South Korea’s Hyundai Card has conducted a blind test pitting a human PR professional against AI in drafting a press release, as part of a broader push to expand artificial intelligence use across its operations.
The competition, titled “Human PR Professional vs. AI: Which Would You Choose?” took place last month at the company’s headquarters in Seoul. A former journalist working in Hyundai Card’s PR office and an AI each wrote a press release for the Orange, a new premium card launched in March. Employees evaluated the two drafts in a blind test, assessing overall message structure, logical flow, and other key elements.
The human PR professional drew on internal sources and interviews, while the AI collected external information. Employees were advised not to focus on the fluency and overall polish of the sentences to ensure a fair evaluation.
Reactions among employees were mixed. Some found it difficult to distinguish between the two drafts. “Both had their own strengths and weaknesses, so it was difficult to say which one was clearly better,” one participant said, according to Hyundai Card. “The more we read, the harder it became to distinguish between the human-written piece and the AI-written one,” said another.
Leaders may not actually need to do vibe coding themselves, but senior leaders need to understand the basics in order to communicate with working-level employees.
Responses to the same piece also varied. One employee said the topic was clear and the benefits described in detail, suggesting it felt like it was written by a person. Another said the listing of benefits made it feel like a piece written by AI trained on data, and still somewhat unnatural.
The human PR professional took the victory in round one.
Beyond the outcome, Hyundai Card described the exercise as an opportunity to enhance PR planning and writing capabilities through AI, including testing prompt-writing methods optimized for PR work and more efficient AI-based editing and search methods.
“By framing the exercise as a competition, we were able to spark employees’ interest, while also gaining vivid feedback that helped us identify and supplement areas where we may fall short compared with AI,” a Hyundai Card official said.
“We plan to continue conducting these tests and explore more effective ways to use AI in PR.”
The PR office’s initiative is part of a broader AI Transformation, or AX, strategy at Hyundai Card. The company has recently provided large language model training to around 260 leaders at the team leader level and above, as well as 300 employees who expressed interest in the program.
Hyundai Card structured the training to enable leaders to directly operate widely used LLM tools and complete tasks tied to their actual daily responsibilities, rather than limiting instruction to theoretical overviews of AI trends. During sessions, participants used LLM tools to curate keyword-based news, draft briefing materials, summarize documents such as academic papers and reports, generate mind maps, and structure presentation decks. Participants also used vibe coding to build web pages and apps, and learned to automate workflows by integrating AI with existing documentation tools including Excel.
The program included hands-on exercises tailored to specific team functions, such as predicting business performance and risk based on daily credit purchase volumes, and developing an HR assistant chatbot. Dummy data structured to mirror the company’s actual data architecture was used to address security concerns.
Hyundai Card Vice Chairman Ted Chung took part in the training and completed the exercises himself. On social media, Chung wrote, “Leaders may not actually need to do vibe coding themselves, but senior leaders need to understand the basics in order to communicate with working-level employees. Seeing coding that would have taken a developer two days in the past being completed automatically in just one minute was simply astonishing.”
Following the program’s conclusion, the company said there has been a steady stream of inquiries regarding follow-up sessions for broader team members.
Hyundai Card said it plans to use the training as a springboard to expand AI adoption into a broader range of roles, including PR, design, legal, and human resources. The company’s AI adoption has until now centered mainly on data-driven areas such as marketing, credit underwriting, and financial fraud prevention.
Hyundai Card notes that it became the first Korean financial company to export an AI platform when it licensed its proprietary software, UNIVERSE, to a major Japanese credit card company at the end of 2024.
According to a survey by global PR software company Muck Rack, 75% of PR professionals worldwide are already using generative AI in their work. The same survey found that 55% of companies had not yet prepared guidelines on the scope or methods of using AI in their public relations efforts.
“We plan to respond swiftly to rapidly changing AI technologies and accelerate the use of AI across diverse areas of work,” a Hyundai Card official said.
Photos via Hyundai Card.
