Reem Masoud: PR value is shifting from coverage volume to credibility, turning government press releases into digital assets
Dubai, UAE: September , 2026: Artificial intelligence is reshaping the economics of public relations and corporate communications in the UAE, with the value of information moving beyond reaching audiences at the time of publication to its ability to be discovered, referenced and reused across an increasingly AI-driven digital ecosystem.
The shift comes as the UAE records the highest institutional AI adoption rate in the Middle East and North Africa at 75 per cent, according to the Arab Media in the Age of Artificial Intelligence report released by Dubai Press Club in partnership with Deloitte. The report estimates AI spending in the region’s media sector at $520 million in 2026, with regional spending growth expected to exceed global rates by around three percentage points through 2030.
The report found that 62 per cent of AI spending in media is directed towards software, compared with 38 per cent for services. Nearly 60 per cent of software spending is allocated to content creation and distribution, reflecting a shift from experimenting with AI technologies to integrating them into the production and delivery of information.
The shift is not limited to the economics of content production. It is also changing the economics of information discovery.
According to 2026 data from Similarweb, 35 per cent of US consumers begin their product discovery journey using AI tools, compared with 13.6 per cent through traditional search engines. At the evaluation stage, AI accounts for 32.9 per cent compared with 15 per cent for traditional search.
The figures indicate that a growing part of the process of gathering information and forming choices takes place before users reach an organisation’s website or official channel. This is changing the value of digital presence, as the information AI systems rely on about an organisation, sector or service increasingly becomes part of the discovery and decision-making process.
Against this backdrop, the concept of “earned credibility” in public relations is also being redefined. Value is no longer limited to what an organisation says about itself, but increasingly depends on whether independent and credible information about it can be discovered, verified and referenced by users and AI systems.
Research by Muck Rack supports this shift. The latest edition of its What Is AI Reading? study found that earned media accounts for around 84 per cent of citations used by AI systems, based on an analysis of more than 25 million links cited in responses from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Journalism accounted for around 27 per cent of cited sources.
The findings suggest that independent editorial coverage is no longer simply a short-term communications outcome. It can become a long-term information asset, with published material from credible sources remaining part of the information environment from which AI systems draw when answering questions about organisations, sectors and issues
As a result, the value of public relations is gradually shifting from the volume of coverage to the value of the information created through that coverage. This includes the quality of the source, accuracy and freshness of data, consistency of information and its ability to remain relevant as platforms and algorithms evolve.
The equation is particularly significant in the UAE, where AI adoption extends beyond individual use cases into institutions and government operations. The 75 per cent institutional adoption rate reflects a shift from isolated applications towards more integrated AI models within organisations.
Reem Masoud, Director of Communications at Tebraa Media, views the shift as a redefinition of the role of public relations in the digital economy, saying the core of the profession has not changed as much as the environment through which credibility travels.
She said AI does not create credibility from scratch. Instead, it captures existing signals and information, reorganises them and presents them in new contexts, making media relations, independent coverage and verifiable information increasingly important to an organisation’s institutional presence.
“Organisations are no longer competing only for media space or search rankings. They are competing for the quality of their information presence within systems that use AI to answer questions, explain issues and compare options,” Masoud said.
She said the shift is moving public relations beyond reputation management towards what could be described as “credibility engineering” building a coherent information base that does not generate value only at the moment of publication, but retains its value over time through its discoverability, verifiability and ability to be referenced.
Under this approach, media coverage should not be viewed as the final output of a communications campaign, but as part of a cumulative information asset made up of official data, editorial content, independent coverage, expert commentary, a presence across multiple platforms and verifiable sources.
The approach is consistent with findings from the Dubai Press Club report, which notes that AI enables strategic communications teams to anticipate emerging narratives and respond more quickly, while highlighting the continued importance of verification, transparency, governance and human judgement.
As AI moves deeper into the production, discovery and interpretation of information, the metrics used to measure PR value are also changing. Beyond the number of published stories and audience reach, organisations are increasingly looking at information discoverability, source credibility, continuity of presence, citations and the ability of content to reach audiences through search and AI systems.
Public relations, therefore, is not declining with the rise of AI. Instead, it is moving into a new economic layer within the information ecosystem, where earned credibility becomes a digital asset, earned media becomes an information source and the government press release becomes part of an organisation’s wider information capital.
As the AI economy expands across the region, government communications is moving towards a model that combines data, technology, human expertise and credibility, making the quality, discoverability, verifiability and reusability of information an increasingly important component of the economic value generated by institutions.
