AI doesn't level the playing field. It magnifies whatever was already there.
A PR agency recently announced a six-figure investment in AI, framed as the thing that will finally close the gap between them and larger, more established agencies. It's a familiar pitch, and on the surface it sounds reasonable—more AI, more capability, more competitiveness. I don't think it holds up, and I think the reasoning matters more than the announcement itself.
AI is not a leveller. It's a magnifier—and what it magnifies is whatever asymmetry already existed before it arrived: judgement, pricing power, and client trust.
An agency that hasn't built those things over time doesn't acquire them by adding a tool. It just produces the same gap, faster, and with more confidence behind it.
The Big 4 Consultancy Example.
Consider what's actually been happening at the top end of the market. Stories have circulated widely about major consultancies charging significant fees for strategic deliverables that turn out to be substantially AI-generated — the client paying premium rates for what the firm now produces at a fraction of the previous cost.
That's not AI levelling anything. That's a firm with existing brand trust and pricing power capturing the entire efficiency gain for itself; the client has no way to tell the difference because they lack the internal expertise to benchmark what they're actually receiving.
The Other Side of the Same Tool.
Now flip that example to a smaller agency without that brand cover, without the client relationships built over decades, without senior people who've seen enough to know when an AI-generated recommendation doesn't actually fit the market it's being applied to. The same tool produces the opposite outcome.
Cut-rate AI output, sold at a discount, to a client who also lacks the experience to catch what's wrong with it. Two agencies, the same technology, entirely different results—because the technology was never the differentiator. It only ever amplified what was already there underneath it.
Why This Matters More in Romania.
This matters more, not less, in a market like Romania, where the underlying skills and infrastructure gap with more mature Western European markets is real and well documented. AI is an attractive shortcut in that context, because it can make a genuine deficiency look temporarily solved.
The danger is exactly that: it's a mask, not a fix. The moment the shortcut is removed, or the moment a client asks a question the AI output can't actually answer, the underlying gap is not just still there—it's now compounded by the fact that nobody was forced to develop the missing judgement while the shortcut was available.
The Judgement Problem.
The agencies and communication directors who should actually be worried are the ones without the seniority to know when AI output is wrong—because roughly half the time, in my experience, it is wrong in some meaningful way: a tone that doesn't fit the market, a recommendation that ignores the context, a confident answer to a question it should have flagged as uncertain. Catching that requires the very thing AI cannot manufacture: judgement built over years of being right and wrong in real situations, with real consequences.
What We Do Differently
At Lighthouse PR, we use AI constantly — for research, for drafting, for the unglamorous first-pass work that used to consume entire afternoons of senior time. What we don't do is confuse that efficiency with the actual value we provide. The investment that matters isn't in the tool. It's in the thirty years of crisis communication, reputation management, and corporate communication experience that one knows what to do with the tool's output—what to keep, what to discard, and what a client actually needs to hear, not just what a model generated in response to a prompt.
An agency announcing a large AI investment is telling you what it's spending money on. It isn't telling you whether it has the judgement to use it well. Those are different questions, and only one of them actually determines whether a client gets good advice or an expensive, well-formatted guess.
The real competitive advantage was never going to be who spent the most on AI. It was always going to be who had the least need to.
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About the Author
Steve Gardiner (Exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. As VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of business growth and business continuity services led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the Crisis Network for Europe (CCNE), Europe's leading crisis communications network.
Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.