Public relations in the AI ecosystem : Structural invisibility and critical challenges

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the central organizational infrastructure of contemporary communication, reconfiguring the forms of visibility, legitimacy, and power within the ecosystem. This article examines how Public Relations (PR) are structurally decentered in this environment because of a process of structural invisibility that disconnects their discursive recognition from their effective access to resources, investment, and capacity for influence. Drawing on critical frameworks from political economy, the theory of symbolic capital and agonistic approaches in PR, the study argues that infrastructures privilege logics of automation, scalability and quantification that collide with the relational, contextual and ethical nature of professional practice. We analyze a global sample of 4774 organizations linked to AI using a two-stage comparative statistical framework and sectoral profiling to measure structural asymmetries. The results show that PR start-ups associated with AI occupy a systematically peripheral position: lower capitalization, fewer investors, more irregular financial trajectories, and higher labor dependency ratios. Paradoxically, this structural deficit coexists with a relatively high symbolic visibility, particularly in media coverage, a pattern that reveals the gap between symbolic capital and economic capital that defines their marginalization in the AI ecosystem. The article concludes that this invisibilization is not accidental, but rather the product of platformization, financialization and epistemic exclusion logics that determine who can influence the design of AI. It is proposed that PR should respond not by accelerating an uncritical integration, but by adopting strategies of slow implementation, regulatory participation, and the articulation of coalitions with equally marginalized actors in order to contest the values that structure the communicative future.