How to Use AI for Brainstorming 

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Key Points

• Basic AI prompts often lead to duplicated responses; specificity in requests can enhance creativity and diversity in brainstorming results.
• Using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can significantly improve the reasoning and creativity of AI, yielding more innovative campaign ideas.
• Assigning roles to AI can generate fresh perspectives and reveal potential messaging gaps, while testing and challenging ideas can identify weaknesses before implementation.

How to Use AI for Brainstorming 

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized how PR professionals generate ideas, but recent research from the Wharton School reveals a critical insight: basic prompts often yield duplicated results. When researchers asked ChatGPT to brainstorm uses for everyday objects, nearly 21% of AI responses were variations on the same answer. The good news? With the right approach, AI chatbots, such as Xénobot, can become powerful brainstorming partners that generate truly diverse, creative campaign ideas. 

Demand Diversity Upfront 

Replace “Give me PR campaign ideas” as a prompt with “Generate 15 vastly different PR approaches covering earned media, influencer partnerships, and experiential marketing.” Being specific about wanting variety encourages AI to move beyond its “most average answer” default. This happens because large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast datasets where frequent, mainstream ideas naturally dominate. When asked for “ideas,” the AI reaches for the most statistically likely ones from that training data, rather than delving into creative, niche, or varied conceptual territory. 

Pro tip: Always ask for 10-20 ideas. Research shows the first seven are obvious, but that creativity kicks in after idea #8. 

Use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting 

CoT prompting is a technique that encourages AI models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at a final answer, mimicking human problem-solving processes. Research shows that CoT prompting can dramatically improve reasoning abilities, with performance gains of 80-90% compared to standard prompting methods. Rather than simply asking your AI to “give me campaign ideas,” use a prompt like: 

“First, brainstorm a variety of initial campaign concepts. Next, make each concept bolder and more attention-grabbing. Then, select the strongest parts and merge them into superior hybrid ideas. Finally, adapt these options to fit our budget and strategic needs.” 

Pro tip: Don’t accept mediocre results. Tell your generative AI tool “Make concepts more innovative” or “These ideas are too safe, what would grab headlines?” It will recalibrate immediately. 

Assign Roles for Fresh Perspectives 

Give your AI chatbot a character: “You’re an investigative journalist covering our client’s industry. What story angles would you pursue?” or “You’re our client’s biggest competitor. How would you counter this campaign?” 

For crisis communications try prompting your AI chatbot like a member of the public: “You’re a concerned parent seeing this news. What questions would you have?” This reveals messaging gaps before they become problems. 

Pro tip: Switch roles frequently; prompt the AI as different stakeholders to surface risks and angles you might otherwise miss 

Test and Challenge Ideas 

Ask the AI to rank its own suggestions by media pickup potential or budget efficiency. Then ask it to find blind spots: “What could go wrong with approach #3?” or “What am I not considering here?” 

Pro tip: Always start a new chat for evaluation; AI tends to reinforce previous answers if you continue in the same thread 

The Bottom Line 

AI Chatbots can generate hundreds of possibilities and stress-test concepts, but you make the final call. Use these techniques to transform brainstorming from predictable to breakthrough. Your campaigns, and clients, will thank you. 

For more insight into how to utilize AI in PR workflows, visit our 100 Best Uses for AI in PR blog post.