Public relations in India is no longer a press-release factory. It is becoming a discipline of trust, timing, and intelligence — one that has to work across newsrooms, search engines, social feeds, and now the answer engines that decide which brands get cited when a buyer asks an AI chatbot whom to trust.
That is the terrain Maulikk Buch has been preparing for across a 25-year arc from field journalism to agency PR to digital media entrepreneurship. His pitch today is not that he is new to communications. It is that a practitioner who has written the story, placed the story, built the platforms that carry the story, and already begun wiring AI into the PR workflow is unusually ready for what comes next: AI-augmented public relations married to new-age digital and social marketing.
From the newsroom floor to the communications brief
Born on 3 June 1979 in Ahmedabad and raised in Vadodara, Buch studied at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and came up the hard way — as a working journalist. He reported for houses that still define Gujarati and English-language news in the state and beyond: Gujarat Samachar, Divya Bhaskar, ETV, DNA, Financial Express and Ahmedabad Mirror. The beat mix was unglamorous and useful: health, crime, education, politics, and the kind of on-ground reporting that colleagues later described as time-bound and reliable even in tense field conditions.
That background matters more in 2026 than it did in 2006. AI can draft a statement in seconds. It cannot tell a client which journalist will actually run the story, what a city desk will cut, or how a regional-language headline will land. Buch’s first advantage is still editorial literacy — knowing how news is made, not only how it is marketed.
Around 2010 he crossed the table. At Adfactors PR he led Gujarat operations and handled communications for large accounts including Adani Enterprises (including work around the Adani logo rebrand), Vadilal and Wagh Bakri. The work sat at the junction of corporate communications, reputation, and crisis-sensitive messaging — the same skills he later packaged for pharma, health and financial-sector clients.
Building a 360-degree practice, not a clipping service
In 2015 he founded Reopinion Media & Com Pvt. Ltd. (also operating under the Reofacts banner), a communications firm that describes itself as a 360-degree practice: traditional and digital PR, media relations, reputation management, crisis response, research and opportunity hunting, advertorials, influencer work, and social media. The agency later listed presence across Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and work spanning India, Asia, the Middle East, North America and Europe.
Two details on the firm’s own site are more revealing than the usual agency adjectives.
First, Reopinion already markets AI-augmented public relations— not as a slogan parked in a future-roadmap slide, but as a live offer: a full communications practice “backed by built-in AI tools that score press-release newsworthiness and track visibility across Google.”
Second, the firm claims a proprietary social-and-market frame it calls **MARK SOC**, positioned as an intellectual-property approach to digital and social media management rather than a bolt-on content calendar. Whether a client buys the branding or not, the intent is clear: treat social as a reputation system, not a posting queue.
Buch has also been a media builder, not only a media pitcher. Since 2011 he has moved from personal blogging into financial and hyperlocal platforms — among them thebullswire.net, theahmedabadbuzz.com, thebarodian.in (which marked a decade in 2025) and dailygujarat.com — and has given editorial guidance to other digital outlets. He has mentored startups through NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission and is cited as a founding member of the Digital Media Association of Gujarat.
That combination — reporter, agency lead, publisher, startup mentor — is the actual expertise. He has sat on every side of the Indian media-and-reputation value chain.
He has already written the brief for the next decade
Buch’s own LinkedIn essays from late 2024 read less like thought-leadership filler and more like a working diagnosis.
In Why Traditional PR is Losing Its Effectiveness in the Digital Era and The Transformation of Public Relations into Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) in the Digital Era, he argues that media relations, press releases and events are no longer a closed system. Power has shifted to audiences who can publish, share and punish in real time. PR, in his telling, has to become IMC: one narrative running through earned media, digital marketing, social engagement, content and customer conversation, measured and adjusted with data. Crisis work, he notes, is no longer a war-room after the print edition; it is a digital-first, transparent, multi-channel response.
He has also written that for startups, PR remains a more cost-effective brand-builder than expensive advertising — a point that lands harder as paid media costs rise and earned third-party coverage becomes the raw material AI engines prefer to cite.
A January 2025 note to PR colleagues was smaller and sharper: stop asking journalists to pre-confirm quotes before a statement goes out; train teams to pitch with respect, understand desk needs, and meet deadlines. That is not a technology thesis. It is a professionalism thesis. AI will not rescue a sloppy media desk.
## Why “ready for AI in PR” is the right next chapter
India’s PR industry grew about 11 per cent in FY26 to roughly ₹3,230 crore, according to PRCAI’s Sprint 2026 report. AI spend inside firms has already jumped from about 2 per cent of revenue three years ago to 7 per cent in 2026. Research and intelligence is the top use case (77 per cent), followed by written content (73 per cent). At the same time, 80 per cent of communicators now flag AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes as a top reputational risk, and 83 per cent say earned media is gaining importance because large language models privilege credible third-party sources over paid placements. Generative Engine Optimisation — getting a brand cited inside AI answers — is becoming a distinct PR strategy.
That is exactly the job description Buch’s career already sketches.
What “starting with AI in PR” should mean in his practice, if it is done properly:
1. Intelligence before output. Use AI to scan regional and national coverage, social sentiment, competitor claims and emerging narratives in Gujarati, Hindi and English — then let a human editor decide what is a story and what is noise. Indian PR’s real AI edge in 2026 is early warning, not faster fluff.
2. Newsworthiness scoring, not auto-spam.
Reopinion’s stated tool for scoring press-release newsworthiness is the right instinct. Most AI-written releases fail because they sound like releases. A journalist-led filter — would this survive a city desk? — is the product.
3. Generative Engine Optimisation as earned-media work. Brands that want to appear when ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answers “whom should I trust?” need third-party journalism, expert bylines, consistent entity data and clean source pages. That is PR, not a new SEO widget. Earned editorial is now several times more likely to be cited by answer engines than a brand’s own site copy.
4. Crisis and deepfake readiness.The same digital amplification that made Buch’s crisis practice relevant now includes synthetic audio, cloned faces and coordinated smear campaigns. The response stack is monitoring + verification + rapid owned-and-earned correction + legal and platform escalation. Human judgement still owns the apology.
5. Multilingual generation with human cultural edit.Vernacular content in India routinely outperforms English-only work. AI can draft in Gujarati and Hindi at speed; a native editor still has to kill the wrong idiom. Buch’s trilingual working life (English, Hindi, Gujarati) and hyperlocal publishing record are the scarce part of that pipeline.
6. AI agents as operations, not oracles. His more recent association with Incodev Technologies Pvt. Ltd. — a Vadodara-origin IT firm that builds AI agents, integrations and digital-marketing stacks — sits next to the PR practice rather than inside it. The useful crossover is operational: media-monitoring agents, journalist-matching agents, briefing bots, workflow automation. The unused crossover would be letting a model speak for a client without a human sign-off.
The industry line on World PR Day 2026 is that generative AI has made content abundant and trust scarce. Strategic judgement, ethics and relationships are the scarce skills. That is a flattering sentence for any veteran. It is only true if the veteran actually changes the workflow.
New-age digital and social strategies that fit this profile
The playbook Buch is positioned to run is not “post more on Instagram.” It is integrated communications with a digital spine.
Earned-first digital PR. Pitch stories that can live as news, search assets and AI citations at once: data snapshots, founder explainers, sector explainers, hyperlocal impact stories. Measure placements not only as clippings but as referral traffic, branded search lift and appearance inside AI overviews.
Hyperlocal plus national. Gujarat and city-level platforms (the model behind The Barodian and Ahmedabad Buzz) still move purchase and political perception in ways national English media cannot. A modern programme runs two layers: city proof and national frame.
Creator and influencer work with reputational controls.
Reopinion already sells influencer marketing for startups. The 2026 version needs disclosure hygiene, mid-tier creators who actually convert in a category, and a kill-switch if a creator’s next post becomes the client’s crisis.
Social as listening infrastructure.
Social is where crises hatch: repeated complaints, tone shifts, regional WhatsApp forwards, a reel that outruns the press note. AI can cluster that signal. The PR lead still writes the first human sentence.
Content systems, not campaigns.
Short video, founder-led LinkedIn, regional reels, podcasts, newsletters and searchable explainers — versioned by language and platform, governed by one narrative. Buch’s IMC essays already describe this; the market has caught up to the argument.
Startup and MSME economics.
His recurring case to founders is that PR buys credibility advertising cannot. Pair that with a lean AI desk — research, first drafts, media lists, monitoring — and a small company can run a reputation programme that used to need a 12-person agency floor.
MARK SOC as a social operating system. If the firm’s own theory is more than a label, it should now include: audience maps, message hierarchy, platform-native formats, creator rules, crisis escalation, and a weekly intelligence note. Social without intelligence is decoration.
The honest positioning
Buch is not a Silicon Valley AI researcher, and the article should not pretend he is. He is a Gujarati journalist who learned large-client PR at a national agency, built his own communications shop, ran hyperlocal digital media, wrote publicly about the death of traditional PR, and has already put “AI-augmented public relations” on the agency homepage.
That is a coherent professional identity for this moment.
The market does not need another person who can prompt ChatGPT to write a press release. It needs people who know when the release should not exist; who can still get a difficult story into a sceptical newsroom; who can hear a crisis in Gujarati social chatter before it becomes an English headline; and who can use machines to watch, draft, score and report — while keeping the byline, the apology and the strategy human.
That is the job Maulikk Buch is credibly ready to do.
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