Artificial Intelligence and Public Relations Practice in Tanzania: Emerging Opportunities, Ethical Issues and Professional Challenges

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the practice of public relations (PR) globally, transforming how organisations monitor their environments, craft messages, engage publics and evaluate communication outcomes. While a growing body of scholarship has examined the implications of AI for communication management in Europe, North America and parts of Asia, the African experience in general, and the Tanzanian experience in particular, remains under-theorised. This conceptual paper examines the intersection of artificial intelligence and public relations practice in Tanzania, drawing on a systematic desk review of scholarly literature, professional reports and policy documents. The paper pursues three objectives: to map the emerging opportunities that AI technologies present for PR practice in Tanzania; to interrogate the ethical issues that accompany the adoption of these technologies in the Tanzanian institutional context; and to analyse the professional challenges that confront practitioners, educators and professional bodies as the field undergoes technological transformation. The analysis is anchored in the Technology Acceptance Model, Diffusion of Innovations theory and the Excellence Theory of public relations. The paper argues that AI offers Tanzanian practitioners significant opportunities in media monitoring, content generation, audience analytics, chatbot-mediated engagement and crisis communication, but that these opportunities are conditioned by infrastructural constraints, skills deficits, limited Kiswahili-language AI resources and an evolving regulatory environment. Ethical concerns relating to transparency, misinformation, data protection under Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, algorithmic bias and professional accountability are examined. The paper concludes with recommendations for practitioners, professional associations, universities and policymakers, and proposes an agenda for future empirical research on AI adoption in Tanzanian public relations.