In our latest episode of AI Loves PR, Catharine Montgomery, founder and CEO of Better Together, joined us to talk about what it really means to be “AI-forward” in public relations and why ethical awareness must go hand-in-hand with innovation.
Montgomery’s team uses AI across nearly every function of agency work, from client service and business development to operations and finance. “We use it as a starting point, not the final word,” she explained. Better Together, uses suits.ai as a centralized AI platform that integrates multiple tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude into a single workflow. New employees are trained directly by the founder of suits.ai, ensuring they understand both the technology and the agency’s goals for using it.
Montgomery also refers to AI as her “Co-CEO,” a framing that signals how deeply embedded AI is in the agency’s culture and positions AI as a true thought partner. “It gets us thinking differently, more creatively.”
But she emphasized that this power comes with responsibility. “We don’t blindly trust outputs. We know the bias is there,” she said. She recalled a moment when AI generated messaging leaned into racial stereotypes. “That was a red flag and a reminder that we have to bring our own lived experience and critical thinking to everything AI gives us.”
To that end, Montgomery trains her team to challenge the outputs. “We teach our staff to ask: Where is this information coming from? What’s missing from this narrative?” The agency also created its own library of prompts to standardize quality and mitigate risk.
While many in the industry still hesitate, Montgomery sees AI fluency as a future-proofing move. “We’re not waiting for the perfect tool. We’re building the right habits now.”
Her advice for other agencies? “Start with one task. Use AI to draft it, then rewrite it yourself. You’ll learn so much just from the comparison.”