The PR industry has a dirty secret: it works brilliantly for companies that can afford a retainer of £3,000 a month or more, and barely at all for everyone else. For the average Edinburgh SME owner, media relations means a hastily written press release, a list of journalists scraped from LinkedIn, and a follow-up email that gets ignored. Honeyjar, a new AI comms platform covered this week by TechCrunch, is building tools designed to close that gap, giving founders and small teams the kind of strategic media support that was previously reserved for businesses with a proper comms budget.
The platform uses AI to help companies identify the right journalists for a story, craft pitches that are actually relevant to what those journalists cover, and track coverage across publications. That last point matters more than it sounds. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, journalist workloads have increased sharply while newsroom headcounts have fallen. Reporters are drowning. A pitch that wastes their time, or arrives from someone they've never heard of, covering something they haven't written about in three years, lands in the bin. Honeyjar's pitch to users is that AI can do the research that makes the difference between a read and a delete.
For Scottish SMEs, the timing is pointed. The Scottish Government's Digital Strategy explicitly identifies digital adoption as a productivity lever for small businesses, and bodies like Business Gateway and Scottish Enterprise have been pushing founders to think about brand-building as seriously as they think about product. The problem is that brand-building costs money. A mid-sized Edinburgh tech startup going up against London competitors with full-service agencies needs a way to punch above its weight. A well-targeted AI-assisted pitch to a single relevant journalist is worth more than a spray-and-pray campaign to five hundred.
The broader market signal here is significant. Research from the PRCA, the industry's professional body, found that AI adoption in PR agencies rose from 27 percent to over 60 percent in a single year. The tools are already inside the agencies. What Honeyjar and platforms like it are doing is democratising access to those same capabilities, so that a sole trader in Leith or a three-person healthtech firm in the Grassmarket can use the same infrastructure a twenty-person London agency has been quietly building into its workflow. That is the great equaliser in action.
One honest caveat: AI can improve the quality of a pitch and the accuracy of a contact list, but it cannot manufacture a story worth telling. The fundamentals still apply. You need to have done something genuinely interesting, launched something real, or have a perspective on your sector that a journalist's readers will actually care about. What these tools do is remove the friction and the guesswork from the delivery side of that equation. For a Scottish founder who knows their business inside out but has never sent a press release in their life, that is not a small thing.