AI PR Is Killing Your Startup’s Chances With the Media

For the past 12+ months, we have been absolutely inundated with PR pitches. Podcast requests. Media outreach. From both PR firms and internal comms teams. Everyone has

Why? Because they’re all using AI PR tools now.

The pitches are almost always decent. Well-written. Never compelling. But never terrible. Just good enough to get opened. But never good enough to reapond.

I used to respond to mediocre pitches from humans.

Not to say yes. But to give feedback. To tell them: don’t pitch me anything like this again, but here’s what we actually want. Here’s what an A-tier SaaStr AI Annual speaker or podcast guest looks like. Here’s what would get a yes.

That feedback loop was valuable for everyone. PR reps learned. Relationships formed. Sometimes, months later, they’d come back with something genuinely great.

I don’t do that anymore.

Why? Two reasons.

• First, there’s no point giving feedback to an AI. It’s not going to internalize it. The same firm will send me the same templated pitch next week with a different founder’s name swapped in.
• Second, the volume. We’re getting roughly 50x-100x the pitches we used to. AI has removed all the friction that used to act as a natural filter. Every startup now has access to “pretty good” outreach at essentially zero cost. So everyone’s using it. All the time.

The result? I block them. Immediately. Something I never did before.

And that’s the trap your startup is falling into.

And so when you finally do have something genuinely worth pitching, I’ll never hear it.

You burned the relationship with the lazy AI pitch. The domain’s blocked. The firm’s blocked. The founder’s name triggers an instant delete.

AI PR feels efficient. You’re getting more outreach done with fewer resources. The pitches look professional. Your team feels productive.

But you’re not building relationships. You’re burning them. At scale. Faster than ever before.

What actually works hasn’t changed

A specific, human pitch. One that shows you actually read or listened to what we produce. One that makes a clear case for why this founder, this story, this angle is different from the 47 other pitches we got this week. One that a real person clearly thought about.

That stands out more today than it ever has. Because everyone else has outsourced their thinking to a tool.

PR outreach is just a specialized form of sales. Always has been.

And in sales, you’ve always been able to spray and pray. AI just makes it cheaper and faster than ever. You can blanket every podcast, every newsletter, every journalist in your category in an afternoon.

But now you might just get blocked. Before your best pitch ever gets written.

The alternative is the same one that works in great sales: slow down, pick your targets, and make it genuinely great. Ten incredible, human, targeted pitches will outperform a thousand AI-blasted ones.

Don’t be lazy with your PR. The bar for what gets attention just got higher, not lower.