In this episode of Cited Sidebars, Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg spoke with Pete Pachal, founder of independent media organization The Media Copilot, which covers the intersection of AI and media.
After leading editorial and strategy for publications including Mashable and Coindesk, Pete founded The Media Copilot in 2023 to train media on how to use AI responsibly and creatively.
Below, find Pete's thoughts on what AI can do for content creation, how to start using it for your own brand, and what to watch out for once you do.
In Pete's work with PR, marketing, and media teams, he's found a throughline in what they want from AI: "How can AI help me better understand the world, or my world?"
In journalism, for instance, he finds that reporters and editors still want to do the work of writing and editing. However, they look to AI to accelerate their research, to find the right stories, and to find the right people to speak with. "Yes, they're going to use tools," Pete said, "but they still want to write. They still want to be actively doing the stuff. They just want better guidance on exactly what they should be doing."
It's similar for communications teams. He said that brand teams have so many tools to monitor their clients, brands, and companies, to the point that it's almost become too much. They ask him how to filter the information and show the impact of their work.
"On both sides," he said, "they're all making sense out of what's out there."
When asked for the biggest waste of time he sees with companies beginning to use AI right now, Pete pointed to developing a full AI policy before ever using the tools themselves.
"That's probably a waste of time because policy is not a thing that a bunch of people in a boardroom, virtual or otherwise, figure out and then impose," he said.
He continued, "It's something that's lived — you need to do some stuff before you can even really know what your policy is."
To be clear, he’s not recommending that anyone dive in without what he calls "broad guardrails," such as keeping private or classified information out of AI and holding only a few licenses to start.
"But that idea of policy being something that is one and done and it comes at the beginning is completely untrue," he said. "You need to experiment a bit then to sort of figure out how it's lived."
Prompting has been given a lot of attention, but Pete calls context "the most important thing" when it comes to building basic AI knowledge.
While personal context matters for your own presence with ChatGPT or Claude, he's specifically talking about context for your brand, "and making sure that that's consistent so you don't have a dozen different versions of that brand context across your team," he said.
That could be context for your brand voice, how you present data, and how you expect projects to be executed. "Don't overthink it," he said. You don't have to include your company's entire history. It's more important, he said, to add context with your basic brand documents, your core principles, and your mission.
Pete says the most important thing he teaches isn't tool selection or prompting: It's the gates. By that, he means: Where does the human check the AI?
"If you prompt the AI with these really capable agentic models and just say, 'Do this thing end-to-end,'" he said, "you'll get an output that looks pretty good … but if you haven't had a gate in there where you're actually coming in and vetting it, doing the work and bringing what you know, it's basically useless."
Media Copilot gets called in to fix the "work slop" that happens when people defer too much to AI while creating something like a presentation. "People are essentially getting these outputs, sending them up the chain, and then someone in a senior position who usually knows better will realize: 'Wait a minute, you didn't even look at this, or you didn't look at this part,'" Pete said.
In fact, he said, a key skill he recommends teaching junior staff is when to walk away from a chat. AI will keep offering to do more, to execute the next step, and that's when the work product starts to get out of hand. "It's not a person," Pete said of being hesitant to stop the conversation. "Just stop. Just walk away."
He said later: "The subtlety in all this stuff is: We all want to accelerate. We all want to get to the end. We all want to use these tools to accelerate us," he said. "But there is much more of a need to kind of slow down."
Madeline Stone is the Content Manager for Editorial & Insights at Stacker. She was previously a longtime business and tech journalist at Business Insider and a content and communications consultant for startups.