A new analysis from Pangram, based on 178,672 English press releases published on PR Newswire, suggests generative AI has become a routine tool in corporate communications. The report found that 34% of releases contained AI-generated text over the last 12 months, and that the weekly share of AI-written content doubled during that period, rising from 22% in August 2025 to 48% in June 2026.
The findings center on a large slice of business messaging that reaches journalists, investors and the public. PR Newswire is one of the largest press release distribution services in the United States. Companies pay to syndicate internally written public relations material such as earnings reports, product launches and other announcements, which the service pushes to newsrooms and financial terminals. It is also one of the main syndication networks for companies obligated to make Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures, and it handles releases from companies including Pfizer, Toyota and Walt Disney World.
The June peak is the report’s clearest sign of how quickly AI has moved into this kind of writing. Pangram found that 48% of press releases on PR Newswire in June 2026 contained AI-generated text, meaning nearly half of that month’s releases showed some AI involvement. Of the 61,523 releases that flagged for AI content, 25% were classified as fully AI-generated, or 15,205 releases, while 75% were classified as mixed, meaning they contained both human and AI text.
That split matters because it suggests AI is not only being used for occasional editing. Pangram said the AI authorship rate across flagged documents was bimodal, meaning releases tended to show either very light AI use or full AI generation. The median press release flagged for AI content was 52% AI-authored. In other words, among the releases that used AI at all, the technology was often contributing a substantial share of the writing rather than merely touching up phrasing.
The report also found that AI use is changing the length of press releases. Median word count in PR Newswire releases rose about 15% over the last 12 months, from 488 words to 562 words. Among releases published in July 2026, the median human-written release was 521 words, compared with a weighted average of 601 words for documents that contained AI-authored text. Pangram said this suggests mixed and fully AI-written releases are becoming longer than fully human-authored ones.
The report’s industry breakdown shows the clearest differences in adoption. Advertising stood out as the biggest AI user. It had the highest share of fully AI-generated press releases at 41%, and the highest overall share of AI content at 64%. That makes the advertising category the strongest example in the study of AI being used at scale in PR writing.
At the other end of the spectrum, finance, energy and biotechnology had the lowest rates of AI-generated text, and each had sub-5% rates of fully AI-authored press releases. Pangram’s data does not explain why those sectors lagged, but it does show that adoption is uneven across industries. Some fields appear to be embracing AI heavily, while others remain far more cautious.
The report also places corporate press releases in a broader trend of AI entering public-facing writing. The analysis began with the question of how common AI is in business communications, especially compared with other uses such as LinkedIn posts. On PR Newswire, the answer appears to be that AI is already deeply embedded in part of the press release ecosystem.
That does not mean every release is machine-written, and the report does not claim that all companies use the technology in the same way. But the scale of the findings suggests that AI is no longer a niche experiment in public relations. With nearly half of PR Newswire releases in June containing AI-generated text, and with the share of AI use doubling over the past year, the technology appears to be moving from an occasional drafting aid to a standard part of the communications workflow.
Even so, the report’s numbers also make clear that the shift is not uniform. The gap between advertising and more cautious sectors such as finance, energy and biotechnology points to different comfort levels with AI-assisted writing. Whether that reflects risk tolerance, disclosure practices or editorial norms is not answered by the data, but the pattern itself is visible in the release sample Pangram studied.
What the numbers do make clear is that generative AI has become a significant force in one of the most widely distributed forms of corporate messaging. For companies that use press releases to reach investors, journalists and the public, the report suggests AI is now difficult to ignore.