At our AI Summit, Head of SEO and Product Dave Peiris introduced two AI tools we’ve been developing: Carin, a custom GPT designed to streamline legal approvals for campaigns, and Sandbox, our AI-powered platform for testing and refining campaign ideas.
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Tool Share Back: Carin & Sandbox
This is Carin. Carin is a custom GPT and our AI car insurance specialist.
So the obvious question is: why do we need an AI car insurance specialist?
We work with a very large car insurance aggregator on digital PR. We’re often coming up with ideas, presenting them to the client, and trying to get those approved by legal. In the days before AI, this was kind of the rough workflow:
We’d create a campaign idea, the client approves it (which can happen quickly), then legal reviews it, which happens very slowly. This can take 2, 4, even 6 weeks. That’s because legal, at a large company, doesn’t sit around waiting for PR campaigns, they’ve got other priorities.
When they eventually review our idea, they might flag issues with terminology, viability, or compliance we hadn’t considered. So we adjust the idea, the client re-approves it, and it goes back to legal, restarting the delay.
What we really need is fewer loops of this. Ideally, legal reviews it once. Carin helps us do that.
Carin isn’t a full legal replacement, but it’s pretty good. It’s custom prompted in the background to review PR ideas for legal standards, terminology, brand alignment, viability, and optimisation.
It’s trained on previously approved press releases, press release checklists (what we can/can’t say, formatting), brand guidelines, tone of voice documents, and dos and don’ts from both PR and legal teams. Plus, it draws on ChatGPT’s knowledge of the sector.
For example, we tested it on a campaign we did for Scrap Car Comparison — a nationwide treasure hunt. People solved clues, entered coordinates into the What3Words app, went to locations, and eventually dug up car keys to win a Fiat 500.
It was a hit in the press. Fun, creative, and attention-grabbing. But a big brand’s legal team would likely have more concerns.
So I put it into Karen. It flagged health and safety risks (digging, driving with shovels), landowner permissions, crowd control, gambling laws, GDPR… a lot. But incredibly helpful to package all this up in the initial pitch so legal sees it’s been thought through. It helps reduce review rounds and can save us up to six weeks – hugely meaningful.
The next tool is Sandbox. It’s more advanced, a web dev build project that helps us improve PR ideas with AI.
Sandbox is in beta testing, but here’s how it works:
It houses AI-generated personas for publications, like The Independent Travel, The Sun, or even sections like NYT Business. You can test your campaign idea against them to predict how likely each outlet is to cover it.
It can even crawl past coverage we’ve had, summarise it, and learn from it, training itself on what works. PR consultants input their campaign outlines and choose which publications to test against.
Using the buried treasure example, Sandbox tested likelihood of coverage: 75% for The Sun (great fun, but could benefit from a celeb hook), 72% for the Daily Mail, 20% for BBC (not really on-brand), even lower for Top Gear (wrong audience).
It then offers suggestions to improve your pitch, some are off (e.g., get a celeb is not always budget-friendly), but others are spot on. For The Sun, it suggested offering exclusive interviews and reaction footage from the winner. That’s brilliant.
It also recommends partnerships like motor influencers, local radio, or teaming up with What3Words for credibility. That last one would’ve been perfect in hindsight.
Ultimately, Sandbox gives us fast feedback so we can refine and improve campaign ideas with the goal of securing more coverage, faster.
Thank you.
