More than 25 years after meeting as interns at FleishmanHillard’s Chicago office, Liz Whelan and Kate Brennan are launching PAiR, a new firm built around a fresh approach to public relations.
The Chicago area company combines senior PR expertise with artificial intelligence, putting technology to work while keeping experienced practitioners responsible for every communication that reaches a journalist.
The two PR veterans developed the system inside a working agency practice, tested it on real client accounts and launched PAiR with a central conviction: earned authority will matter more than the volume of content AI can generate.
It is a new chapter with familiar Chicago roots. Edelman and Golin both started here, helping establish the city as a center for the agency business. Whelan and Brennan learned their craft in that environment. Now, they are building a firm for high-growth companies operating in fast-moving markets where communications carry significant consequences.
PAiR describes its approach as an AI-native operating model, with AI built into its workflow from the beginning. Software agents handle research, monitoring and opportunity matching, while senior practitioners provide strategy, judgment and oversight. A formal approval process requires a named senior practitioner to sign off before anything reaches a journalist.
“The companies we work with are reshaping their industries,” Whelan said. “Meanwhile, the agency model serving them hasn’t changed in thirty years, including fixed retainers, junior-heavy teams and predictable placement velocity. We built the firm we couldn’t find and needed to exist.”
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How PAiR came together
After FleishmanHillard, Whelan and Brennan stayed close while following different paths through the industry.
Liz Whelan worked at Edelman and Cramer-Krasselt before founding LWPR Consulting in 2008. There, she built emerging technology brands and advised founders and CEOs.
Kate Brennan advanced through Golin before moving to the client side, leading corporate communications for national consumer and healthcare brands. Between them, the partners have experienced the agency relationship from both sides of the retainer.
They reunited professionally in late 2025 as they saw changes in both what clients needed and how audiences found information.
Their AI-savvy clients were moving quickly and expected PR outcomes to keep pace. At the same time, reaching an audience increasingly meant earning attention from people and from the large language models answering their questions.
The partners concluded that meeting those needs would require a different operating model.
They developed PAiR within their existing practice, running real client accounts through the system as they built it. According to the firm, that process has logged thousands of practitioner decisions and produced hundreds of earned placements that match back to AI-generated answers.
Earned coverage meets AI discovery
The relationship between independent coverage and AI visibility is central to PAiR’s approach.
Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis of more than 25 million links cited in AI responses found that 84 percent came from what the company classifies as earned media. That definition extends beyond news coverage to include academic research, government sources, encyclopedic sites and third-party corporate content.
For PAiR, the implication is that coverage can serve two audiences. It reaches readers directly and can also inform what a buyer or investor encounters when asking ChatGPT or Gemini about a company or category.
The partners view earned media as raw material for reputation in the AI era, giving the quality of a company’s PR implications that reach the boardroom.
PAiR’s workflow operates in a continuous loop. Agents monitor and match opportunities, then score them for relevance, urgency and fit with a reporter’s interests. Those findings enter a single decision queue, called DecisionHQ, where a senior practitioner approves, edits or skips each item.
The team pursues earned coverage, then uses monthly AI Visibility measurement to check whether the brand appears in AI answers. Gaps become the next practitioner assignments.
“If an agent can’t cite it, it can’t say it,” Brennan said. “Every stat, quote and credential in a PAiR draft traces to a source. Speed is available to everyone now. Judgment is the difference, and judgment is what journalists respond to.”
Early results and room to adapt
PAiR’s clients include high-growth companies in AI, private equity and venture capital, cybersecurity, legal technology, health technology and other complex industries.
These are businesses where the partners see earned attention as essential to discoverability and, in some cases, a factor in the valuation multiples companies command.
The firm reports that it increased channel insights platform 360insights’ presence in AI answers from 7.3 percent to 38 percent in six months. It also reports taking a cybersecurity client from onboarding to top-tier news coverage in outlets including Business Insider, Reuters and Bloomberg in less than a week.
Cat Casey, president and co-founder of Intelligent AF and a PAiR client, described her experience with the approach.
“Six months ago Liz and Kate built their approach around agentic PR technology, and the velocity of placements has been mind-blowing. The coverage went wider and deeper in the rooms that mattered at a scale that outpaced everything before it.”
Through portfolio programs with leading private equity and venture capital firms, PAiR also offers a consistent PR standard across portfolio companies, with flexibility in how the work gets done.
Companies can engage PAiR as a full-service firm or use a hybrid arrangement alongside their in-house teams. They can change that mix as their needs evolve.
Whether the broader industry follows remains an open question. Whelan and Brennan see large agencies adding AI to established retainer structures, while standalone tools can identify where a brand is missing from AI answers without providing the PR work needed to address those gaps.
Their bet is that the next agency model will resemble the companies they serve: nimble, led by senior expertise, measurable and built for the AI era from the start.
“Our clients are disrupting their industries,” Whelan said. “It was time someone disrupted ours.”
PAiR is headquartered in the Chicago area. Learn more at pairpr.ai.
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