Featured, a Scottsdale-based technology company, has launched what it calls the AI co-pilot for PR: a single, AI-guided platform that helps public relations professionals and subject-matter experts find media opportunities, draft pitches, and land coverage. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, giving its co-pilot a deep base of real media opportunities to draw from.
The launch makes Featured one of the more closely watched companies to come out of the Arizona technology scene this year, in part because of what sits underneath it. Where most communications tools assemble data from outside vendors, Featured built its product on platforms it owns outright.
What is the AI co-pilot for PR?
In practice, Featured aggregates a wide range of earned-media opportunities like journalist requests, podcast bookings, bylined articles, speaking engagements, and generative engine optimization (GEO) audits into one interface. A user describes what they are looking for in plain language, and the platform surfaces matched opportunities, then guides the user through reviewing, refining, and sending a tailored pitch.
Purpose-built AI agents handle the time-intensive work behind the scenes: monitoring journalist requests, researching podcasts, drafting starting points, and navigating each outlet’s submission requirements. Users are notified of relevant opportunities and can send outreach through a connected Gmail or Outlook inbox.
“PR has always come down to three things: finding the right opportunity, saying the right thing, and getting in front of the right person at the right time,” said Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured. “We’ve spent years building the data and the relationships behind PR workflows. Now we’ve put an AI co-pilot on top of it, so solo founders, boutique PR agencies, and in-house marketing teams can execute on and expand their PR strategy.”
An Arizona company with national reach
Farmiloe is a University of Arizona graduate and a veteran of the state’s entrepreneurial community; he previously built and sold the Scottsdale digital agency Markitors. Featured grew out of that work and now sits at the center of a national network of media opportunities.
The scale of the owned platforms is the part that stands out. HARO, founded in 2008 and revived by Featured in 2025, serves a community of more than 800,000 sources and 75,000 journalists, delivering requests through email digests up to three times a day. Connectively, the platform Featured operated for more than four years, connects an expert with a publisher roughly every six seconds, supports 100,000 users, and helps 2,500 publishers fill content gaps with expert-led articles.
Why the timing matters
Featured is launching at a moment of real change for public relations. As AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude reach hundreds of millions of weekly users, those systems increasingly draw on earned media when deciding which sources to cite. Coverage that once drove web traffic now also shapes what AI tells people about a brand.
That shift is central to how Featured frames the category. “PR used to mean making the front page of a newspaper or a search engine results page,” Farmiloe said. “Now it means being cited by AI, and earned media is the through-line.” The company’s belief that AI is the new front page runs through its product and its pitch.
What it means for Arizona businesses
For the state’s founders, small agencies, and in-house marketing teams, the practical promise is access. PR has traditionally required either an expensive agency relationship or a patchwork of fragmented tools. Featured is positioned as a way for a small team to run a credible media strategy without either.
The company is priced as a usage-based subscription, with plans that scale to the volume of AI work each user runs rather than the number of seats. The structure, Featured says, is built to serve boutique firms and lean communications teams rather than large enterprises alone.
Featured is available now at featured.com. HARO and Connectively continue to operate as standalone products within the company’s portfolio, with HARO remaining free and ad-supported for journalists and sources alike. For an Arizona technology sector still defining itself beyond real estate and semiconductors, Featured represents a bet that one of the next durable software categories, such as the AI co-pilot for PR, can be built and headquartered in Scottsdale.
