Advance Auto Parts Pairs Newsroom Discipline With AI In Fortune 500 Comeback

Advance Auto Parts runs its corporate communications like a daily news desk. After more than 90 years in business, the Fortune 500 retailer is in the middle of a comeback under CEO Shane O'Kelly, overhauling supply chain, merchandising, and customer service. Keeping employees, customers, and investors aligned through that pace of change demands editorial discipline. One core message has to ladder into audience-specific assets without a single dropped beat.

Nicole Ducouer is Head of Strategic Communications at Advance Auto Parts, where her remit spans brand PR, executive messaging, internal communications, crisis comms, the corporate LinkedIn presence, and more, all with the goal of brand protection and elevation. A former news anchor with 15 years in broadcast journalism, she most recently led corporate communications at Hanesbrands, the apparel maker behind Hanes, Champion, and Bali. That broadcast training shapes how she manages messaging for a legacy retailer in a high-stakes overhaul. "The best advice I received about PR is when you make noise, you get noise. So we're really aware of what noise we're making, and whether we want to get noise back," Ducouer says. 

The instinct is editorial. Ducouer runs her team the way a producer runs a show, starting from a single core message and working backward to figure out which audiences need to hear it, in what format, and on what cadence. Employees, the trade press, shareholders, and frontline team members each get the story shaped for them, but the underlying narrative does not bend. In turn, team members become ambassadors, prospects become customers, and investors become believers. Building the brief is only step one. It has to reach the right ears, in the right format, at the right time, or it doesn't land.

AI on the desk

Generating that volume of human-tested content can stretch a lean comms team. That's where generative AI earns its keep, clearing the desk of first drafts so the humans can spend their hours on strategy and relationships. Ducouer compares the current moment in adoption to the early days of the internet, when some teams still insisted they did not need to learn how to use it.

The industry has moved fast in her direction. Three in four PR and communications professionals now use generative AI at work, nearly three times the share that did in early 2023, according to a Muck Rack survey of more than 1,000 practitioners. Nine in 10 say it lets them work faster, and roughly eight in 10 say it boosts the quality of their output. The most common use cases line up almost exactly with the work that fills a comms desk: brainstorming, first drafts, editing, and research.

"I don't think anybody should be scared to say they use AI every day. I use Copilot as a partner. I'll plug in my comms strategy and ask what I'm missing, or hand it a press release and ask how to do it better. What it pumps out isn't your final product, but it takes a little weight off your brain just to get you started," Ducouer says.

Ducouer's workflow with Copilot fits how comms actually operates. She uses the tool to pressure-test a strategy, surface gaps, and accelerate the path to a working draft, leaving her team more time for the conversations that the technology cannot have for them. That distinction matters when most large companies are still not ready to deploy AI at scale, and where the line between productive use and over-reliance is being drawn one team at a time.

Pitch the agenda

Those reclaimed hours go straight into the kind of work AI cannot shortcut. Trade outlets in the aftermarket operate in a small ecosystem, where the same editors and reporters cover the pro customer week after week. Burn one of those relationships with a transactional pitch, and the next one gets harder. Ducouer's advice to comms leaders is to lead with the journalist's agenda, not the company's product catalog. A pitch should function as an invitation into a story the reporter already wants to tell about impact, change, or community work.

The dynamic shifts even further when a brand is in the middle of a public reset. Audiences scan the language for tells, and earned coverage carries the credibility that polished marketing copy cannot. For Advance Auto Parts, that often means highlighting community work, including the foundation's giving to veterans, in stories that influence whether somebody buys a part, considers the stock, or supports the philanthropic mission. The trade reporter and the consumer both have to choose to give attention, and a credible third-party telling earns both at once.

"When you're in a comeback like we are, that earned media goes even farther because people can read right through the lines. It brings a level of authenticity and credibility. That's why we call it earned. You're earning the reporter's respect to come do a story on you, and then you're earning the consumer's respect when they read it and hear you're doing good things," she says.

Making any of this work, in earned media or elsewhere, starts with access at the top. Communications leaders need to be close enough to decision-making to see what is changing and how announcements will land before they go out the door. That access does not come automatically, particularly for leaders new to an organization, and Ducouer urges comms heads to be explicit with executives about why early involvement matters.

Numbers and nuance

Knowing whether any of that work actually lands is its own discipline. Ducouer's team pairs hard data on opens, clicks, and engagement with a qualitative morale check built on person-to-person feedback, working from the premise that during a corporate reset, the anecdote often carries more weight than the dashboard. "My biggest nightmare is for somebody to say, 'I never heard about that,' and they're talking about a big driver of our strategy. That makes me stop and question what I missed, what I didn't say, what channel didn’t we cover, or was the message wrong?" Ducouer says.

The approach translates into recognizable assets inside and outside the company. Internally, it shows up in a refreshed culture platform, Inspire, Serve, Grow, that modernizes the founders' 90-year-old vision and is used to recognize team members for their performance and leadership behaviors. Externally, it shows up in the recently expanded paint-out partnerships with Team Penske NASCAR driver Ryan Blaney, the rollout of the modernized Advance Rewards loyalty program, and launch of ARGOS, their new owned oil and fluids brand. The proof points often arrive from unexpected places. Ducouer points to a recent LinkedIn article from O'Kelly, a U.S. Army veteran, on the transition out of military service, where the engagement numbers are strong, but the real signal comes when somebody important to the CEO reaches out personally to say the piece moves them. That kind of feedback is what no dashboard captures.

"You could look at spreadsheets, numbers, open rates, click rates, views, and engagement, and we do look at all of that. But what often drives us to feel successful are the anecdotes and the person-to-person feedback. A lot of the time, we pair the numbers and data on a spreadsheet with just talking to people," she says.

Inside the circle

All of it depends on the senior comms leader having a seat at the table. The editorial approach, the AI-assisted drafting, and the earned-media playbook only compound when comms is in the room where strategy is set, early enough to shape the story before it goes public. Without that seat, blind spots multiply, and the messaging lags the actual business.

Earning that seat is a matter of making the business case. It is not a personal perk. It is an input that changes what the comms team can produce on the other end.

"Communications leaders help the success of the business by being a thought partner for leadership, not a note taker. If you give people the why, it helps for you to know information early or sit in the meetings that can have a greater impact," Ducouer says.

That case is easier to make when the work itself keeps delivering. For Ducouer, a corporate comeback is exactly the kind of environment where the comms function gets to demonstrate why it belongs at the executive table. The pace of change, the audience scrutiny, and the need for message discipline all raise the stakes on getting communications right. "In the middle of a comeback, what a great time to be in communications. I'm really excited about the go-forward story we're telling at Advance," she says.