Author: Jesper Andersen

  • State of the Profession 2026 by CIPR

    State of the Profession 2026 by CIPR

    About the paper

    CIPR’s State of the Profession 2026 is original survey research on working conditions, activities, AI use, recruitment, pay, professional challenges, polarisation and inclusion in public relations.

    Chalkstream conducted an online survey for CIPR from 13 April to 4 May 2026, receiving 738 responses, of which 573 were complete; 88% of respondents were UK-based and 12% were based outside the UK.

    The 2026 sample is older, more senior and contains more agency, consultancy and independent practitioners than previous waves, so year-on-year comparisons, particularly on income, activities and AI, should be treated with caution.

    Length: 75 pages

    More information/download: https://newsroom.cipr.co.uk/organisations-more-cautious-about-taking-public-positions-compared-to-five-years-ago-ciprs-2026-state-of-the-profession-report-reveals/

    Core Insights

    1. What overall picture does the report paint of the PR profession in 2026?

    The central picture is not of a profession moving uniformly in one direction, but of one experiencing the same pressures very differently depending on sector, seniority, age and geography.

    Employment conditions illustrate this split clearly. Agencies and consultancies appear comparatively buoyant: 49% say they are growing, up from 38% in 2024. In-house teams look much weaker, with only 21% reporting growth, down from 33%, while 65% describe their teams as stable and 13% as shrinking. Confidence in future growth is correspondingly low. Among in-house respondents, 42% are not at all confident that their team will grow over the next 12 months, rising to 46% in the public sector.

    The profession’s day-to-day work combines continuity with some movement towards more strategic responsibilities. Copywriting and editing remains the most commonly reported activity, cited by 52% of practitioners, as it has been throughout the series since at least 2018. Strategic planning has moved into second place at 41%, followed by PR programmes and campaigns at 38%, community and stakeholder relations and media relations at 36% each. The report cautions, however, that the apparent rise of strategic planning may partly reflect the more senior 2026 sample.

    The perceived challenges facing the profession have also shifted. Fake news and disinformation is now the most commonly identified challenge, cited by 54%, replacing AI, which falls to second place at 49%. The expanding skill set expected of individual practitioners comes third at 39%. Concerns about professional status have also re-emerged: 34% cite PR not being seen as a professional discipline, returning the issue to the top five.

    Taken together, the report portrays a profession whose traditional work has not disappeared, but whose operating environment has become more difficult. Practitioners are simultaneously dealing with technological change, disinformation, expanding skills expectations, polarised public debate and uneven organisational investment in communication.

    2. What does the study reveal about the adoption of AI, and where are the largest gaps between use, confidence and governance?

    AI has become a normal part of professional practice, but the report finds a striking gap between widespread adoption and much more ambivalent attitudes towards its value.

    Eighty-two percent of practitioners use AI at least occasionally for work. Regular use remains unchanged from 2024 at 45%, but occasional use has risen from 28% to 37%, while the proportion saying they have never used AI has fallen from 8% to just 3%. Use is therefore close to universal, even though intensive use has not increased.

    Practitioners also report substantial practical benefits. Eighty-six percent say AI has improved the speed with which they complete tasks, and 75% say it has improved their ability to concentrate on higher-value or more strategic work. The evidence is more mixed when it comes to quality: 55% report a positive effect on the quality of their work, 48% on consistency and personalisation, and only 37% on the quality of decision-making.

    The attitudes data reveals an important tension. Seventy-one percent feel confident in their ability to adapt to AI-related changes, and 81% believe the skills that make PR professionals valuable cannot be replicated by AI. Yet only 47% believe AI will improve the overall quality of PR work. Thirty-four per cent regard AI as a threat to the profession, while 76% believe AI-generated content risks damaging trust in public relations.

    Governance has not fully caught up with adoption. Although 66% say their organisation has an AI policy, 24% of users report having no formal policy or guidance on which tools may be used. A third say they have used unapproved AI tools at work. Sixty percent have received AI training.

    There is also a weak link between organisations and their external suppliers. Among in-house practitioners who use agencies or independents, half have never asked them about their use of AI. Looking from the supplier side, 49% of agencies and independents say clients have not asked them about AI use at all, while only 5% say most or all clients ask.

    Sector differences are pronounced. Private-sector and agency practitioners tend to be the most positive and confident about AI. The public sector has the strongest policy and training structures: 79% report an organisational AI policy and 67% have received training. Not-for-profit and NGO practitioners appear comparatively exposed, with lower confidence, weaker policy coverage and greater concern about AI as a threat.

    The report therefore suggests that PR has moved beyond the question of whether AI will be adopted. The more important issue is now whether organisations can develop governance, skills and professional standards quickly enough to match the level of actual use.

    3. What does the report say about employment, recruitment and income, and how reliable are the apparent changes?

    The labour-market findings point to a growing divide between agencies and in-house communication functions.

    Nearly half of agencies and consultancies report that they are growing, compared with just over one-fifth of in-house teams. Agency respondents are also substantially more optimistic about the future: 46% are moderately or extremely confident that their organisation will grow over the next year, compared with only 21% of in-house practitioners.

    The differences are sharpest in the public sector. Forty-six percent of public-sector respondents are not at all confident about team growth over the next 12 months, compared with 34% in the private sector and 44% in not-for-profits and NGOs.

    The survey also finds changes in working patterns. Thirteen percent of respondents work part-time, compared with 7% in 2024. CIPR cautions against interpreting this as evidence of a profession-wide move towards part-time employment because independent practitioners, who are particularly likely to work part-time, make up a larger share of the 2026 sample.

    The same caveat matters considerably for salaries. Average full-time income is reported at £64,817, 22% above the 2024 figure of £53,052 and the highest recorded in the series. But the report explicitly attributes much of this rise to the greater seniority of the 2026 respondents. Directors, partners, founders and managing directors average £102,887, compared with £69,930 for heads of communication and associate directors, £56,311 for managers and £38,774 for interns, trainees, assistants and executives. A sample containing more senior practitioners will therefore mechanically produce a higher overall average.

    Organisation type also matters. Private-sector in-house practitioners report the highest average full-time income at £74,419, followed by agency and consultancy practitioners at £68,675 and independents at £66,900. Public-sector practitioners average £59,156 and not-for-profit and NGO practitioners £56,714.

    The estimated gender pay gap remains unresolved. After controlling statistically for age and seniority, the report calculates a gap of £5,539, compared with £3,894 in 2024. The 2026 estimate falls just short of statistical significance because fewer respondents provided income data, so the apparent increase should not be treated as definitive. The report’s more defensible conclusion is that there is no evidence that the gap has disappeared or clearly narrowed.

    Recruitment also contains a diversity concern. Among senior in-house respondents involved in recruitment, non-White practitioners are less likely than White practitioners to participate in recruitment decisions, 59% compared with 70%. The same pattern appeared in the 2022 and 2024 studies, making it more than a one-year anomaly within this survey series.

    4. How is growing social and political polarisation affecting the work and responsibilities of PR practitioners?

    This is one of the report’s most distinctive additions. For the first time, the State of the Profession study includes a substantial section specifically devoted to polarisation and controversial issues.

    The findings suggest that dealing with contested issues is increasingly becoming part of normal PR work. Sixty-four percent say navigating polarised opinions is becoming a larger part of their job, while 54% say polarisation in society has made their work more difficult. Ninety-one percent regard keeping up with current affairs as necessary for their job, yet 38% say doing so negatively affects their mental health.

    Personal and professional views also regularly come into conflict. Forty-three percent say they are sometimes asked to communicate messages with which they personally disagree, although 59% believe representing views one may personally disagree with is part of the professional role.

    More broadly, 82% say they encounter ethically or politically difficult topics at least occasionally: 40% rarely, 28% sometimes, 9% often and 4% very often. Younger practitioners report such experiences considerably more frequently. Among those aged 16–34, 53% say they encounter them sometimes, often or very often, compared with 21% among those aged 55 and over. The report explicitly says it cannot determine whether this reflects differences in the work given to younger employees or differences in the attitudes of the generations themselves.

    These issues are not merely theoretical. Practitioners report changing employment or client decisions because of organisations’ positions on social, political or ethical issues. Thirty percent have raised concerns internally about an employer’s stance, 24% have started looking for another job, and 22% have decided not to apply for a job they would otherwise have considered. On the agency and consultancy side, 39% have decided not to pitch for work because of a potential client’s position, 37% have declined a client or project and 22% have ended or attempted to end a client relationship.

    Organisations themselves appear to have become more cautious. Fifty-two percent of respondents say their organisation is more reluctant to take public positions than five years ago, while 48% believe the risks of taking positions on controversial issues outweigh the benefits. At the same time, 47% say organisations face greater pressure to comment, and 46% say employees increasingly expect them to take positions.

    The crucial governance finding is that fewer than half have meaningful organisational guidance. Only 21% report a formal policy on controversial issues and another 24% informal guidance; 39% have neither.

    When asked what would help, the most popular answer is not communications training. Sixty-one per cent want senior leadership to take responsibility for decisions on controversial issues, ahead of training in navigating polarised audiences at 53% and clearer organisational policy at 52%.

    The implication is that polarisation is increasingly a corporate governance issue rather than simply a communication challenge. Practitioners appear to be asking senior leaders to make the fundamental decisions about whether an organisation should speak, remain silent or take a particular position, rather than leaving communicators to carry that responsibility themselves.

    5. What does the study show about diversity and inclusion, and where are the tensions between the profession’s overall picture and individual experiences?

    The headline picture of workplace inclusion is comparatively positive, but the aggregate figure conceals substantial differences between groups.

    Sixty-eight percent of respondents describe their work environment as very or extremely inclusive, including 29% who call it extremely inclusive. Only 8% describe their workplace as not at all or only slightly inclusive.

    Organisation type matters considerably. Eighty-one percent of agency and consultancy respondents describe their workplace as very or extremely inclusive, compared with 62% in private-sector in-house teams, 61% in the public sector and 67% in not-for-profit organisations and NGOs.

    The most significant difference, however, concerns ethnicity. Among White respondents, 72% describe their workplace as very or extremely inclusive and only 5% as not at all or slightly inclusive. Among non-White respondents, the corresponding figures are 57% and 18%. Non-White practitioners are therefore more than three times as likely to report low workplace inclusivity.

    Representation also changes markedly with seniority. White respondents account for 58% of interns, trainees, assistants and executives, but their proportion rises progressively to 87% among directors, partners and managing directors. The report notes that this pattern has appeared in the data for several years.

    At the same time, diversity itself has fallen as a perceived industry challenge. Only 17% now identify lack of diversity among PR practitioners as one of the profession’s major challenges, placing it tenth, compared with fifth in 2024. This creates an important tension within the findings: concern about diversity has declined among practitioners as a whole even though the data continues to show substantial differences in representation, recruitment involvement and perceived inclusion.

    The report also broadens the diversity picture beyond ethnicity and gender. Fourteen percent of respondents report a long-term physical or mental health condition affecting their daily activities, while 16% identify as neurodivergent. Both figures vary considerably by employment type. Nineteen percent of independent practitioners identify as having a disability and 32% as neurodivergent, compared with 6% and 12% respectively among agency and consultancy respondents. The report does not establish why independent practice attracts or accommodates these groups at higher rates, so causal interpretations would go beyond the evidence.

    Overall, the report suggests that the profession should be cautious about treating a generally positive average assessment of inclusion as evidence that inclusion problems have been resolved. The experience of the average respondent is not necessarily the experience of practitioners from less well represented groups, and some of the strongest inequalities become visible only when the data is broken down by ethnicity, seniority or organisation type.

  • In Search of Mainstream by YouTube Culture & Trends

    In Search of Mainstream by YouTube Culture & Trends

    About the paper

    This is a mixed-methods industry report from YouTube Culture & Trends and NRG.

    It combines a review of recent research, analysis of entertainment, media and video trends from around the world, platform data and surveys of active online audiences aged 14–44; the main 2026 survey cited throughout was conducted in the US in April 2026 with N=939 respondents, alongside additional 2025 surveys and tracking data.

    The report does not clearly specify recruitment, weighting, full country coverage or a single total sample across all datasets, so the methodology is relatively high-level and partly proprietary.

    Length: 13 pages

    More information/download: https://www.youtube.com/trends/report/tr26-mainstream-trends-report/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the state of mainstream culture?

    The report argues that mainstream culture has not disappeared under the pressure of media fragmentation. Instead, the mechanisms through which something becomes mainstream have fundamentally changed.

    Audiences now have access to far more creators, communities and content than in the era when a relatively small number of broadcasters, publishers and entertainment companies could define common cultural reference points. This has produced a more personalised and less synchronous culture, in which different groups can consume very different things.

    At the same time, the desire for shared experiences remains strong. Among US online 14- to 29-year-olds surveyed, 63 percent agreed that being interested in the same things as other people makes them feel part of something bigger. The report also finds an apparently contradictory development: 63 percent of 14- to 44-year-olds say they are more likely than five years ago to watch creators or content that everyone they know also follows, while 67 percent say they are also watching more things that nobody they personally know follows.

    The report interprets this as evidence that fragmentation and shared culture can coexist. People participate in more specialised cultural communities, but some ideas, creators and properties travel between those communities and eventually become widely recognised.

    The crucial change is therefore not whether mainstream culture exists, but how it is created. The report describes a movement away from predominantly top-down cultural gatekeeping towards a more networked process in which creators, communities and audiences collectively generate the attention, participation and understanding that allow something to break through.

    2. How does the report define and measure whether something has become mainstream?

    The report proposes three signals that together distinguish genuinely mainstream phenomena from things that are merely visible, popular or important within particular communities: visibility, comprehension and participation.

    Visibility refers to repeated exposure and widespread awareness across platforms and conversations. At its strongest, a cultural phenomenon becomes difficult to avoid.

    Comprehension means that people across different audiences understand what something represents. A genuinely mainstream phenomenon therefore becomes a form of cultural shorthand: people recognise references, jokes or memes without requiring extensive explanation.

    Participation captures the active behaviours surrounding something, including commenting, sharing, creating, remixing and purchasing. The report treats this as particularly important in contemporary digital culture because audiences no longer simply consume cultural products but actively contribute to their circulation and development.

    The model produces four different cultural positions:

    1. A niche phenomenon generates strong engagement within a particular community.
    2. Something known has high visibility and understanding but relatively little active engagement.
    3. Something popular may be large and highly engaging but remain especially meaningful to particular demographic groups.
    4. Something becomes mainstream only when visibility, participation and comprehension converge across a broad range of audiences.

    This distinction is important to the report’s argument because it rejects simple audience size as an adequate definition of mainstream success. Something can be culturally important without becoming mainstream, while high awareness alone does not necessarily demonstrate deep cultural significance.

    The survey findings support the emphasis on digital signals. Among US online 14- to 44-year-olds, 46 percent say widespread online discussion indicates that something has become really big in popular culture, while 41 percent point to memes, jokes or references and 41 percent to people watching content about it on YouTube.

    3. Why does the report see communities and participation as the new engines of mainstream culture?

    The report argues that digital media have changed audiences from relatively passive recipients of culture into active participants in its development and distribution.

    Its most striking finding in this respect is that 70 percent of the surveyed US online population aged 14–44 describe themselves as video content creators. The category is therefore being used very broadly, but the underlying point is that creating and sharing content is presented as ordinary audience behaviour rather than the activity of a small professional group.

    This participation can begin inside relatively small communities. Fans create videos, explanations, commentary, memes and other material for one another. That activity can then increase a topic’s visibility outside the original community while simultaneously providing new audiences with ways of understanding it. Participation therefore contributes to the other two elements of the report’s mainstream model: visibility and comprehension.

    The consumption patterns reported reinforce this argument. Seventy-one percent say they have watched videos that unpack stories within a particular fandom or community, while 69 percent have watched content from a community they would themselves consider niche.

    The report uses gaming, anime and podcasts to illustrate how interests previously regarded as specialist can become widely recognised cultural categories. Minecraft and Roblox, for example, achieved 75 percent recognition in the survey, approaching the 84 percent recorded for Marvel. Anime is presented as an example of sustained online participation helping a longstanding specialist interest move into broader popular culture, while podcasts illustrate how commentary and extended discussion can turn awareness into deeper understanding.

    The same logic changes how audiences perceive success. Rather than necessarily interpreting mainstream acceptance as “selling out”, younger audiences are portrayed as feeling personally invested in helping creators or fandoms succeed. Sixty-three percent of 14- to 29-year-olds say shared interests make them feel part of something bigger, compared with 54 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds. The report also cites earlier research in which fans expressed pride when something they supported succeeded because they believed they had contributed to that success.

    Mainstream breakthrough is therefore presented increasingly as a collective achievement: communities do not simply identify emerging cultural successes but actively help create them.

    4. What role does the report assign to YouTube, and how does that shape its perspective?

    YouTube is presented as playing several interconnected roles in the modern cultural system: discovery platform, participation infrastructure, explanatory layer and source of cultural validation.

    First, the platform provides entry points into interests and communities. The report argues that audiences may encounter a phenomenon through creator videos, commentary, clips or related content before engaging directly with the original property.

    Second, YouTube enables the participatory activity that the report considers central to contemporary mainstream formation. Fans can create, remix, discuss and share material, allowing specialised communities to generate cultural momentum.

    Third, the platform is portrayed as especially important for comprehension. Videos explaining, reviewing or reacting to something allow audiences not merely to become aware of it but to understand why it matters. The report describes this as increasingly important because visibility is abundant while understanding is comparatively scarce.

    Its survey provides several strong platform-specific findings. Sixty-five percent of US online 14- to 44-year-olds agree that something feels more real or legitimate when they see it appear on YouTube. Seventy-three percent say YouTube is the best place for them to explore their interests deeply, and 72 percent say YouTube helps them remain interested in things long after initially discovering them.

    The report also uses case studies to illustrate this process. The NFL generated more than 20 billion YouTube views across official channels and fan communities in 2025, while the internet-born Backrooms phenomenon accumulated more than 15 billion views of related YouTube content before eventually becoming a major theatrical release. These examples are used to show how both established institutions and digitally native phenomena can use online communities as routes into broader culture.

    This perspective is important when interpreting the report. YouTube is not merely one object of analysis but also the publisher and a central part of the explanatory model. The report repeatedly presents YouTube-specific evidence demonstrating the platform’s importance and does not systematically compare its proposed cultural role with competing platforms. Its broader claims about fragmentation, communities and participation can therefore be distinguished from its more specific claim that YouTube occupies an especially central position within those processes.

    5. What broader picture of cultural power and influence emerges from the report?

    The report describes a redistribution of cultural power rather than the disappearance of cultural hierarchy altogether.

    Traditional institutions such as broadcasters, studios and major entertainment brands remain important, but they no longer possess the same exclusive ability to decide which cultural properties reach large audiences. Online communities can now generate awareness, participation and shared understanding before traditional institutions become involved.

    This reverses part of the traditional sequence of mainstream success. Instead of institutional endorsement creating cultural importance, the report argues that traditional recognition increasingly follows success that has already been established digitally. Film adaptations, streaming deals, major sponsorships and awards can therefore be interpreted as acknowledgement of cultural momentum generated elsewhere rather than the original source of that momentum.

    At the same time, digital scale alone is not sufficient. The report emphasises that real-world conversation remains particularly powerful: 42 percent of surveyed 14- to 44-year-olds say something feels worth their time when people they know in real life are talking about it. Digital culture becomes fully mainstream when online phenomena move beyond feeds and communities into wider everyday discourse and physical experiences.

    The resulting cultural system is more bottom-up, participatory and fluid. Niche communities can become incubators for much larger phenomena, audiences can function simultaneously as consumers, promoters and creators, and cultural understanding becomes almost as important as simple visibility.

    The report’s final implication is therefore that “mainstream” should no longer be understood primarily as whatever reaches the largest audience through dominant institutions. Mainstream culture now emerges when communities create enough participation to generate broad visibility and, crucially, enough shared understanding for an idea to travel beyond its original audience. In the report’s model, cultural power increasingly belongs to those capable of turning specialised engagement into something that people across very different communities can recognise, understand and participate in.

  • Global Corporate Affairs Survey 2026 by Oxford-GlobeScan

    Global Corporate Affairs Survey 2026 by Oxford-GlobeScan

    About the paper

    The 2026 Oxford-GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey is an original expert survey examining the risks, opportunities and evolving role of Corporate Affairs.

    The online survey was fielded from 4 February to 27 March 2026 among 294 senior Corporate Affairs and related professionals in 51 countries; 83 percent had more than ten years’ experience and 79 percent reported to Board, CEO or Group Executive level.

    The sample spans Europe, South America, North America, Africa and Asia-Pacific, although it is unevenly distributed geographically, with Europe accounting for 44 percent and South America 26 percent of respondents.

    Length: 28 pages

    More information/download: https://globescan.com/2026/07/20/oxford-globescan-global-corporate-affairs-survey-2026/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about how the Corporate Affairs environment is changing?

    The report argues that Corporate Affairs is being reshaped by the convergence of geopolitical volatility, geoeconomic fragmentation and rapid technological change, particularly AI. Its central message is not simply that the external environment has become more difficult, but that the traditional Corporate Affairs model is becoming inadequate for dealing with it.

    Geopolitical risk remains by far the dominant short-term concern, cited by 76 percent of respondents. However, the report argues that the nature of this risk is becoming more concrete and economically consequential. Concerns about tariffs, supply chains, economic uncertainty, energy costs and changing trade relationships indicate what the authors describe as a return to “geoeconomics”: political objectives increasingly being pursued through economic instruments.

    At the same time, AI has moved dramatically up the agenda. AI and technology were identified as a major business risk by 44 percent of respondents, compared with only 17 percent in 2025. Yet the same technological transformation is also seen as the largest opportunity available to business, with 71 percent naming innovation, digitalisation and AI as a major opportunity.

    This combination of geopolitical and technological disruption creates a more complex role for Corporate Affairs. The function is increasingly expected to interpret external developments, anticipate political and reputational risks, coordinate responses across the organisation and translate external intelligence into advice for senior management.

    The report therefore portrays Corporate Affairs as moving away from being primarily a communications or stakeholder-relations function towards becoming a strategically embedded organisational capability. Its emerging role is closer to that of a navigation function: helping leadership understand an increasingly volatile environment and decide how the organisation should respond.

    This transformation is not presented simply as an aspiration from the authors. Seventy-four percent of respondents themselves believe that their existing Corporate Affairs approach requires some form of revision, including 17 percent who believe it requires radical revision.

    2. What do Corporate Affairs leaders see as the most important risks and opportunities for global business?

    The risk landscape is dominated by geopolitics. Seventy-six percent of respondents identify geopolitical risk as one of the biggest risks facing global business over the next two years, making it the leading concern for the seventh consecutive year.

    The second-largest risk is the impact of AI and technology at 44 percent, up 27 percentage points from 2025. This is one of the most striking changes in the survey. Macroeconomic conditions rank third at 34 percent, followed by climate change at 19 percent. Data privacy and cyber risk, populism and social division, reputation risk, regulatory pressures, supply-chain problems and misinformation also feature among the principal concerns.

    The rankings vary by sector and region. Geopolitics leads across every region, but macroeconomic risks rank particularly highly in Africa and North America. Sector differences are also evident: climate change remains especially important in food and agriculture, while data privacy and cyber issues are prominent in ICT, media and financial services.

    The opportunity landscape looks very different but is driven by some of the same forces. Innovation, digitalisation and AI dominate at 71 percent, substantially ahead of stakeholder engagement and trust building at 23 percent and sustainable growth and ESG strategies at 17 percent. Economic growth and upliftment, economic and political stability, collaboration, talent and skills, and the energy transition are also identified as opportunities.

    This creates one of the report’s central paradoxes. AI is simultaneously regarded as one of the largest threats and the single largest opportunity facing business. The report interprets this as evidence that Corporate Affairs organisations must learn both to exploit new technology and to manage the disruption it creates.

    The increasing importance of stakeholder engagement is another notable finding. Mentions of stakeholder engagement and trust building as an opportunity rose from 11 percent in 2025 to 23 percent in 2026. The report therefore sees technological capability and stakeholder legitimacy as complementary rather than competing priorities.

    Human capability is also important. Respondents connect successful technological adoption with skills, leadership capacity and organisational readiness. The opportunity presented by AI is therefore not regarded simply as a matter of acquiring technology; organisations also need people capable of integrating it into decision-making and business processes.

    3. How are governance, ESG, corporate purpose and political advocacy changing?

    The report describes a substantial recalibration of the ESG agenda rather than its disappearance.

    Climate change remains the most frequently cited ESG issue, mentioned by 40 percent of respondents, but this is down from 51 percent in 2025. Governance and ethics have risen sharply to 34 percent, while regulation and policy uncertainty rank third at 16 percent.

    The shift becomes even clearer when respondents are asked which component of ESG represents the greatest reputational risk. Governance ranks first globally at 45 percent, ahead of environmental risk at 27 percent and social risk at 26 percent. Governance has therefore moved from the lowest-ranked of the three dimensions in 2024 to the highest in 2026.

    The report interprets governance broadly. It includes ethics, accountability, board oversight, transparency, disclosure, regulatory compliance and the organisation’s ability to demonstrate effective control in volatile circumstances. The growing prominence of governance therefore connects directly with the wider geopolitical and regulatory environment described elsewhere in the report.

    Another striking change concerns diversity and inclusion. Internal inclusivity and diversity falls to 7 percent among respondents’ leading ESG issues, compared with 21 percent in 2025. The authors interpret this not as evidence that social issues have become irrelevant, but as a more cautious corporate response to political and cultural controversy, with organisations concentrating attention on governance, regulation and compliance.

    Political advocacy remains significant despite these pressures. Thirty-three percent of respondents say their organisation increased its political advocacy during the previous year. Increased engagement is particularly common in Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe. The report also notes that the same external pressures can produce opposite responses: some organisations increase advocacy to shape policy and manage uncertainty, while others reduce their visibility because of concerns about politicisation or reputational exposure.

    Corporate purpose shows a similar tension. Eighty-two percent of respondents say their company has a stated corporate purpose, but only 32 percent report increased executive-level discussion of purpose during the previous year, down from 45 percent in 2025. The biggest obstacles to implementing purpose include the political environment, lack of an integrated implementation plan, organisational complexity and inadequate measurement.

    Yet respondents do not expect expectations of corporate purpose to disappear. Thirty-six percent believe societal expectations for purposeful organisational leadership will be significantly higher in three years. The report therefore identifies a growing tension between organisations becoming more cautious internally and stakeholders continuing to expect businesses to demonstrate a broader societal role.

    4. How much value does Corporate Affairs believe it creates, and how effectively is that value being measured?

    Corporate Affairs practitioners remain confident that their function contributes substantially to business value, but the report exposes a significant gap between perceived value and the ability to demonstrate it systematically.

    Seventy-nine percent of respondents believe Corporate Affairs has a high or significant impact on creating and protecting business value. This remains a strong result, although it has declined from 84 percent in 2025 and 91 percent in 2023.

    Respondents identify forecasting around risk, crises and political developments as the area in which Corporate Affairs is most effectively creating business value, mentioned by 32 percent. Reputation management follows at 30 percent, while building internal alignment behind strategic objectives reaches 21 percent.

    When asked more broadly where Corporate Affairs has contributed during the previous year, trust and reputation dominate. The report groups 94 percent of responses around reputation capital and trust, 69 percent around policy and risk, and 46 percent around growth and people-related contributions such as market access, revenue enablement and talent.

    The measurement evidence, however, is considerably weaker. Only 49 percent say that they formally measure the impact or success of Corporate Affairs, while 41 percent say that they do not.

    Even among the 143 respondents who use formal metrics, measurement remains heavily concentrated on relatively traditional indicators. Media performance is used by 75 percent, formal reputation or trust tracking by 65 percent, and informal stakeholder sentiment or engagement by 65 percent. Employee engagement and internal alignment indicators are used by 60 percent.

    More outcome-oriented measures are less widespread. Public-policy and advocacy outcomes are used by 45 percent, risk-mitigation indicators by 39 percent, and investor perceptions or valuation signals by only 31 percent.

    The report consequently identifies measurement as one of the function’s significant weaknesses. Corporate Affairs practitioners themselves say that impact measurement, data and AI capabilities require improvement, while the authors argue that organisations need to move beyond media monitoring and informal stakeholder feedback towards more structured assessments of reputation, trust, risk reduction and business value.

    A second capability gap concerns AI-generated misinformation. Only 18 percent of respondents consider their Corporate Affairs function fully prepared to handle a deepfake or AI-driven misinformation incident, while 43 percent consider themselves not very prepared. The report therefore depicts a function that recognises both its strategic importance and the scale of the capability development still required.

    5. What does the report say Corporate Affairs must change to become future-fit?

    The strongest conclusion is that maintaining the existing Corporate Affairs model is no longer considered sufficient. Seventy-four percent of respondents believe their approach requires revision: 57 percent favour modest revision and 17 percent favour radical change.

    The two major forces behind this perceived need are geopolitical volatility and AI. Respondents identify the need to respond more effectively to geopolitical conditions as one of the principal drivers of change, alongside the need to manage and exploit AI and communications technology.

    When respondents specify what needs to change, clearer strategy, focus and prioritisation come first at 35 percent. Operating models, governance and internal alignment follow at 30 percent. Other priorities include resource allocation, stronger stakeholder and leadership influence, specialised skills, improved measurement and data capabilities, and stronger brand and reputation management.

    Asked for the single most important action that would make Corporate Affairs future-fit, respondents place proactive, insight-led and adaptive strategic planning first at 26 percent. Adoption and integration of AI and technology follows closely at 24 percent, while talent acquisition and upskilling ranks third at 21 percent. Anticipatory governance, including foresight and risk preparedness, reaches 13 percent.

    The report ultimately condenses its findings into four broad requirements.

    First, Corporate Affairs strategy needs to be embedded within overall business strategy. The function should have close access to the CEO, Board and senior leadership because its ability to interpret external developments is increasingly relevant to strategic decision-making.

    Second, organisations need operating models that connect headquarters, regions and business units. Geopolitical differences, trade policies and rapidly changing stakeholder expectations make internal alignment and coordinated execution increasingly important.

    Third, Corporate Affairs needs new capabilities. AI expertise is one component, both for exploiting technology and responding to threats such as misinformation. But the report also emphasises foresight, political and economic analysis, international trade knowledge, forecasting and specialist talent.

    Fourth, Corporate Affairs needs stronger evidence of its impact. Demonstrating contributions to reputation, trust, risk management and long-term business value becomes increasingly important if the function is to justify its more strategic organisational position.

    Taken together, these findings portray a profession moving from communication and reputation management towards a broader strategic role centred on intelligence, anticipation, organisational alignment and external navigation. The report’s core implication is that reputation and stakeholder engagement remain fundamental capabilities, but they are no longer sufficient on their own. Future Corporate Affairs teams are expected to combine them with geopolitical intelligence, technological competence, foresight, measurement and much closer integration with business strategy.

  • The State of PR 2026 by Muck Rack

    The State of PR 2026 by Muck Rack

    About the paper

    The State of PR 2026 is an original survey study of public relations professionals examining their roles, working conditions, strategic priorities, media relations practices, AI adoption, GEO and social media use.

    Muck Rack surveyed 1,115 professionals by email between 14 May and 12 June 2026 and retained 971 usable responses after data cleaning.

    The sample is heavily US-based (91%) and agency-weighted (56%), so the findings primarily reflect the American PR market rather than the global profession.

    Length: 34 pages

    More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/Muck_Rack_-_State_of_PR_2026.pdf

    Core Insights

    1. What does the report show about the changing scope of PR work?

    Media relations remains the profession’s central activity. Eighty-four per cent of respondents say it accounts for at least a quarter of their work, unchanged from the previous year. This suggests that, despite major technological and organisational changes, traditional earned media work still defines the PR role.

    At the same time, the role is broadening. Thought leadership accounts for at least a quarter of the job for 51% of respondents, six percentage points more than in the previous year. Media measurement and reporting is cited by 45%, content creation by 41%, and both executive and corporate communications by 25%.

    The report therefore presents PR not as a profession abandoning media relations, but as one layering additional responsibilities on top of it. Practitioners are increasingly expected to combine journalist outreach with content production, executive visibility, analytics, strategic advice and authority-building.

    This expansion may also help explain the pressure reported elsewhere in the study. Fifty-five per cent worked more than 40 hours in the preceding week, 77% worked outside normal hours at least once, and 66% rated their recent work stress above the midpoint of the scale. PR’s remit appears to be growing without traditional responsibilities becoming less important.

    2. How are AI and GEO changing PR strategy and practice?

    Generative AI has moved firmly into mainstream PR practice. Eighty per cent of respondents already use it in their workflow, compared with 77% in the previous year. A further 8% plan to explore it, while only 10% say they do not intend to use it.

    AI and automation are also the leading long-term priority: 61% expect them to grow in importance over the next five years. However, the report does not suggest that AI is replacing conventional PR skills. Media relations ranks second at 48%, up from 35% the previous year, followed by strategic planning at 32% and reputation management at 30%.

    Generative Engine Optimisation is emerging as a distinct strategic concern. Seventy-three per cent consider GEO at least somewhat important to their communications strategy, including 43% who describe it as very or extremely important. Yet responsibility remains unclear:

    • 29% say no one owns GEO.
    • 24% place responsibility with PR or communications.
    • 15% assign it to SEO or content teams.
    • 13% do not know who owns it.
    • 11% place it with marketing leadership.
    • 9% assign it to an AI or innovation team.

    This indicates that organisational practice is lagging behind strategic interest. GEO has become relevant before most organisations have established governance, responsibilities or consistent measurement.

    The tactics being adopted also reinforce PR’s traditional authority-building role. Fifty-five per cent are seeking coverage in high-authority publications to increase visibility in AI-generated responses. Half are producing more authoritative or data-driven content, and half are optimising content for search. Forty-four per cent are restructuring content so that AI systems can parse it more easily, for example through clear answers and FAQs.

    The underlying implication is that AI visibility is not simply a technical SEO issue. The report frames credibility, earned media coverage, authoritative content and machine-readable structure as mutually reinforcing elements of an emerging PR discipline.

    3. Why is earned media becoming harder to secure, and how are practitioners responding?

    The report portrays difficulty securing earned media as almost universal. Only 2% say it has not become more difficult during the year.

    The largest obstacles are structural:

    • 71% cite low journalist response rates.
    • 61% cite smaller or shrinking media lists in relevant beats.
    • 43% point to increased competition for coverage.
    • 36% cite a lack of timely or newsworthy stories.
    • 36% cite shorter media cycles and faster newsroom turnaround.
    • 35% identify overloaded or understaffed PR teams.

    These findings suggest that practitioners face pressure from both sides. Newsrooms have fewer relevant journalists and less available attention, while PR teams are competing more intensely for that attention.

    Nevertheless, many practitioners still use relatively broad outreach. Forty-nine per cent pitch more than 20 journalists per campaign or announcement, including 24% who pitch more than 50. This wide-net approach may partly reflect shrinking response rates: as the probability of an individual journalist responding falls, practitioners may compensate by increasing the number contacted.

    The relationship base is mixed rather than predominantly strong. Thirty-six per cent have previously worked with only a few of the reporters they pitch, while 35% have worked with about half. Only 27% have worked with most or all of them.

    Personalisation is common but often limited. Sixty-six per cent usually or always personalise their pitches, but among those who personalise, 73% change only a few sentences. Fifteen per cent tailor every part of the pitch, while 11% personalise only the greeting.

    The report therefore reveals a tension between relevance and scale. Practitioners recognise the need for personalisation and relationships, but the difficulty of earning coverage encourages larger pitch lists and relatively light-touch customisation.

    4. How do PR professionals believe the function can demonstrate greater value?

    Most respondents feel positively regarded by organisational leadership. Sixty-seven per cent say PR and communications is valued or very valued, including 36% who say it is very valued. However, one-third regard the function as only moderately, slightly or not valued.

    The strongest consensus in the entire value discussion concerns measurement. Sixty-nine per cent say producing measurable results is the best way to increase PR’s perceived value to leadership or clients. The alternative answers are far less prominent:

    • 11% choose improving executive visibility.
    • 10% choose delivering creative solutions.
    • 8% choose managing reputation risk.

    This does not necessarily mean that executive visibility, creativity or risk management are unimportant. Rather, respondents appear to believe that these activities become more persuasive internally when their consequences can be evidenced.

    Measurement and reporting already constitute at least a quarter of the job for 45% of respondents. The study therefore positions measurement not as a specialist or administrative add-on, but as an important source of organisational legitimacy.

    There is, however, a contrast between this strong belief in measurement and the immature measurement of GEO. Thirty-nine per cent are not currently measuring GEO success, while 21% are unsure how it is being measured. Only 25% track brand mentions in AI-generated responses, 21% monitor search visibility, and 17% track referral traffic from AI tools.

    The implication is that PR’s strategic aspirations may be developing faster than its evaluation methods. Practitioners believe measurable results are essential, but one of the profession’s most rapidly emerging priorities does not yet have widely established indicators or standards.

    5. What broader picture of the PR profession emerges from the report?

    The report depicts a profession experiencing simultaneous continuity and transformation.

    The continuity lies in media relations. It remains the dominant component of the job, and practitioners expect it to become more—not less—important. Online and digital media are pitched by 91%, but traditional formats remain significant: newspapers by 69%, magazines by 64% and television by 60%. Podcasts have also become a mainstream target, cited by 57%.

    The transformation lies in how authority, visibility and influence are created. PR now operates across earned media, thought leadership, search, social platforms and AI-generated answers. High-authority media coverage is valuable not only because people see it directly, but because it may influence what AI systems retrieve, cite or reproduce.

    LinkedIn occupies a particularly strong position. Sixty per cent regard it as the most valuable social platform for PR work, far ahead of Instagram at 18%. It is included in 87% of company social strategies and is the platform respondents most want to monitor, at 73%. This suggests that LinkedIn functions simultaneously as a corporate channel, a professional network, an executive visibility platform and an arena for thought leadership.

    Yet the profession’s development carries a human cost. Long hours, after-hours work and elevated stress are widespread. The combination of traditional media work, expanded content responsibilities, measurement demands, social media monitoring and emerging AI tasks may be increasing expectations faster than resources and organisational structures can adapt.

    Overall, Muck Rack’s perspective is that PR is becoming more technologically enabled and strategically expansive, while remaining rooted in media relationships and credibility. Its most important emerging role may be helping organisations build the authority required to be visible across both human and AI-mediated information environments. However, the sample’s strong US and agency bias means that this conclusion should not automatically be generalised to every national market or in-house communications setting.

  • World PR Report 2025-2026 by ICCO

    World PR Report 2025-2026 by ICCO

    About the paper

    The report ‘The Era of Relationship Capital – Consultancy Views of the Path Ahead’ examines the state and future direction of the global PR consultancy industry, combining original survey research with industry expert commentary.

    Its core research is an online survey conducted from September 2025 to March 2026 among 244 PR professionals across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, North America, Latin America and the Middle East.

    Country-level coverage, recruitment method and weighting are not clearly specified, and the UK, North America, Latin America and Middle East each have fewer than 30 respondents. There is also a methodological inconsistency: at least one chart gives a base of 291 respondents rather than the stated 244, so detailed figures and regional comparisons should be treated with some caution.

    Length: 61 pages

    More information/download: https://www.iccoglobal.com/icco-world-pr-report/

    Core Insights

    1. What overall picture does the report paint of the global PR industry in 2025–2026?

    The report depicts a profession that remains broadly confident about its future but is operating under significantly greater pressure. The global optimism score for PR market growth is 6.2 out of 10, down from 6.6 the previous year, while 63 percent of respondents say they are optimistic about growth in their market. The result is not a story of contraction so much as one of more cautious confidence.

    More importantly, the report argues that the nature of PR is changing. Traditional execution is becoming less central to where agencies expect value and growth to come from. Strategic consulting was the leading growth area over the previous year, cited by 37 percent of respondents, followed by corporate reputation at 35 percent. Looking ahead, corporate reputation is expected to be the largest growth area at 41 percent, followed by strategic consulting at 39 percent. Strategic consulting also leads expected investment at 39 percent.

    Technology, healthcare and financial and professional services are the strongest client sectors. Technology is particularly prominent, reflecting both the wider AI boom and organisations’ need to communicate technological change.

    The report therefore presents PR as moving further “upstream” into advisory work. Its authors and contributors repeatedly describe a shift away from communications as primarily an execution or amplification function and towards judgement, interpretation, risk management, reputation and organisational decision-making.

    However, that development is taking place amid substantial economic and organisational pressure. The leading challenges include effectively integrating AI, cited by 34 percent; clients unwilling to commit sufficient funds, 31 percent; economic conditions, 29 percent; and pressure to achieve profit and margin targets, 25 percent.

    The central tension is consequently clear: PR agencies see growing demand for higher-value strategic advice at the same time that budgets, business models, technology and talent are all under pressure.

    2. How is AI changing PR practice, skills and professional expectations?

    AI is the report’s most powerful technological theme. It has moved from experimentation towards normal professional infrastructure.

    Eighty-nine percent of respondents say their organisations have integrated AI tools into everyday processes, up from 74 percent the previous year. Ninety-one percent identify AI as the technology most likely to be relevant to PR practitioners over the next five years, far ahead of cybersecurity at 38 percent and data science at 37 percent.

    The skills agenda reflects that transformation. Mastery of AI tools is identified by 45 percent as one of the most important skill sets for the coming decade, narrowly ahead of strategic consulting at 43 percent. Another 32 percent highlight the ability to critically assess and ethically deploy AI-generated content.

    The report does not, however, portray technological capability as sufficient by itself. Its contributors consistently argue that AI increases rather than eliminates the importance of human judgement. AI can accelerate research, pattern recognition, content creation and analysis, but the professional still has to provide context, interpretation, cultural understanding and strategic judgement.

    This creates a second dimension to AI adoption: governance and ethics. Eighty-four percent believe ethical adoption and use of AI is important for the PR industry, and 78 percent regard cultural intelligence as important as AI becomes embedded in communications.

    There is consequently a gap between adoption and maturity. AI is already widespread, yet effectively integrating it remains the single most frequently cited business challenge. The report suggests that the next competitive divide will not simply be between agencies that use AI and those that do not. It will be between organisations that combine AI with strong data, governance, professional judgement and strategic capability and those that merely use it to accelerate existing production.

    3. How are client demand and agency value shifting, and what does this mean for the traditional PR business model?

    The report provides considerable evidence that clients increasingly expect PR agencies to contribute at a more strategic level.

    Strategic consulting, corporate reputation and public affairs are all significant growth areas, while influencer communications, measurement and analytics and ESG also attract investment. Expected investment is led by strategic consulting at 39 percent and influencer communications at 38 percent, with measurement and analytics at 27 percent and ESG at 23 percent.

    Corporate reputation is especially important to the report’s argument. Sixty-three percent identify proactively improving corporate reputation as an important client objective, considerably ahead of issues and crisis management at 41 percent and increasing sales at 38 percent. Corporate reputation is also the service area most widely expected to grow during the coming year.

    At the same time, AI is reducing the scarcity value of routine production. Several contributors argue that content creation and other executional activities will increasingly become commoditised as technology lowers their cost. This makes expertise, interpretation, evidence and trusted counsel relatively more valuable.

    Yet there is an important contradiction in the data. Although the industry aspires to become more strategic, client measurement requests remain heavily oriented towards traditional communications outputs. Media clippings are the most commonly requested item, cited by 56 percent, while 36 percent still report client requests for Advertising Value Equivalency and another 36 percent for sentiment metrics.

    The industry’s own use of measurement also remains disproportionately focused on reporting. Eighty-two percent say measurement and evaluation metrics are used for reporting, compared with 52 percent for planning, 50 percent for justifying fees and budgets, 44 percent for decision-making and 40 percent for advising.

    The report therefore describes an industry caught between two models. Its growth ambitions centre on advisory work, reputation and strategic influence, but important parts of its measurement and client relationship practices remain rooted in traditional reporting and communications outputs.

    4. What structural challenges could prevent PR firms from making this transition successfully?

    Talent is one of the most persistent constraints. Retaining key talent is the most commonly identified talent challenge at 41 percent, followed by developing junior and mid-level staff at 35 percent and motivating younger executives at 34 percent.

    The industry’s recruitment patterns may reinforce the problem. Rival agencies remain the leading expected source of talent at 61 percent, followed by journalism at 54 percent and graduate programmes at 49 percent. Several expert contributors argue that this is poorly aligned with the industry’s emerging needs for expertise in data, technology, regulation, policy and specialised industries.

    Their interpretation is that communications firms need more multidisciplinary recruitment from areas such as analytics, law, science, public policy and professional services rather than repeatedly competing for the same conventional PR talent.

    Measurement creates another structural challenge. Twenty percent identify the inability to measure PR impact effectively as a major business challenge. The report’s measurement commentary argues that AI makes rigorous evaluation more important because technology can scale poor assumptions and weak analysis just as efficiently as it can scale good analysis.

    Ethics is similarly becoming more consequential. Misinformation and disinformation are consistently identified among the profession’s leading ethical challenges. Eighty-six percent believe agencies should advise clients against behaviour they regard as unethical, and 73 percent say they have turned down a client or assignment for ethical reasons. However, only 44 percent believe PR is more ethical than other industries, indicating a considerable gap between professional aspirations and perceptions of industry-wide behaviour.

    Workforce sustainability presents an additional problem. Thirty-four percent of respondents report experiencing mental health problems during the previous 12 months, while formal organisational support is far from universal.

    Taken together, the findings suggest that PR’s move towards strategic advisory work requires more than adding new technologies or services. Agencies need deeper talent pools, stronger measurement capability, credible ethics and governance, and organisational models capable of retaining and developing professionals with increasingly complex skill sets.

    5. What does the report mean by “relationship capital”, and why does it see this as the profession’s central strategic opportunity?

    “Relationship capital” is the organising idea used by ICCO to connect many of the report’s otherwise separate findings. It describes the accumulated trust, goodwill, credibility and access that allow an organisation to be heard and believed by important stakeholders, particularly during uncertainty or crisis.

    The concept reflects the report’s view of the environment in which organisations now operate. Geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, social polarisation, fragmented media, misinformation and AI-generated content have all made reputation and trust more difficult to establish and maintain.

    ICCO’s argument is that attention alone therefore becomes less strategically valuable. Attention can be purchased or generated quickly, whereas relationships and credibility have to be accumulated through consistent behaviour and engagement over time.

    This helps explain why corporate reputation, strategic consulting, crisis counsel, public affairs, insight and evaluation feature so prominently throughout the report. They all contribute to an advisory model in which communications professionals help organisations understand stakeholders, anticipate risk, make decisions and maintain legitimacy rather than simply generate visibility.

    It also reveals the report’s underlying perspective. As an organisation representing PR consultancies, ICCO clearly has an interest in presenting communications as a strategically important management discipline rather than a commodity service. The survey findings provide some support for that interpretation, particularly the growth of strategic consulting and corporate reputation. However, other findings, including continued budget pressure, traditional measurement practices and strong demand for executional services such as influencer communications, show that the transition is incomplete.

    The report’s broader conclusion is therefore not that traditional PR activities are disappearing. It is that their relative value is changing. As AI makes communications production cheaper and information environments more fragmented, the report expects competitive advantage to shift towards the capabilities that are harder to automate: trusted relationships, judgement, strategic interpretation, ethical counsel and evidence-based advice.

  • 2026 Sharepoint Intranet Benchmarking Report by SWOOP Analytics

    2026 Sharepoint Intranet Benchmarking Report by SWOOP Analytics

    About the paper

    SWOOP Analytics’ 2026 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report analyses how SharePoint intranets are actually used and what drives intranet health, engagement, clutter and AI readiness.

    It is original benchmarking research based on real usage data, not survey responses, covering 410,457 intranet visitors, 253,755 intranet pages and 41 organisations worldwide over 1 October–31 December 2025.

    Length: 98 pages

    More information / download:
    https://sharepoint2026.swoopanalytics.com/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report’s central argument is that SharePoint intranets have moved beyond the adoption problem. Almost all employees now access the intranet, with 95% of employees using it during the three-month benchmark period. The issue is no longer whether people visit the intranet, but whether the content they find there is useful, current, readable and well governed.

    This creates a major shift in how intranet success should be understood. The report argues that success is not primarily about publishing more content, driving more visits or creating a larger intranet. Instead, the strongest intranets are those that help employees complete tasks, find trusted guidance and navigate content efficiently. In other words, the intranet is becoming less of a broadcast channel and more of a productivity and knowledge infrastructure.

    The report is especially clear that Content pages — policies, how-to guides, reference material and other evergreen pages — are the heart of the intranet. Employees spend 10.4 minutes per workday on Content pages, compared with only 0.9 minutes on News pages. News still matters, but it is consumed lightly, skimmed quickly and performs best when short and highly relevant.

    The broader conclusion is that intranet performance now depends on disciplined governance: clear ownership, content lifecycle management, accessibility, readability, pruning of outdated pages and a stronger distinction between news, reference content and knowledge assets.

    2. What does the data show about how employees actually use intranets?

    The report shows a pattern of near-universal but increasingly selective use. Employees are not abandoning the intranet. On the contrary, access has increased from 86% in 2024 to 93% in 2025 and 95% in 2026. But they are becoming more intentional in how they use it.

    The average employee visits the intranet 3.23 times per working day, slightly down from 3.36 in 2025, while pages viewed per visit have risen modestly to 2.22. Employees also access an average of 39.6 unique pages over the three-month period. This suggests fewer casual check-ins and more purposeful visits.

    The device data is striking. Desktop remains overwhelmingly dominant, accounting for 89% of intranet access, while phone access has fallen sharply to just 1.7%. The report interprets this as evidence that intranets are mainly experienced as desktop productivity environments, not mobile-first communication channels.

    Another important signal is the increase in home-page-only visits, from 3.6% in 2025 to 6% in 2026. The report sees this as strategically significant because it may indicate scanning without engagement, overexposure to generic content or weak prompts for next action. The homepage should therefore function as a hub for tasks and journeys, not as a billboard.

    3. Which content factors most strongly affect intranet engagement?

    The report finds that engagement is driven less by publishing volume and more by content hygiene, readability, accessibility and structure. This is one of its most important findings.

    SWOOP’s Health Score combines three dimensions: Quality, Experience and Engagement. Quality includes ageing content, spelling and grammar, broken links and missing editors. Experience includes readability, heading length, heading-to-paragraph ratio and accessibility. Engagement measures whether users spend an amount of time on a page that is reasonable in relation to its length.

    For both News and Content pages, readability and accessibility are especially important. Pages with poor structure, long sentences, accessibility issues or insufficient headings perform worse. The report also notes that accessibility is not merely a compliance matter; it has a measurable relationship with engagement.

    For News pages, structure and brevity are critical. The strongest-performing news articles are typically 200–400 words, with readership declining after around 400 words and completion rates falling further for longer articles. Very long news articles, especially those over 1,000 words, have the weakest completion rates.

    For Content pages, the picture is slightly different. Broken links matter more because these pages are often used as tools or reference material. Ageing content is more ambiguous: older Content pages may be heavily used because they are mature and valuable, but the report stresses that this only works if they are reviewed periodically. Old does not automatically mean stale, but unmanaged old content becomes a risk.

    4. What does the report say about clutter and AI readiness?

    The report argues that clutter is now one of the central intranet problems, and that it directly affects both human browsing and AI performance. The Clutter Index measures low-value pages, navigation complexity, home-page-only visits, unread News pages and content relevance across departments. In 2026, the Clutter Index rose slightly to 0.33.

    Unread and irrelevant News is identified as the largest contributor to clutter. The practical message is quite direct: organisations should publish less News, apply stricter criteria for what qualifies as News, convert evergreen News into reference pages and remove stale items from prominent news streams.

    The AI Readiness findings are especially relevant. The overall AI Readiness score improved only marginally, from 51.13 in 2025 to 52.38 in 2026. This happened despite a dramatic improvement in search effectiveness, from 34.16 to 66.3. The reason is that search effectiveness only accounts for 10% of the AI Readiness index, while content readiness and engagement readiness account for 90% combined — and both declined slightly.

    The report’s sharpest AI conclusion is that AI readiness is no longer primarily a search problem. The bigger constraint is the quality, currency and governance of the content that AI depends on. If an intranet contains outdated, duplicated, unmanaged or low-value pages, AI tools may retrieve and summarise poor content more efficiently, but not necessarily more accurately or usefully.

    The report therefore warns that AI will not magically fix intranet disorder. It may amplify it.

    5. What are the main implications for communication, intranet and knowledge-management teams?

    The first implication is that intranet teams should shift from publishing management to content stewardship. More content is not the answer. Better governed content is. The report repeatedly points to pruning, lifecycle management, ownership, templates, accessibility checks and review cycles as practical levers.

    The second implication is that Content pages deserve more strategic attention than News. News is visible and often politically important, but Content pages account for the overwhelming majority of time spent. Improving policies, guidance, FAQs, how-to pages and other reference material is likely to deliver more value than increasing the volume of internal news.

    The third implication is that leaders and managers are important intranet users. The report finds that Leadership & Executive and Management roles have the highest engagement intensity. This suggests that intranet content should be designed to support leader-led communication: clear summaries, explicit actions, reusable briefing points and easily cascadeable messages.

    The fourth implication is that organisations need to think of intranets as knowledge-management systems. The report introduces a Knowledge Management Ratio comparing pages with files, distinguishing between balanced, file-dominant, content-led and news-led intranet profiles. The most AI-ready organisations are not those with the most content, but those with the clearest pathways from work artefacts to maintained, authoritative “single source of truth” guidance.

    The final implication is that governance must become supportive rather than punitive. The Boehringer Ingelheim case study shows this well: around 2,000 editors, mandatory training before publishing rights, automated health-score nudges, community support and lifecycle pruning have enabled a very large intranet to remain healthy. The report presents this as evidence that federated governance can work if editors are equipped with standards, data and support rather than simply controlled from the centre.

  • IC Index 2026 by Institute of Internal Communication

    IC Index 2026 by Institute of Internal Communication

    About the paper

    The IC Index 2026 report examines the state of internal communication in UK large organisations, focusing on trust, change, leadership, AI, manager communication and employee attention.

    It is original survey research: Ipsos Karian and Box surveyed a representative quota sample of 5,000 UK workers aged 18–75, all working in organisations with 500+ employees, between 15 and 29 January 2026.

    The geographic scope is the UK; the report also includes practitioner reflections from internal communication experts.

    Length: 37 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.ioic.org.uk/insight-practice/ic-index.html

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the IC Index 2026 report?

    The report argues that internal communication has become more strategically important because employees are facing a tougher, more uncertain work environment, while trust, clarity and confidence are weakening. The subtitle — “The reality check” — is apt: the report presents declining communication ratings, falling trust in leaders, weak change communication, limited AI clarity and rising employee time pressure as warning signs for organisations.

    The authors frame internal communication not as a support function, but as a core mechanism for organisational resilience. They argue that internal communicators need to help leaders communicate with clarity, candour and compassion, build two-way communication systems, surface difficult conversations and connect organisational ambitions to employees’ lived reality.

    The report’s most important claim is that internal communication determines whether organisations can manage change, maintain trust and achieve their goals. The conclusion makes this explicit: organisations with dedicated IC teams have stronger strategic alignment, advocacy, information flow and representation, and the authors present this as evidence that internal communication is more critical when trust and change pressures intensify.

    2. What are the main problems the report identifies in the current employee experience?

    The report identifies six headline problems.

    First, employees are experiencing more organisational change but less clarity. More than half report restructuring in the past year, and over a third report redundancies; both are up 12 points compared with 2024. Yet only 49% agree that the reasons behind changes are clearly communicated, down seven points compared with 2023.

    Second, trust in leadership has fallen. The Trust Index is down seven points compared with 2025 and now sits at 58%. Trust in CEOs or most senior leaders and leadership teams has fallen by nine points each. Only half of employees say they trust their CEO or most senior leader, and only half trust the leadership team.

    Third, leaders appear to be overestimating how well they have communicated strategy and AI. Senior leaders are consistently much more positive than non-managers about strategy clarity, belief in strategy and AI communication. For example, 87% of senior leaders say the organisation has been clear on strategy and business priorities, compared with 57% of non-managers.

    Fourth, many employees feel poorly supported through change. Only 42% agree their organisation is good at helping employees adapt to change, while 31% actively disagree. The report links stronger change support to practical actions such as honesty about impacts, listening to employees, providing skills, and clarifying what people need to do differently.

    Fifth, frontline and digitally disconnected employees are less well served. Employees not frequently connected to a computer are more likely to hear about major changes through word of mouth and are less likely to trust leaders or feel psychologically safe.

    Sixth, employees have very little time for internal communication. Most employees spend ten minutes or less per day reading or viewing organisational news and updates, and just over one in five say they spend no or hardly any time at all.

    3. What does the report say drives employee confidence in the future?

    The report treats confidence as a multi-factor “equation”, not simply a product of optimistic messaging. Just under three in five employees — 57% — say they feel confident about the future of their organisation, while one in five actively disagree.

    The strongest driver of confidence is whether work processes allow employees to work efficiently. This is significant because it means confidence is grounded in employees’ day-to-day experience, not only in leadership narratives. Only half of employees agree that their organisation’s work processes allow them to work efficiently.

    The other major drivers are open and honest communication, clarity about strategy and business priorities, belief that AI is being used to solve the right problems, and feeling connected to people beyond one’s immediate team. The report’s implication is that internal communication can influence confidence, but cannot do so credibly if it ignores operational friction, weak processes or unclear AI adoption.

    This is one of the stronger analytical points in the report: employee confidence depends on whether the organisation feels coherent. Employees need to understand where the organisation is going, believe communication is honest, see that AI has a meaningful purpose, and experience work as efficient enough to make the future feel achievable.

    4. How does the report portray the role of leaders and managers?

    The report presents leaders and managers as central to whether communication lands — but also as part of the problem.

    Senior leaders are portrayed as increasingly disconnected from employee perceptions. They are much more likely than non-managers to believe that strategy and AI have been communicated clearly. On AI, for instance, 67% of senior leaders agree that leaders have explained clearly how AI will be used, compared with just 27% of non-managers.

    Managers are presented as the key sense-making layer. Most managers spend some time communicating with their teams each day, but more than half spend 30 minutes or less, and 14% spend less than 15 minutes. This matters because employees often depend on their direct managers to translate organisational messages into team-level meaning.

    The report also shows that manager support is uneven. More than three quarters of managers feel equipped to lead conversations about what is happening across the business, but this has declined compared with 2025 and 2024. Managers who receive training, preparation time or other structured support feel more equipped, while those receiving no support feel least equipped.

    The strongest practical insight is that managers adapting communication to their team context has a large impact. Employees whose managers do this well are far more likely to find communication relevant, rate communication as excellent and recommend their employer as a great place to work.

    5. What are the report’s most important implications for internal communication practice?

    The report’s main implication is that internal communication needs to move further upstream. It should not merely distribute decisions after they have been made; it should help leaders understand employee reality before, during and after change.

    For change communication, the report suggests that IC teams need to push for early, honest, jargon-free communication; clear rationale; regular updates; routes for questions; and visible listening. The evidence shows that employees are more positive when organisations explain the reasons for change, listen to views and clarify what people need to do differently.

    For leadership communication, the implication is that trust cannot be rebuilt through messaging alone. Leaders need visibility, openness, empathy and evidence that they understand employee challenges. The report connects falling trust especially to CEOs and senior leadership teams, making leadership communication a strategic risk area rather than a stylistic concern.

    For AI communication, the report implies that organisations are under-communicating the purpose and practical expectations of AI adoption. Only 35% believe their organisation is using AI to solve the right problems, and only 32% say their employer has clearly communicated how they are expected to use AI as part of their job.

    For channels and content, the report’s implication is that relevance is now existential. Employees have little time, and 56% say employer communications feel relevant. The report points towards personalisation, segmentation and opt-in/opt-out models, while also warning that these require good audience data and a serious channel strategy.

    Finally, the report argues that representation and good-news communication matter more than many organisations may assume. Only 42% see stories about people like them in internal communications, yet those who do are much more likely to be advocates and to trust the organisation. Similarly, good news is not merely “nice to know”: effective communication of good news has a stronger impact on advocacy and overall communication ratings than effective communication of bad news.

  • 2026 Trends in Communications Budgets by Gartner

    2026 Trends in Communications Budgets by Gartner

    About the paper

    The report analyses 2026 communications budget trends, with a focus on how CCOs are reallocating spend towards PR, AI, technology, analytics and measurement.

    It is primarily original survey research based on Gartner’s 2026 CCO Spend Survey, conducted online from late October to mid-December 2025 among 200 senior communications decision-makers in North America and Europe, all from organisations with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

    The report also draws on secondary Gartner survey evidence from CFOs, CEOs and CMOs, so it is best understood as a mixed-evidence analyst report rather than a purely standalone survey study.

    Length: 23 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.gartner.com/en/communications/research/cco-budget-2026-ec

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report’s central argument is that communications functions are being forced to transform under constrained budget conditions. Gartner argues that CCOs can no longer rely on incremental budget planning or traditional allocations. Instead, they must actively redirect resources towards AI, communications technology, analytics, measurement, PR, brand and crisis communications.

    The underlying logic is that communications is now expected to support broader business transformation, especially AI-driven transformation, while also managing heightened reputation risk, misinformation, shifting stakeholder expectations and declining trust. The report frames this as a strategic inflection point: communications functions that fail to modernise their capabilities risk further budget cuts, while those that reallocate spending towards measurable, technology-enabled and reputation-focused work will be better positioned to demonstrate business value.

    A key point is that this is not presented as a story of abundant new funding. Gartner emphasises that many CCOs face cuts or constraints: 46% say their current-year communications budget forecast was reduced due to company-wide cost-cutting, and 44% say their function lacks the budget needed to execute its strategy successfully. At the same time, 82% say their communications strategy needs to evolve rapidly to meet changing audience expectations. This creates the report’s core tension: ambition is rising, but capacity is not keeping pace.

    2. How are communications budgets changing, and where are CCOs reallocating spend?

    The report finds that overall budget growth is limited and uneven. Smaller organisations with revenue below $5 billion expect modest increases, while larger organisations face stagnant or declining budgets. Most organisations spend around 0.5% of revenue on communications, with smaller companies spending a higher percentage and very large companies spending a lower percentage, presumably because larger organisations benefit from economies of scale.

    Within constrained budgets, the mix of spending is changing. Communications budgets remain heavily weighted towards traditional areas: labour accounts for 40.3%, agencies and services for 23%, operational costs for 17.3%, and communications technology tools and internal platforms for 16.8%. However, looking ahead, technology is the area most likely to receive increased investment: 35% of communications leaders expect to increase spend on communications technology and internal platforms.

    This implies that CCOs are trying to fund transformation partly by reducing or limiting other areas. Gartner explicitly points to potential trade-offs in events, creative services, translation, operational costs and some agency spending. The report does not say these activities are unimportant, but argues that they must be streamlined, delegated, automated or tightly linked to strategic priorities if communications is to fund AI, data and analytics capabilities.

    3. Why are PR, brand and crisis communications receiving increased budget attention?

    Gartner argues that external reputation management is becoming more important because the risk environment is more volatile. PR and corporate brand command the largest shares of communications budgets, with public relations at 14.3% and corporate brand at 8.8%. Crisis communications has also grown, rising by 2.1 percentage points year on year to 4.8% of the current budget.

    The report links this shift to several forces: AI disruption, misinformation and disinformation, geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory complexity, stakeholder scrutiny and the growing speed with which reputation issues can escalate. It also argues that public large language models are changing how audiences discover and trust information, which means organisations must rethink earned media, owned content and answer engine visibility.

    This is one of the report’s more forward-looking arguments. Gartner suggests that PR is not simply about media coverage; it is becoming part of how organisations maintain discoverability, credibility and influence in AI-mediated information environments. That is why the report recommends prioritising PR and earned media investments that support “answer engine visibility”, reallocating some spending from paid media to owned and earned media, investing in authoritative owned content, and updating the corporate narrative across traditional, social and owned channels.

    4. What does the report say about AI, GenAI, technology and analytics in communications?

    The report presents AI, technology and analytics as the main transformation priorities for communications functions. GenAI investment is rising from 5.7% of total communications budget in the current fiscal year to a forecast 8.8% next year, a 54% year-on-year increase. However, Gartner also notes that current GenAI spend is below the level predicted in the previous year’s research, which suggests adoption is moving more slowly than expected.

    The barriers are not only financial. The report says 86% of communications leaders recognise the need to update team talent strategies and skill sets to capitalise on GenAI opportunities. It also says 57% believe the function must address substantial audience scepticism about GenAI integration in communications work, and 43% report that GenAI investments have not yet delivered the expected value.

    Analytics is another major theme. Thirty-four percent of leaders plan to increase spend on data and analytics, and 35% already have a dedicated communications data scientist or analyst, while another 25% plan to add one within 12 to 18 months. Yet the actual budget allocation for measurement, monitoring and analytics is still only 4.1%, up from 2.9% the year before. Gartner contrasts this with marketing’s 8% allocation and argues that communications still underinvests in the capabilities needed to link its work to organisational outcomes.

    The report’s perspective is therefore cautiously pro-investment. Gartner does not simply say “spend more on AI”. It argues that AI and technology investments must be part of a coherent strategy tied to business and communications outcomes, with proper talent development, measurement and success metrics. Otherwise, CCOs risk cutting human capability too aggressively while buying tools that fail to deliver value.

    5. What are the main implications for CCOs and communications leaders?

    The main implication is that CCOs need to become much more deliberate budget strategists. Gartner’s advice is to stop planning budgets through small adjustments to last year’s numbers and instead redraw allocations around current business priorities, reputation risks and transformation needs. The report repeatedly frames budget planning as a strategic leadership discipline, not an administrative exercise.

    A second implication is that CCOs must be able to defend investment in business terms. The report recommends linking communications outcomes to enterprise priorities such as reputation, engagement, trust and business transformation. It also urges communications leaders to benchmark spending, establish clearer budget targets for analytics and measurement, and build stronger evidence of impact.

    A third implication is that communications leaders must make harder trade-offs. Gartner explicitly recommends cutting low-value work that does not support business objectives, offloading or streamlining activities such as event management, graphics, creative services and translation where appropriate, and reassessing agency spend so it is focused on high-ROI activities or skills not available in-house.

    Finally, the report implies that internal communications should not be neglected. Although external-facing activities receive much of the budget attention, employee communications is the third-largest budget allocation, and Gartner warns that AI transformation creates employee anxiety that could threaten enterprise success. The report says 69% of communications leaders see employee anxiety from changes such as AI transformation as a significant risk over the next two years. That means CCOs must continue investing in employee communications, change communications, manager and leader communications, intranet platforms, employee experience platforms and measurement of internal communications effectiveness.

    Overall, the conclusion is clear: communications leaders are being asked to do more than protect reputation or produce content. Gartner sees the function’s future value in helping organisations navigate AI-enabled transformation, sustain trust, manage reputation risk, and prove impact through data.

  • The Changing Shape and New Economics of News Podcasting by Reuters

    The Changing Shape and New Economics of News Podcasting by Reuters

    About the paper

    The Reuters Institute report examines how news podcasting is shifting from audio-only formats towards video, personality-led “shows”, and hybrid business models.

    It is a mixed-methods report based on qualitative audience research with 50 regular news/current affairs podcast users in the US, UK, and Norway, mini-groups with a subset of those users, semi-structured interviews with 13 publishers plus industry experts and platforms, and selected Digital News Report/IAB quantitative data.

    Length: 39 pages

    More information / download:
    https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/changing-shape-and-new-economics-news-podcasting-listening-watching-podcasts-shows

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central change reshaping news podcasting?

    The report argues that news podcasting is no longer simply an audio medium distributed through open RSS feeds. It is becoming a more fluid, multi-format category that blends audio, video, social clips, newsletters, live events, subscription products, and sometimes television-style shows.

    The key shift is from “podcasts” as discrete audio products to “shows” as broader audience franchises. Video is the most visible driver of this change. Platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and Apple are increasingly prioritising or enabling video podcasting, encouraging publishers to rethink production, distribution, discovery, and monetisation.

    The report does not claim that audio is disappearing. Instead, it argues that podcasting is becoming dual-format. Audiences often use audio and video in different contexts: audio while commuting, exercising, cooking, or multitasking; video at home, on YouTube, or on connected televisions. This means publishers are not simply replacing audio with video, but trying to work out which formats, shows, and audiences justify investment in video.

    A second major change is the rise of personality-led conversational formats. These are cheaper to produce than heavily edited narrative documentaries, easier to turn into video, and better suited to social clips and host-driven audience relationships. This is pushing parts of the market away from highly produced narrative series and towards recurring, reactive, talent-led shows.

    2. How are audiences using news podcasts, and what do they value about them?

    The report finds that news podcast users are generally a highly engaged subset of the news audience. They are not usually using podcasts as their only source of news. Rather, podcasts supplement other formats by offering depth, explanation, perspective, and a more conversational relationship with journalists or hosts.

    Podcast use is described as complementary to other news habits. Social media may provide fast discovery, websites and apps provide checking and updates, radio may support routine listening, while podcasts are used for deeper understanding. This makes podcasts particularly valuable for “active knowledge-building” rather than simple headline consumption.

    The appeal of video varies by country, context, and content type. US respondents were more open to video podcasting, partly because YouTube plays a larger role in their podcast discovery and consumption. Norwegian respondents were more resistant, with stronger attachment to audio and local public-service audio platforms. UK users sat somewhere between these positions.

    Audiences gave three main reasons for choosing video:

    • personal format preference
    • consumption context
    • and content type.

    Some younger users feel more connected to hosts when they can see facial expressions, body language, and surroundings. Others only want video when the subject benefits from visuals, such as breaking news footage, complex explanations, comedy, lifestyle, or entertainment. For factual news, many still prefer audio because it is flexible, intimate, and easy to use while doing other things.

    3. How are publishers responding to the shift towards video?

    Publishers are taking video seriously, but most are cautious about a full “pivot to video”. The report identifies three main strategic reasons for investing in video: acquisition, retention, and revenue.

    For acquisition, video helps publishers reach audiences through YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Spotify, and connected TVs. Video clips are easier to share and can act as discovery tools for younger audiences who may not actively seek out publisher websites or podcast apps.

    For retention, podcasts deepen audience relationships. The report repeatedly emphasises the human dimension of podcasting: hosts build trust, habit, familiarity, and parasocial connection. For subscription publishers, these relationships can reduce churn and strengthen the broader value of the subscription bundle.

    For revenue, video opens access to larger advertising budgets than audio alone. However, the report is careful to note that the economics remain uncertain. Video production costs more, requires new workflows, and may not pay off in smaller markets where advertising opportunities are limited.

    Publisher strategies differ sharply. The New York Times is selective: shows such as Hard Fork, Popcast, and The Ezra Klein Show have video versions, while The Daily remains audio-first. The Guardian is also hybrid, using video for some conversational and sports formats while protecting narrative audio investigations. Die Zeit treats video mainly as a discovery layer. The Economist is exploring video inside a subscription ecosystem. Nordic publishers such as Bonnier, Schibsted/Podme, and Politiken are more cautious because they already have strong audio habits, subscription models, and smaller advertising markets.

    The report’s table on publisher strategies is especially useful because it shows that video is not one strategy but several: full video versions, short promotional clips, subscriber-only video, TV/documentary extensions, studio models, and selective experiments.

    4. What is changing in the economics of news podcasting?

    The economics are becoming more complex and hybrid. Traditional podcasting has mostly been free and advertising-supported, but publishers are now experimenting with subscriptions, bundles, premium layers, bonus episodes, live events, memberships, merchandise, IP licensing, and brand partnerships.

    The report shows that direct payment remains difficult. Audience research in the US, UK, and Norway found that many listeners value news podcasts but are reluctant to pay because there are so many free alternatives. Some would switch to another show if their favourite podcast went behind a paywall. Others might pay only for genuinely distinctive content, such as exclusive interviews, deep expertise, investigative journalism, archives, or bonus material.

    Several publishers are nevertheless testing paid audio. The Economist put most of its podcasts behind a paywall while keeping The Intelligence free. Die Zeit launched a separate podcast subscription. Politiken launched a stand-alone audio app. The New York Times offers an audio subscription mainly around archives and bonus material, while still using free recent episodes to support the broader bundle. Schibsted/Podme uses a premium podcast subscription model in the Nordics, with some free content and some exclusive paid layers.

    Advertising remains central, but video changes the opportunity. The report notes that US podcast advertising revenue reached $2.4 billion in 2024, while digital video advertising was vastly larger. That creates an incentive for podcast publishers to access video budgets. But the advertising market is still organised around separate audio and video buying teams, and measurement, ad-serving, pricing, and platform standards remain unresolved.

    The report’s broader conclusion is that podcasts are rarely just stand-alone revenue products for traditional publishers. They are often part of a wider funnel: attracting new users, increasing engagement, reducing churn, and adding value to subscriptions.

    5. What are the wider implications for journalism and media organisations?

    The report suggests that the future of news podcasting will be shaped by a tension between journalism-led publishing and creator-led show business.

    For traditional newsrooms, the challenge is organisational as much as technological. Audio, video, social, text, product, and commercial teams can no longer operate as separate silos if one recorded conversation can become a podcast episode, a video episode, social clips, a newsletter, a transcript, a written article, and a subscriber feature. This requires new skills, new production workflows, and potentially new “studio” or “show” structures inside media companies.

    The rise of talent also raises editorial questions. Podcast-first companies such as Goalhanger and Chora Media put hosts, fandoms, communities, and show brands at the centre. Their model looks less like traditional news publishing and more like a blend of creator economy, television, live events, and music-industry-style fandom. Traditional publishers may want some of that audience loyalty, but adopting the model raises questions about editorial control, host power, commercial boundaries, and whether newsrooms are set up to develop and retain talent in the same way.

    The report’s final implication is that “podcasting” itself is becoming harder to define. Some purists still tie the term to RSS distribution or audio. But in practice, audiences increasingly encounter podcasts on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, social feeds, connected TVs, apps, and paywalled publisher products. The boundaries between podcast, video show, radio programme, social franchise, and subscription product are blurring.

    The report concludes that the future is unlikely to be audio versus video. It is more likely to be a hybrid ecosystem where successful publishers combine reach and depth, free and paid layers, journalism and personality, open distribution and owned platforms. The strategic question is how much news organisations are willing to invest in creator-led, show-based formats without losing the editorial qualities that made their audio journalism valuable in the first place.

  • What is A.I. reading – May 2026 Edition by Muck Rack

    What is A.I. reading – May 2026 Edition by Muck Rack

    About the paper

    What is AI Reading? by Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse examines which sources generative AI systems cite when answering realistic consumer prompts.

    The report is a modelling/data-pack style citation analysis based on a large prompt set submitted to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with more than 25 million cited links analysed across multiple industries; the geographic scope is not clearly specified in the report.

    Length: 43 pages

    More information / download:
    https://generativepulse.ai/report/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central finding of the report about the sources AI systems cite?

    The report’s central argument is that generative AI citations are overwhelmingly shaped by non-paid, earned, third-party sources rather than paid media or advertising. About 99% of links cited by AI come from non-paid media, while paid and advertorial content accounts for only 0.3% of all citations. Press releases account for 1.1%.

    Within that non-paid universe, journalism remains a major foundation of AI visibility. The report finds that about 27% of all links cited by AI are journalistic. This is framed as a consistent pattern across Muck Rack’s previous studies, where journalism has generally accounted for 20–30% of AI citations.

    However, journalism is not the only important source category. The report’s pie charts on pages 5–7 show a broader mix: corporate blogs and content at 24%, aggregators and encyclopedic sources at 17.4%, owned media at 13.7%, government/NGO sources at 8.6%, academic/research sources at 4%, social/UGC at 2.9%, tech platforms at 0.9%, press releases at 1.1%, and paid/advertorial at 0.3%.

    The implication is clear: visibility in AI-generated answers is not mainly bought through advertising. It is earned through the kinds of sources AI systems treat as credible, relevant or useful: journalism, reference sources, third-party content, government data, academic material, user-generated platforms and some owned content.

    2. How do ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini differ in their citation behaviour?

    The report argues that each AI provider has a distinct citation ecosystem. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini do not simply cite the same sources at different volumes; they appear to rely on meaningfully different source environments.

    ChatGPT is described as a “near-universal citer”. It includes citations in 96% of responses, but averages only about five sources per response. Claude is more selective: only 55% of its responses include citations, but when it does cite, it averages 13 sources per response. Gemini sits between the two, citing in 82% of responses and averaging eight sources per response.

    The differences become even sharper when looking at the actual domains. ChatGPT’s top cited domain is Wikipedia, followed by Axios, YouTube, Kiplinger and Forbes. Claude’s top domain is PubMed Central, followed by Wikipedia, Quora, ScienceDirect and NerdWallet. Gemini’s top cited domain is Reddit, followed by YouTube, Quora, Wikipedia and NIH.

    The report’s interpretation is that these are “three effectively separate information environments”. For PR and communications teams, this matters because AI visibility cannot be reduced to a single generic “AI search” strategy. A brand, journalist, outlet or source may matter a great deal in one model and be nearly invisible in another.

    3. What determines whether journalism, press releases or other content gets cited?

    The report finds that the type of question asked strongly shapes the type of source cited. Industry trend queries are especially likely to draw on journalism: 46% of industry trend responses cite journalistic sources, more than twice the rate for how-to and comparative queries.

    By contrast, how-to queries are less journalism-driven. The report says AI tends to rely more on reference content and brand-owned material when users ask how to do something. Comparative evaluation and best-of queries also behave differently, often pulling in review content, platforms, maps, rankings or consumer advice sources depending on the category.

    Press releases are most likely to appear in industry trend responses, but even there they remain a relatively small part of the citation mix. Around 1.16% of industry trend citations are press releases, compared with 0.33% for best-of queries, 0.27% for risk/due diligence, 0.25% for problem/discovery, 0.13% for comparative evaluation and 0.09% for how-to.

    Recency also matters, especially for journalism. Among journalism citations with known publish dates, 57% were published within the previous 12 months. The report notes a sharp peak in the first month after publication, followed by a decline through month six and then a long tail. Older articles still matter, but the bias toward recent coverage is clear.

    4. Which sources, platforms and outlets stand out most in the report?

    Several sources stand out because they behave differently from the broader pattern.

    Wikipedia is especially important for ChatGPT and Claude. It appears among the top three cited domains in 12 of 17 industries for ChatGPT and 8 of 17 industries for Claude. For Gemini, it appears in the top three in only 3 of 17 industries, because Gemini is more strongly shaped by Reddit, brand domains and Q&A platforms such as Quora.

    Reddit is particularly important for Gemini. The report says Reddit is Gemini’s single most-cited domain, accounting for about 2.4% of all Gemini citations. By contrast, ChatGPT cited Reddit only 16 times and Claude cited it zero times in the study.

    YouTube also differs by provider. It accounts for about 2.1% of Gemini citations and about 2.0% of ChatGPT citations, while Claude returned zero YouTube citations across the study. Claude does cite other video platforms such as TikTok and Vimeo, but not at the same level.

    Among journalism outlets, the standout is Axios. The report says journalism citations are spread across more than 20,000 distinct outlets, with no single publication generally dominating. Axios is the exception: it appears in ChatGPT’s top three cited domains across 13 of 17 industries. The Associated Press appears in the top three for one industry, while The New York Times and Reuters do not appear in the top three most cited sources for any industry in the report.

    5. What are the main implications for PR and communications teams?

    The report’s main implication is that AI visibility is increasingly connected to earned authority across multiple information environments. Traditional media relations still matters, but not in a simple “get mentioned in top-tier media” way.

    First, journalism remains important because it accounts for about 27% of all AI citations and is especially influential for industry trend queries. For brands that want to shape how AI explains what is happening in a sector, credible media coverage appears to be particularly valuable.

    Second, the report suggests that citation strategy must be model-specific. A communications team optimising for ChatGPT would pay close attention to Wikipedia, Axios, YouTube and sector-specific sources. A team concerned with Gemini would need to understand Reddit, YouTube, Quora and other user-generated or community-driven environments. For Claude, academic, research, personal finance and reference-style sources appear more prominent.

    Third, owned media still matters, but it is not enough on its own. Owned media accounts for 13.7% of citations, while corporate blogs and content account for 24%. The distinction in the report is important: third-party corporate/blog content is categorised as earned when it is not owned by the company or product targeted in the query, while first-party corporate/blog content is owned media. This suggests that corporate content can influence AI, but third-party validation remains highly significant.

    Fourth, communications teams need to think beyond classic media lists. Depending on the sector and query type, AI may cite Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Reddit, Quora, YouTube, PubMed Central, NIH, government websites, academic databases, review sites, ranking platforms or trade publications. The relevant source ecosystem changes by industry.

    Finally, the report implies that AI visibility is dynamic. The methodology section explicitly notes that generative AI systems are rapidly evolving and opaque, and that observed behaviours may shift as models are updated or retrained. So the findings should be treated as a snapshot of AI citation behaviour in May 2026, not as a permanent rulebook.

  • 2026 Work Trend Index by Microsoft

    2026 Work Trend Index by Microsoft

    About the paper

    Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report examines how A.I. agents are changing work, arguing that as agents take on more execution, human agency shifts towards intent-setting, judgement, orchestration and accountability.

    It is a mixed-methods report based on Microsoft 365 telemetry, a 20,000-person online survey of A.I.-using knowledge workers across 10 markets, a separate 1,800-person global survey on managers and agentic A.I., and expert perspectives; the main survey covers Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

    Length: 29 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/agents-human-agency-and-the-opportunity-for-every-organization

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report’s central argument is that AI and agents are not merely productivity tools; they are forcing a redesign of the operating model of work. Microsoft frames this as a shift in which agents take on more execution, while humans gain more “agency”: more capacity to define intent, direct work, exercise judgement and own outcomes.

    The report is explicit that the key question is no longer simply whether organisations are adopting AI. The larger question is whether they are structurally capable of capturing its value. Its thesis is that many workers are already using AI in advanced and resourceful ways, but their organisations have not yet redesigned the surrounding systems — leadership alignment, incentives, governance, performance evaluation, culture and management practices — to match what AI now makes possible.

    A useful way to express the report’s logic is this: AI raises individual capability, but organisational design determines whether that capability becomes institutional advantage. The report repeatedly contrasts “AI adoption” with “AI absorption”. Adoption means people or teams use tools. Absorption means the organisation changes how work is designed, evaluated, governed, learned from and scaled.

    This is why the report’s three-part structure matters. At the employee level, AI expands what individuals can do. At the leader level, the task becomes rearchitecting work rather than simply deploying tools. At the organisational level, the most advanced firms become “Learning Systems” that capture lessons from AI-enabled work and turn them into repeatable practices.

    2. How does AI change the role and value of individual employees?

    The report argues that AI lifts the ceiling on individual potential by helping people do more complex, higher-value work. In Microsoft’s privacy-preserving analysis of more than 100,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot chats, 49% of classified conversations supported cognitive work such as analysing information, solving problems, evaluating and thinking creatively. The rest were split between working with people, finding information and producing work.

    Survey findings reinforce this. According to the report, 66% of AI users say AI has allowed them to spend more time on high-value work, and 58% say they are producing work they could not have produced a year earlier. Among “Frontier Professionals” — the most advanced AI users in the research — that latter figure rises to 80%.

    However, the report does not present this as simple automation. Its stronger claim is that human value moves. As AI takes on more execution, the employee’s differentiating contribution becomes judgement, quality control, critical thinking, intent-setting and the design of the human-AI workflow. The report says AI users themselves recognise this: 50% name quality control of AI output as an increasingly important human skill, while 46% name critical thinking. A striking 86% say they treat AI output as a starting point, not a final answer, and that they remain responsible for the thinking.

    The report’s page 9 framework is particularly useful. It describes four modes of working with AI: asking, delegation, collaboration and exploration. The key point is not that one mode is superior. The most advanced users know which mode a task requires. Quick factual queries may be “asking”; recurring reports or structured summaries may be “delegation”; proposals and judgement-heavy communication may require “collaboration”; and unfamiliar workflows may call for “exploration”. This is an important conceptual distinction because it moves the discussion beyond “prompting” towards work design.

    3. What is the “Transformation Paradox” identified by the report?

    The “Transformation Paradox” is the report’s term for the gap between workers’ AI readiness and organisations’ ability to support it. Microsoft maps respondents across two dimensions: individual AI capability and organisational readiness. The result is a five-zone model.

    Only 19% of AI users fall into the “Frontier” zone, where both individual capability and organisational readiness are high. Another 10% are in “blocked agency”: they have strong individual AI capability, but their organisations are not ready to support or absorb it. A further 5% represent “unclaimed capacity”, where the organisation is more ready than the individual. Sixteen per cent are “stalled”, with both low individual capability and low organisational readiness. The largest group, 50%, sits in the “emergent” zone, where both individual practice and organisational conditions are still forming.

    The paradox is that the pressure to use AI is rising, but the organisational systems still reward old ways of working. The report says 65% of AI users fear falling behind if they do not adapt quickly with AI, yet 45% say it feels safer to focus on current goals than to redesign work with AI. Only 13% say they are rewarded for reinventing work with AI even when results are not immediately achieved.

    This is one of the report’s most important findings because it reframes AI transformation as a management and systems problem. The obstacle is not simply lack of tools or lack of individual skill. It is the mismatch between what employees are capable of doing and what their organisations measure, encourage, permit and reward.

    4. What role does leadership play in turning AI use into organisational value?

    The report places substantial responsibility on leaders and managers. It argues that the job of every leader is now to “rearchitect work” — not just introduce AI tools, but redesign workflows, roles, incentives, metrics, governance and expectations around what humans and agents should each do.

    Leadership alignment appears to be weak. Only 26% of AI users say their leadership is clearly and consistently aligned on AI. The report also finds a perception gap between leaders and employees: leaders are more likely than employees to say AI-driven reinvention feels safe and rewarded. That suggests that senior leaders may believe the organisation is more supportive of AI transformation than employees experience in practice.

    Managers are presented as especially important because they translate strategy into everyday behaviour. A separate Microsoft-led study of 1,800 employees globally found that when managers actively model AI use, employees report a 17-point lift in AI value, a 22-point lift in critical thinking about AI use and a 30-point lift in trust in agentic AI. When managers create psychological safety around experimentation, employees report higher AI readiness and value, and are more likely to be high-frequency users of agentic AI.

    The report also shows that Frontier Professionals tend to work in stronger managerial environments. Compared with non-Frontier Professionals, they are more likely to say their manager openly uses AI, sets quality standards for AI-assisted work, creates space for experimentation and encourages more ambitious work redesign. This supports the report’s broader argument: individual AI skill matters, but it compounds only when leaders create the right organisational conditions.

    5. What does the report mean by saying every firm must become a “Learning System”?

    The report uses “Learning System” to describe an organisation that captures what AI-enabled work is teaching it and turns those insights into shared, repeatable and improving practices. This is the report’s organisational endgame: the firms that win are not simply those with the most AI tools, but those that learn fastest from their own work.

    The evidence behind this claim comes from Microsoft’s AI Impact Analysis. The report finds that organisational factors — culture, manager support and talent practices — account for more than twice the reported AI impact of individual mindset and behaviour: 67% versus 32%. The top single factor is organisational AI culture, followed by talent practices and manager support. The methodology is careful to state that these are statistical associations, not causal effects, because the variables are self-reported at the same moment.

    The report argues that as agents become more active, they generate valuable signals: what worked, what failed, where quality drifted, which hand-offs broke down and where workflows need redesign. In weaker organisations, these signals stay local. In stronger ones, they are captured, shared and encoded into routines. This is what Microsoft calls “Owned Intelligence”: institutional know-how that compounds over time, is specific to the firm and is difficult for competitors to copy.

    The report identifies three questions every advanced organisation must answer:

    1. who reviews agent performance
    2. who has authority to update agent workflows
    3. and how local wins are captured and scaled.

    It also argues that this requires coordination across four roles: employees who redesign their work around intent and review; leaders who redesign processes around outcomes and agent autonomy; IT teams that manage agents as entities with identities, permissions and lifecycle controls; and security teams that build monitoring, auditability and policy enforcement into the system.

    The implication is clear: AI transformation is not finished when employees start using AI. It becomes strategically meaningful only when the organisation builds the infrastructure to learn from AI-enabled work, codify that learning and continuously improve how humans and agents work together.

  • The Wharton Blueprint for A.I. Agent Adoption by Wharton

    The Wharton Blueprint for A.I. Agent Adoption by Wharton

    About the paper

    The report is a mixed-methods synthesis rather than a single original study: it combines recent academic research on human-AI interaction, practitioner perspectives from executives at firms deploying AI agents, and recommendations from Wharton faculty.

    It does not present one unified sample or fieldwork design; instead, it draws on multiple experiments, surveys, working papers, and case-informed expert contributions, with sample sizes and geographies varying by cited study and not clearly specified at the report level.

    Length: 47 pages

    More information / download:
    https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/special-report/wharton-blueprint-ai-agent-adoption/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report’s core argument is that AI agent adoption is no longer mainly constrained by technology, but by psychology. The authors argue that many people are still unwilling to let AI agents perform meaningful tasks on their behalf, not because the systems cannot do anything useful, but because users hesitate to believe that the agent is competent, to trust it, and to hand over control. The report therefore frames adoption as a behavioural and design challenge rather than a purely technical one.

    It organises this adoption problem into three “psychological frictions”:

    • perceived competence
    • trust
    • and delegation of control.

    These are presented as the three core barriers that developers and organisations must overcome if they want broader acceptance of AI agents. In other words, the report is not asking only whether agents work; it is asking what makes people willing to let them work on their behalf in real settings.

    The report is also quite explicit that this is a practical blueprint. It is designed for people building or deploying AI agents and aims to translate behavioural science into design recommendations. That makes its purpose strongly applied: it is less about theorising AI adoption in the abstract and more about showing how organisations can reduce resistance and increase real-world uptake.

    2. How does the report explain the first friction, perceived competence, and what makes users believe an AI agent can do the job?

    The first friction is perceived competence, which the report defines as the user’s subjective belief in the agent’s ability to perform desired actions. The key point here is that perceived competence is not the same as technical capability. An agent may be highly capable in a technical sense, but if users do not experience it as capable, they will still hesitate to adopt it.

    The report argues that users prefer agents that appear competent rather than warm. Across cited experiments, people were less willing to use AI that sounded cheerful or friendly than AI that signalled expertise, consistency, and reasoning. Competence cues included explaining criteria, showing reasoning, and making recommendations in a way that felt rigorous rather than overly personable. In practice, the report suggests that in serious domains such as health, finance, law, and professional work, a warm personality can actually undermine adoption if it makes the system seem less capable.

    Another major idea is that people judge whether the agent adds value. In the report’s discussion of AI-enabled travel agents, four factors shaped that perception:

    • convenience
    • personalisation
    • ubiquity
    • and superior functionality.

    At the same time, benefits alone are not enough. Privacy concerns, technology anxiety, and the desire for human interaction can still depress adoption even when users recognise obvious advantages. That means perceived competence depends both on positive cues about usefulness and on reducing perceived reasons not to engage.

    The report also places strong weight on explanations. In high-stakes contexts, users felt AI was more reliable and safer when it explained its process in detail, including the steps taken, data considered, or method used. Explanations therefore function not only as transparency, but as a signal of seriousness and quality. Finally, the report argues that agents can borrow competence from humans: when AI is presented as supporting a credible human expert rather than acting as an equal or rival, resistance falls and competence rises. This is one of the clearest examples of the report’s broader logic that adoption depends heavily on perception and framing.

    3. What does the report say about trust, and which factors most strongly increase or weaken trust in AI agents?

    The second friction is trust, defined as the user’s willingness to rely on the AI agent despite uncertainty. The report presents trust as central because AI agents are not just offering information; they are potentially taking action. That raises the stakes, since users must feel confident not only in what the system says but in what it might do.

    One of the strongest findings is that trust improves when users understand the agent’s limitations. The report cites experiments showing that people trusted AI more, and worked more effectively with it, when they were explicitly told where it was likely to fail. Rather than undermining confidence, acknowledging weaknesses helped users feel that they understood the system’s boundaries and therefore knew when to rely on it and when to be cautious. This is an important insight because it runs against the instinct to present AI as broadly capable and seamless.

    The report also argues that proof of successful outcomes often matters more than technical explanations. Users were more persuaded by evidence that the agent had successfully performed similar tasks before than by detailed accounts of how the system worked internally. The implication is that many users do not primarily want interpretability in a technical sense; they want reassurance that the system delivers results. Similarly, trust rises when agents reduce uncertainty before, during, and after use by making goals explicit, showing steps as they happen, and demonstrating how feedback improves future actions.

    Other trust-building mechanisms in the report include making the agent seem as though it understands the user’s goals, labelling it as “learning” or “improving,” using precise rather than rounded numbers, and tailoring outputs to specific user criteria rather than generic averages. The report repeatedly warns against the opposite pattern: trust falls when AI feels generic, when it seems to optimise for “most users,” or when it makes the process so effortless that users feel detached from the outcome. That last point is especially interesting, because the report suggests that convenience alone does not guarantee trust; too much automation can reduce psychological ownership and make people less willing to accept the result.

    4. How does the report understand delegation of control, and what level of autonomy does it recommend?

    The third friction is delegation of control, which the report defines as the user’s willingness to grant the AI the autonomy required to act on their behalf. This is where adoption becomes most sensitive, because an AI agent can move from being a helpful assistant to something that feels intrusive or disempowering.

    The report’s clearest conclusion is that people prefer a moderate level of autonomy. Too little autonomy makes the agent feel burdensome and not worth using, because the human has to micromanage it. Too much autonomy makes people feel that their freedom and control are being taken away. The recommended design pattern is therefore “human in the loop”: the agent should do meaningful preparatory or analytical work, but final decisions or key approvals should remain visible and accessible to the user.

    Control is not just about actual permissions; it is also about felt control. The report highlights research showing that concerns about control account for a substantial share of people’s decision whether to adopt AI. It therefore recommends making edit, pause, stop, reverse, and review options highly visible. Users need to know not only that controls exist, but where they sit and how easily they can be used. This is consistent with the report’s wider emphasis on transparency, checkpoints, and reversibility.

    The report adds two further nuances. First, adoption increases when users feel the agent is “theirs,” for example through naming, setup choices, or preferences, because ownership increases willingness to invest attention and effort. Second, the report notes that people rely more on AI under pressure, because repeated evaluation is cognitively costly. Yet it does not recommend manufacturing urgency; instead, it suggests using real workflow pressures to make AI the easier default. The overall message is that delegation works best when autonomy is earned gradually, bounded clearly, and embedded in a structure where the human still feels like the principal actor.

    5. What are the report’s wider implications for organisations, and what limitations does it acknowledge?

    For organisations, the report implies that successful AI agent deployment depends as much on behavioural design, workflow design, and communication as on model performance. The most important practical lesson is that adoption is unlikely to follow automatically from capability. Even if agents can perform useful tasks, users may resist them unless systems are positioned as competent, transparent, bounded, and supportive rather than all-powerful or frictionless. In organisational terms, this means deployment strategies must address psychology deliberately.

    The report’s recommendations point towards a fairly specific organisational philosophy. Agents should be framed as assistants, not authorities; they should explain their reasoning in business terms; they should show users what they are doing before, during, and after action; and they should operate within structures resembling job descriptions, permissions, escalation paths, and measurable outcomes. This effectively treats AI agents less like magical automation and more like junior or specialist collaborators who require oversight, governance, and staged trust-building.

    At the same time, the report is careful to acknowledge limitations. It explicitly states that this is based on the current best scientific evidence in a rapidly evolving field, and that many insights are extrapolated from adjacent AI and organisational behaviour research because AI agents themselves are still relatively novel. The report also notes limitations study by study: many cited findings come from experiments, hypothetical scenarios, specific sectors such as travel, healthcare, e-commerce, or financial advice, or controlled lab environments rather than long-term real-world deployments. That means the blueprint is evidence-informed, but not final or universally settled.

    So the deeper implication is twofold. First, organisations should not wait for perfect certainty before designing for adoption, because the report offers a strong behavioural framework already. Second, they should treat these recommendations as a living playbook, to be tested, adapted, and updated as both the science and the technology mature. That combination of confidence and caution is one of the report’s defining features.

  • 2025 PR Performance Report by Prezly

    2025 PR Performance Report by Prezly

    About the paper

    The report argues that effective PR performance depends on combining inbound discovery with outbound outreach, using platform data from Prezly newsrooms and campaign sends in 2025 plus a cited secondary analysis on AI citations.

    It is best described as a mixed-methods data report based mainly on large-scale proprietary behavioural data, but the exact number of campaigns, organisations, users, or countries covered is not clearly specified in the report.

    Its evidence appears to be drawn from Prezly platform activity, with some broader industry context added from external analysis; the geographic scope is not clearly specified in the report.

    Length: 10 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.prezly.com/insights

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about how PR performance should be understood?

    The core argument is that PR performance cannot be judged mainly through campaign metrics such as opens and clicks. Prezly argues that PR teams need to see inbound and outbound activity as connected parts of one system: a newsroom that attracts discovery through search and AI, and targeted outreach that drives engagement with the right recipients. The report repeatedly frames this as a shift away from narrow campaign reporting towards a broader understanding of how audiences actually find and use PR content.

    This matters because the report claims that much of PR’s real impact happens outside traditional email performance dashboards. Search visits, AI citations, and delayed direct visits may all reflect communications value, yet they are often omitted from standard reporting. Prezly’s perspective section makes this explicit by saying that teams measuring only opens and clicks are “measuring the smallest part” of the work.

    2. What does the report show about inbound PR and how people discover newsroom content?

    The clearest finding is that search is the dominant driver of newsroom traffic. The report says newsroom traffic grew 62% year on year, with 65% of traffic coming from search, 29% from direct traffic, 5% from social media referrals, and 1% from AI referrals such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. It also notes that direct traffic includes pitch-email clicks because many email clients do not pass referrer data.

    The implication is that newsroom content increasingly serves discovery audiences beyond journalists receiving a pitch. On page 2, the report states that for every tracked click from ChatGPT, roughly 50 more people may have seen the content within an AI response, suggesting that visible referral traffic understates AI exposure. The chart on page 2 reinforces this broader discovery logic by showing Google far ahead of other referral sources.

    The report also argues that owned newsroom content is much more likely than syndicated PR material to appear in AI-generated answers. Citing a BuzzStream analysis via Search Engine Journal, it says 98.6% of relevant AI-cited PR content came from owned newsroom content, compared with 1.2% from wire services and 0.2% from syndicated PR. That is the basis for the report’s “450× more likely” claim. This is important because it supports Prezly’s case that publishing location now affects not only search visibility but also AI discoverability.

    A further practical point is device use. The report says 54.7% of newsroom visits are on mobile, versus 44.8% on desktop and 1.5% on tablet. So even if teams produce good content, the user experience may still fail if newsrooms are designed mainly for desktop behaviour.

    3. What does the report find about outbound outreach and what makes pitches perform better?

    The strongest pattern is that smaller media lists perform much better than large sends. On page 4, the report says pitches sent to lists of 1 contact achieve a 19.3% click-through rate, lists of 2–10 achieve 16.8%, lists of 51–200 achieve 5.8%, and lists of 200+ achieve 3.6%. The chart on that page shows a steady decline in CTR as list size increases. This underpins the report’s repeated argument that relevance beats volume.

    Personalisation helps, but only within a sound targeting strategy. The report states that personalisation lifts CTR by 15%, with the strongest gains in lists of 2–25 recipients. Its interpretation is that personalisation amplifies a good list rather than rescuing a poor one. The chart on page 5 visually supports that point by showing the personalised version outperforming the non-personalised version most clearly in smaller list ranges.

    Pitch length also matters. Prezly argues against the common assumption that shorter is always better, saying the 201–300 word range nearly doubles CTR compared with shorter pitches. The chart on page 6 shows the 201–300 word band as the strongest performer at 6.25% CTR, clearly above other length ranges.

    By contrast, subject line length seems less decisive. The report says open rate “barely moves” with subject line length, while CTR peaks at 20–40 characters and very short subject lines underperform. So the report suggests that teams may spend too much time optimising superficial elements and not enough on list quality, relevance, and body copy.

    4. What assumptions and perspective shape the report?

    The report is clearly written from a platform-company perspective, and that matters to how its argument is framed. Prezly’s viewpoint is that PR teams undervalue the newsroom as a performance asset and over-focus on campaign-level metrics. The document consistently argues for seeing newsrooms, search visibility, AI discovery, and targeted pitching as an integrated workflow. That framing aligns closely with Prezly’s product positioning.

    Its underlying assumptions are that discoverability now matters as much as distribution, that owned content is strategically more important than wire-based distribution, and that behavioural data offers a better view of performance than legacy PR metrics alone. Those assumptions are plausible within the report’s evidence base, but they are still shaped by the lens of a vendor analysing its own ecosystem.

    Methodologically, the report is also selective. It relies heavily on aggregated platform data, but it does not clearly specify sample size, client mix, timeframe boundaries beyond “last year” or “2025”, sector spread, or geography. That does not invalidate the findings, but it does mean the report is more directional than fully transparent academic-style research.

    5. What are the main implications for PR teams and communications leaders?

    The biggest implication is measurement. If teams continue to report mainly on opens and clicks, they may systematically understate communications impact. The report suggests that leaders should expand dashboards to include newsroom traffic, search visibility, AI discoverability, and post-campaign engagement beyond the original send.

    The second implication is strategic. PR teams may need to treat their newsroom as a discoverability engine rather than simply a repository for press releases. Because search is the top traffic source and owned content dominates AI citation patterns, publishing discipline, structure, and content freshness become more important. The report effectively reframes the newsroom as infrastructure for earned, search, and AI exposure.

    Third, the report points towards a more selective outreach model. Smaller, more targeted lists, better personalisation, and stronger pitch construction outperform scale-based blasting. For PR leaders, that implies a capability shift away from volume and towards segmentation, judgement, and relevance.

    Finally, there is a practical user-experience implication: mobile cannot be treated as secondary. With more than half of newsroom visits coming from phones, weak mobile experiences risk undermining otherwise strong content.

    Taken together, the report’s conclusion is that the best PR teams will be those that connect content publishing, discoverability, outreach, and measurement into one coherent operating model rather than treating them as separate tasks.

  • The 2026 AI Index Report by Stanford University

    The 2026 AI Index Report by Stanford University

    About the paper

    The Stanford AI Index Report 2026 is a broad, global data-pack and secondary-analysis report on the state of artificial intelligence across research, technical performance, responsible AI, economy, science, medicine, education, policy and public opinion.

    It is based on multiple datasets and contributors, including sources such as Epoch AI, GitHub, Lightcast, LinkedIn, Quid, Zeki and McKinsey; it is not a single original survey, and sample sizes vary by section.

    The report’s geographic scope is global, though some chapters rely heavily on U.S., China, Europe and selected country-level data; some methodology details are chapter-specific rather than contained in one unified method statement.

    Length: 425 pages

    More information / download:
    https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the AI Index Report 2026?

    The central argument is that AI is scaling faster than the surrounding systems can adapt. The report frames 2025–26 as the period “after arrival”: AI is no longer an emerging technology sitting on the margins, but a mainstream force moving through work, education, science, medicine, infrastructure and policy. Generative AI reached roughly 53% population-level adoption within three years, organisational adoption reached 88%, and AI companies are scaling revenue and investment faster than previous technology waves.

    But the report repeatedly stresses that capability growth is outpacing governance, measurement and institutional readiness. Benchmarks are saturating, leading models are becoming harder to distinguish, frontier labs are disclosing less, and independent testing does not always confirm developer-reported performance. The result is not a simple story of progress or danger, but a more complex pattern: AI capabilities, adoption and investment are accelerating, while evaluation, regulation, education, labour-market adaptation and responsible AI practice are struggling to keep up.

    2. What does the report say about AI capability and model competition?

    The report argues strongly against the idea that AI capability is plateauing. Frontier systems continued to improve in 2025 across reasoning, coding, mathematics, multimodal understanding and agentic task execution. On SWE-bench Verified, performance rose from around 60% to near the human baseline in a single year. Some models now meet or exceed human baselines on PhD-level science questions, multimodal reasoning and competition mathematics.

    At the same time, the report highlights a “jagged frontier”. AI systems can produce astonishing results in some domains while remaining surprisingly weak in others. One striking example is that Gemini Deep Think achieved gold-medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, while the top model could read analogue clocks correctly only about half the time. Similarly, AI agents improved dramatically on OSWorld, from around 12% to roughly 66% task success, but still fail about one in three attempts on structured computer-use tasks. Robots also remain far from general competence in the physical world, succeeding in only 12% of household tasks despite strong performance in controlled simulation environments.

    The competitive landscape is also changing. The U.S.–China model performance gap has effectively closed, with U.S. and Chinese models trading the lead multiple times since early 2025. As of March 2026, the top U.S. model led the top Chinese model by only 2.7%. At the same time, top frontier models from Anthropic, xAI, Google, OpenAI, Alibaba and DeepSeek are tightly clustered, making raw benchmark performance less useful as a differentiator. The report suggests that competition may increasingly shift towards cost, reliability, latency, usability and domain-specific performance.

    3. How are AI development, infrastructure and talent distributed globally?

    The report shows a field that is both concentrated and dispersing. Frontier model development remains heavily concentrated in industry and in a small number of countries. Industry produced more than 90% of notable AI models in 2025, while academia produced only two notable models. The United States still leads in notable model production, with 59 notable models in 2025 compared with China’s 35 and South Korea’s 8.

    However, China leads in several research and innovation indicators: publication volume, citations, patent output and industrial robot installations. The U.S. still retains advantages in top-tier model production, higher-impact patents and private investment, but China’s scale in research and patenting is now central to the global AI landscape. South Korea stands out for innovation density, leading the world in AI patents per capita.

    Infrastructure is even more concentrated. The United States hosts 5,427 data centres, more than ten times any other country, and global AI compute capacity has grown roughly 3.3 times per year since 2022. Yet the hardware supply chain has a critical dependency: TSMC in Taiwan fabricates almost every leading AI chip. This makes AI sovereignty difficult for most countries because the underlying compute, chips, data centres and talent are unevenly distributed.

    Talent patterns are also shifting. The U.S. remains home to more AI talent than any other country, but the number of AI researchers and developers moving to the U.S. has dropped 89% since 2017, including an 80% decline in the last year alone. Switzerland and Singapore lead in AI researchers and developers per capita, while the report notes that gender gaps in AI talent remain deeply entrenched, with no country approaching parity.

    4. What economic, labour-market and environmental consequences does the report identify?

    Economically, the report depicts AI as both a major investment boom and an uneven productivity story. U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025, more than 23 times the $12.4 billion invested privately in China, though the report notes that private investment alone may understate China’s total AI spending because of government guidance funds. The U.S. also led in entrepreneurial activity, with 1,953 newly funded AI companies in 2025.

    The productivity evidence is promising but not universal. The report cites productivity gains of 14% to 26% in customer support and software development, while finding weaker or even negative effects in tasks requiring more judgement. This is important because some of the clearest productivity gains appear in fields where entry-level employment is beginning to decline. In U.S. software development, developers aged 22 to 25 saw employment fall nearly 20% from 2024, while headcount for older developers continued to grow.

    The environmental footprint is becoming much harder to ignore. Grok 4’s estimated training emissions reached 72,816 tons of CO₂ equivalent. AI data centre power capacity rose to 29.6 GW, roughly comparable to New York state at peak demand. The report also estimates that annual GPT-4o inference water use may exceed the drinking water needs of 1.2 million people. The implication is that AI’s economic value and social utility must increasingly be weighed against energy, water, infrastructure and supply-chain constraints.

    5. What does the report imply for governance, education, science, medicine and public trust?

    The report’s broader implication is that AI is moving into high-stakes domains before institutional systems are fully ready. Responsible AI is not keeping pace with capability: leading frontier developers commonly report capability benchmarks, but responsible AI benchmark reporting remains inconsistent. Documented AI incidents rose from 233 in 2024 to 362, and the report notes that improving one responsible AI dimension, such as safety, can sometimes degrade another, such as accuracy.

    In education, formal systems are lagging behind actual use. More than 80% of U.S. high school and college students now use AI for school-related tasks, but only half of middle and high schools have AI policies, and just 6% of teachers say those policies are clear. This suggests a growing gap between everyday AI use and the institutional guidance needed to use it well.

    In science and medicine, the report is cautiously optimistic but evidence-conscious. AI models for science can outperform human scientists on some benchmarks, such as ChemBench, but they remain weak in areas such as astrophysics replication and Earth observation. The report also notes that smaller, specialised models can outperform much larger ones in scientific domains, challenging the assumption that bigger is always better. In medicine, AI scribes and clinical note-generation tools saw substantial adoption, with some physicians reporting up to 83% less time spent writing notes and reduced burnout. But the broader evidence base remains thin: a review of more than 500 clinical AI studies found that nearly half relied on exam-style questions rather than real patient data, and only 5% used real clinical data.

    Policy is becoming more active but also more fragmented. AI sovereignty is emerging as a defining policy principle, especially as countries seek greater control over infrastructure, data, models, applications and talent. National AI strategies are expanding, particularly among developing economies, but actual capabilities remain uneven. The EU, U.S. and Asian countries are also moving in different policy directions, with the EU AI Act’s first prohibitions taking effect while the U.S. shifted towards deregulation.

    Finally, public opinion is divided. Experts and the public view AI’s future very differently: 73% of experts expect AI to have a positive impact on how people do their jobs, compared with only 23% of the public. Trust in institutions to regulate AI is fragmented, with the United States reporting the lowest level of trust in its own government to regulate AI among surveyed countries, at 31%. The report therefore closes on a central tension: AI is becoming more capable, more widely adopted and more economically valuable, but trust, governance and social readiness remain far less mature.

  • Want RoI from A.I.? Go for growth by PwC

    Want RoI from A.I.? Go for growth by PwC

    About the paper

    PwC’s AI performance study examines why some large companies generate measurable ROI from AI while others remain stuck in pilot activity.

    It is original proprietary survey research based on 1,217 senior executives, all director-level or above, across 25 sectors and across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America; fieldwork took place in October and November 2025.

    The sample is heavily weighted towards large publicly listed companies: 91% were publicly listed and 76% had revenue of US$1 billion or more.

    Length: 30 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/technology/ai-performance/want-ai-roi-go-for-growth.html#the-takeaways

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report argues that AI ROI is not mainly a function of how many AI pilots a company launches. It comes from what PwC calls “AI fitness”: the ability to aim AI at important business outcomes, build the foundations that make AI scalable and reliable, and embed AI deeply across the enterprise.

    PwC’s headline finding is that the most AI-fit companies achieve AI-driven financial performance that is 7.2 times higher than other companies. The study defines this performance as revenue and efficiency gains attributable to AI, adjusted against sector medians. According to the report, 20% of the surveyed companies capture 74% of AI-driven returns, showing that value is highly concentrated among a relatively small group of leaders.

    The core message is therefore: companies should stop counting pilots and start building the organisational machinery that turns AI activity into measurable business impact. The strongest performers treat AI not as a tool for scattered productivity gains, but as a reinvention engine that can reshape products, business models, operating models and competitive positioning.

    2. What does PwC mean by “AI fitness”?

    PwC defines AI fitness as a combination of six foundational capabilities and three measures of AI use.

    The six foundations are:

    1. Innovation — dedicated infrastructure, business-unit ownership and disciplined portfolio reviews.
    2. Governance and risk — Responsible AI frameworks, access controls, compliance processes and oversight bodies.
    3. Data and technology — modern platforms, trusted data, reusable components and redesigned workflows.
    4. Strategy — a clear connection between AI deployment and corporate strategy.
    5. Investment — sufficient funding and the ability to reallocate resources as priorities shift.
    6. Workforce — skills, incentives, collaboration models and trust in AI-generated insights.

    The three measures of AI use are:

    1. Breadth and depth — how widely AI is used across the value chain and how deeply it is embedded into workflows.
    2. Sophistication — whether AI is used merely to assist and summarise, or whether it executes tasks, operates within guard rails or becomes autonomous.
    3. Capturing value from industry convergence — whether AI helps the company identify and exploit new value pools across traditional sector boundaries.

    The important point is that PwC does not define AI leadership as “using more AI” in a generic sense. Leadership comes from combining AI use with the organisational conditions that make AI repeatable, trusted and commercially meaningful.

    3. Why does the report say companies should aim AI at growth and reinvention, not just efficiency?

    The report acknowledges that many companies use AI to improve efficiency: faster claims processing, code generation, customer support automation, productivity improvements and cost reduction. But PwC argues that the biggest returns come when AI changes what the company sells, how it creates value and where it competes.

    AI leaders are 2.6 times as likely as other companies to say AI has improved their ability to reinvent their business model. They are also more likely to use AI to identify emerging value pools, respond to changing customer needs, collaborate across sectors and compete outside their traditional industry boundaries.

    The strongest individual AI fitness factor in the study is the ability to capture growth from industry convergence. PwC’s logic is that AI allows companies to detect and act on new combinations of customer needs, data, services and partnerships that cut across old sector lines.

    The John Deere example illustrates this argument. The company used AI-powered precision spraying not simply to make an existing machine smarter, but to support a more service-like model linked to verified outcomes. According to the report, See & Spray was used on more than 1 million acres in the 2024 growing season and saved an estimated 8 million gallons of herbicide mix, while also positioning John Deere for recurring services revenue rather than one-off hardware differentiation.

    4. What foundations do AI leaders build differently from other companies?

    PwC’s argument is that foundations matter because they improve the “conversion rate” from AI use to measurable results. Companies with stronger foundations reportedly see nearly double the improvement in AI-driven performance when they increase AI use, compared with companies with weaker foundations.

    The report highlights five especially important foundation-building practices.

    First, AI leaders fund and flex the portfolio like investors. They invest materially more in AI — PwC says leaders invest 2.5 times as much of revenue as other companies — and they are better at reallocating financial and human resources towards higher-value AI opportunities.

    Second, they create infrastructure for innovation. They are more likely to provide sandbox environments and dedicated technical infrastructure for experimentation, and more likely to place accountable innovation owners inside business units.

    Third, they build workforce trust. Employees in AI-leading organisations are 2.1 times as likely to trust AI-generated insights and act on them in daily decisions. The report links this trust to cross-functional co-creation, role-based learning, incentives to experiment and clear guard rails.

    Fourth, they use governance to accelerate rather than obstruct. Leaders are more likely to have a documented Responsible AI framework and a cross-functional governance board, but the report frames governance as a way to move routine use cases faster while escalating only higher-risk cases.

    Fifth, they remove data and technology friction. AI leaders are much more likely to have reusable centrally catalogued AI components, high-quality accessible data, modern cloud-based platforms, and redesigned workflows that incorporate AI rather than merely adding AI tools on top of existing processes.

    The overall message is pragmatic: companies should not try to modernise everything at once. They should build only the foundations needed to scale the AI initiatives most closely tied to strategic outcomes.

    5. What are the report’s main implications for executives?

    The main implication is that executives need to move from an “AI activity” mindset to an “AI performance” mindset.

    PwC repeatedly warns against treating AI pilots as proof of progress. The report suggests that many companies have visible AI activity but little evidence of revenue growth, cost reduction, better decisions or improved customer outcomes. The practical challenge is therefore to connect AI to specific business objectives, measure impact, and stop or scale initiatives based on evidence.

    The report’s recommended executive agenda has four parts.

    First, aim AI at strategic value, especially growth, reinvention and industry convergence, rather than only internal productivity.

    Second, assign ownership and metrics. Every important AI initiative should have a business owner, success measures and accountability for outcomes.

    Third, industrialise what works. Companies should take proven use cases and replicate them across functions, regions, workflows and decision points, rather than leaving value trapped in isolated pockets.

    Fourth, move carefully towards greater autonomy. PwC argues that automation of routine, high-frequency decisions is strongly linked to AI-driven performance, but it should happen within explicit guard rails, with decision quality measured and trust thresholds met before expansion.

    The conclusion is that AI advantage may compound. The leading companies are learning faster, redeploying solutions faster and safely automating more decisions. For laggards, the risk is not just missing short-term efficiency gains, but falling behind as AI-fit competitors turn their foundations into a widening performance premium.