Author: Jesper Andersen

  • People, pressure and purpose in international public relations by The PR Network

    People, pressure and purpose in international public relations by The PR Network

    About the paper

    The report examines how international public relations functions are structured, valued and managed, arguing that the role has expanded far beyond traditional media relations into a broader strategic management function.

    It is a mixed-methods-style practitioner report grounded primarily in original qualitative research: 25 in-depth interviews with senior international public relations and corporate communication leaders conducted in April and May 2025, across multiple sectors and regions, although the precise country-by-country geographic distribution of interviewees is not clearly specified in the report.

    Length: 41 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.thepr.network/people-pressure-purpose

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s main argument about the true role of international public relations?

    The report’s core argument is that international public relations is already functioning as a strategic management discipline, even if organisations do not always recognise or reward it as such. It says the field has outgrown its historic association with media relations and press coverage, and now plays a much wider business role.

    According to the report, international PR teams do at least four things that place them squarely in management territory.

    • First, they support market entry by building awareness, credibility and stakeholder relationships before commercial teams are fully in place.
    • Second, they shape reputation and brand distinction in unfamiliar or competitive markets.
    • Third, they manage reputational risk and strengthen organisational resilience by spotting issues early and helping shape the response.
    • Fourth, they advise leadership on tone, timing, signalling and stakeholder expectations.

    That is why the report insists PR should not be understood as a support service concerned mainly with coverage. It presents communicators as “door openers and market makers”, leadership advisers and cultural interpreters whose work influences growth, trust and risk management. In effect, the report is trying to reframe international PR as a business-critical capability rather than a tactical communications function.

    2. How does the report say effective international PR teams should be structured and governed?

    The report rejects the idea that there is one ideal operating model. Instead, it says effective structures depend on organisational context, market maturity, growth stage, internal capacity, cultural complexity and budget.

    It identifies four main structural models.

    • A centralised model gives headquarters strong control and consistency, but offers low local autonomy.
    • A hub-and-spoke or regionalised model gives regional leads responsibility for adapting and implementing strategy under central oversight.
    • A best-in-class network model relies on independent local agencies or consultants chosen for market expertise, with high local autonomy.
    • A hybrid model combines elements of the others and adapts according to market and business needs.

    The report’s real point is not that one model is inherently superior, but that successful teams design deliberately rather than by accident. Strong structures balance strategic coherence with local responsiveness. The best teams work with clear principles, shared objectives and some central oversight, while still allowing variation by market. In other words, design matters more than doctrine.

    The report also suggests that structure is a signal of organisational seriousness. How a company structures PR reflects how much it values the function. If PR is genuinely strategic, then the reporting lines, mandates and decision rights need to reflect that.

    3. Why are local insight and cultural fluency so central to success in international PR?

    The report treats local insight as the currency of international PR. Its argument is that global strategy fails when central teams treat local markets merely as execution points rather than as sources of intelligence and judgement.

    A recurring theme in the interviews is that local teams are often closest to what is happening on the ground but furthest from decision-making. That creates risk. Campaigns or messages that ignore local nuance can damage credibility, weaken relationships and undermine the very trust they are meant to build. The report is explicit that “global” should not mean “uniform”. Alignment and adaptability have to work together.

    The table on the “five pillars of effective international public relations” makes this especially clear. It highlights trust, cultural fluency, alignment with commercial priorities, better mechanics of collaboration and stronger agency management as the main ingredients of effective cross-border work. In practice, this means local teams should have influence, not just instructions; messaging frameworks should be adaptable, not rigid; and collaboration systems should support shared planning and transparency.

    More broadly, the report elevates cultural fluency from a soft skill to a leadership capability. The best practitioners do not merely translate language. They interpret meaning, authority, timing, tone and stakeholder expectations across markets. That is presented as one of the reasons international PR practitioners add strategic value beyond their formal job descriptions.

    4. What human and organisational pressures are shaping the profession today?

    This is one of the strongest parts of the report. It argues that behind the strategic rhetoric lies a profession under significant strain. The interviews suggest that purpose remains high, but pressure is rising.

    The report identifies four interlinked pressures.

    The first is workload and burnout. International roles often span multiple time zones, lean teams and constant responsiveness, creating a “follow the sun” expectation that stretches working days and weeks. The report says the answer is not asking individuals to endure more, but redesigning workflows, protecting personal time and resourcing properly.

    The second is insecurity and emotional labour. PR is described as one of the first functions questioned when budgets tighten, especially where leadership does not fully understand its value. At the same time, communicators are expected to coach, influence and protect the organisation, often without visible recognition for that invisible labour.

    The third is the pressure to keep evolving. Practitioners are expected to become fluent in AI, data and integration while still delivering day-to-day work. The report says there is often no real space in the system for learning, which makes future-readiness harder to achieve than leaders may assume.

    The fourth is mental health and isolation. The report notes that mental strain surfaced in almost every conversation, whether explicitly or indirectly. Working across cultures, at distance and in under-resourced environments can create isolation and sustained pressure. Its broader implication is that sustainability in international PR is not just a wellbeing issue; it is an operating-model issue.

    5. How does the report think international PR should be measured and where is the field heading next?

    The report argues that measurement remains one of the profession’s most frustrating fault lines because teams are still too often judged by legacy indicators that do not capture strategic value. It says practitioners feel they are effectively maintaining two measurement systems at once: one that reflects real contribution, such as influence, access and risk mitigation, and another that satisfies dashboard expectations, such as coverage volume, impressions and sentiment.

    It is especially critical of the lingering influence of advertising-value thinking. Even if AVEs are no longer openly championed, the report suggests that the mindset behind them still shapes how senior leaders interpret success. That leaves communicators undervalued and makes it harder to connect PR to broader organisational outcomes.

    Instead, the report proposes a more rounded approach. It highlights tiered targeting, message pull-through, salience over sentiment, pipeline alignment and digital attribution as more useful methods. None is presented as perfect on its own, but together they move evaluation closer to value. It also stresses the need for integrated reporting frameworks and common definitions so teams can compare performance across markets with confidence.

    In terms of the future, the report identifies three priorities: embedding strategic value more firmly in leadership decision-making, redesigning roles and operating models for resilience, and systematically developing the skills future communicators will need, including data, AI, policy and management capability. The overall conclusion is that the future of international PR will depend on stronger recognition, better-designed systems and more sustained investment in people.

    The report’s underlying perspective is clear throughout: international PR already creates strategic value, but its structures, metrics and organisational recognition still lag behind the reality of the work.

  • IC Index 2025: Your guide to IC channels and topics by Institute of Internal Communication

    IC Index 2025: Your guide to IC channels and topics by Institute of Internal Communication

    About the paper

    The report is a focused internal communication channels-and-topics analysis from the IC Index 2025, examining what information UK employees in large organisations want, how much communication they receive, and which channels they rely on.

    It is based on original survey research: an online representative quota sample of 4,939 UK workers aged 18–64 in organisations with 500+ employees, fielded in late March to early April 2025; the geographic scope is the UK only.

    The methodology is clearly stated, though the report is limited to larger employers, so it does not represent smaller organisations or microbusinesses.

    Length: 9 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.ioic.org.uk/resource-report/ic-index-2025-guide-to-ic-channels-and-topics.html

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the current state of internal communication?

    The core argument is that internal communication in large UK organisations is broadly functioning reasonably well at a practical level, but clear gaps remain in relevance, targeting and topic coverage. The report says there have not been “massive shifts” since the IC Index began in 2023, yet some movements are important enough to affect communication strategy, especially when looked at through demographic and organisational differences such as generation, sector and employer size.

    In essence, the report presents a fairly balanced picture. On the one hand, most employees say they receive the right amount of communication, most prefer written information, and email still dominates as the everyday channel for updates. On the other hand, substantial minorities still feel under-informed on key issues, especially pay and benefits, career development, job guidance, organisational challenges and hybrid working.

    So the deeper message is not that internal communication is broken, but that it needs to become more audience-aware and more disciplined. The strongest practical implication is that communicators should stop treating employees as one uniform audience and instead think more carefully about what different groups need, when they need it, and through which formats and channels. That “know your audience” theme is visually reinforced in the audience-segmentation spread on page 8.

    2. How well are organisations getting the volume of communication right?

    The headline result is that 74% of employees say they receive “the right amount” of internal communication, while 14% say they get too much and 12% say they get too little. That is a strong result overall, suggesting that most large organisations are not wildly misjudging communication volume.

    But the more important finding is what happens when organisations miss the mark. Employees who say they get the right amount are much more positive about communication overall: 75% rate organisational communication as excellent, their engagement score is 75%, and 72% would recommend their employer as a great place to work. By contrast, among those who say they get too little communication, only 17% rate communication as excellent and 42% rate it as poor. Those getting too much communication are also less positive, but not to the same extent: 42% still rate communication as excellent and 20% as poor.

    That leads to one of the report’s clearest conclusions: too much communication is less damaging than too little. In other words, information overload is not ideal, but information starvation is worse. The report frames this as a meaningful challenge for leaders and managers, who need to filter noise while still ensuring people get the essentials.

    There is also an organisational-size effect. Smaller large organisations, with 500–999 employees, are most likely to get the balance right: 83% of employees in that group say the amount is right. Among organisations with 10,000+ employees, that drops to 67%. This suggests scale makes communication calibration harder, likely because more business units and functions are competing for attention.

    3. Which topics do employees most want more information about?

    The clearest unmet need is pay and benefits. More than a third of employees, 36%, say they receive too little information on that topic. The next biggest gap is career and personal development opportunities at 31%, followed by guidance to help people do their job at 27%, organisational challenges at 26%, and ways of working or hybrid working, also at 26%.

    That pattern matters because it shows employees are not just asking for more grand strategy messaging. They want information that directly affects their working lives, their future prospects and their ability to do their job well. Pay, progression and practical guidance all sit near the top of the list. The report explicitly notes that the top gaps are heavily focused on the individual employee experience.

    At the same time, organisational meaning still matters. The report flags that too little information on strategy and direction, career development, job guidance, purpose and mission, and values and culture is associated with a particularly negative effect on engagement. So employees need both instrumental information and sense-making information: what affects me personally, and what tells me where the organisation is going and why.

    There are also a few trend signals since 2023. Ways of working and hybrid working has moved up six places on the “too little” ranking, while strategy and direction has dropped five places, implying some improvement on strategy communication relative to other themes. Meanwhile, diversity and inclusion stands out as the topic with the highest “too much” score at 21%, followed by values and culture and people stories/news at 15% each. That does not necessarily mean those topics are unimportant; rather, it suggests some organisations may be over-indexing on them relative to employees’ felt needs.

    4. How do employees prefer to receive information about organisational priorities and plans?

    The dominant preference is written communication. Overall, 53% say they would prefer to read information about their employer’s priorities and plans, compared with 31% who would rather talk about it in team or group discussions, 10% who prefer visual formats such as film or infographics, and just 6% who prefer audio.

    This is important because it pushes back against the idea that internal communication should automatically become more multimedia-heavy. The report shows that written communication remains the default preference for a majority. It also suggests that the appetite for audio has weakened: the share preferring audio has fallen by 6 percentage points since 2023. By contrast, preference for talking about priorities and plans has risen by 11 points, which may indicate a growing desire for interaction and discussion around important organisational issues.

    The pattern is not uniform across all organisations. In employers with 500–999 staff, only 44% prefer to read information and 39% prefer to talk about it. In organisations with 1,000 or more employees, the pattern stabilises at roughly 55% preferring to read and 28% preferring discussion. So smaller large organisations appear more conversational in how employees want to engage with priorities and plans.

    One especially interesting finding is that digital connectedness makes very little difference here. Employees who spend most of their time at a computer and those in less digitally connected roles have near-identical preferences for reading communication, and only small differences on the other formats. That weakens the common assumption that frontline or offline workers necessarily want less written communication.

    5. Which channels do employees actually rely on, and how do audience differences shape channel use?

    In practice, email is still the dominant channel by a wide margin. Sixty-five per cent say they rely on email for general news and updates. After that come one-to-ones with line managers at 35%, company newsletters at 34%, and team meetings at 34%. Then there is a second tier: colleagues by word of mouth at 25%, Microsoft Teams at 21%, and the intranet at 17%.

    This matters because it shows a clear distinction between preference and reality. Employees may say they like written information, and the channel data confirms that written, scalable formats still dominate everyday organisational communication. Email remains the backbone. Manager communication and team-based discussion are important, but secondary.

    The report also adds a useful caution about advocacy. Some low-usage channels, including LinkedIn, Instagram, Slack and TikTok, are associated with very high levels of employer advocacy among the people who use them. But the report sensibly argues that this probably reflects the fact that advocates are more likely to engage with their employer through those channels, rather than those channels causing advocacy. In other words, correlation here should not be mistaken for channel effectiveness.

    Audience differences are one of the most valuable parts of the report. On page 8, several patterns stand out:

    Public sector employees are more likely than private sector employees to rely on the intranet, 20% versus 15%, while private sector employees are more likely to rely on virtual and in-person town halls. Smaller organisations make heavier use of team meetings, WhatsApp and LinkedIn. For example, among employees in organisations with 500–999 people, 40% rely on team meetings, 22% on SMS or WhatsApp, and 15% on LinkedIn, compared with just 31%, 6% and 4% respectively in the largest organisations.

    Generational differences are especially sharp. Gen Z employees are much more likely than Baby Boomers to rely on SMS or WhatsApp, 19% versus 5%, and more likely to use LinkedIn and Instagram. Baby Boomers, by contrast, are more likely to use the intranet, 20% versus 10% for Gen Z. Millennials also show relatively high use of digital screens, LinkedIn and Instagram.

    Finally, part-time employees are more likely than full-time employees to rely on word of mouth, 30% versus 24%, and employees in global organisations are more likely to use company newsletters than those in UK-only organisations, 38% versus 30%. Together, these patterns reinforce the report’s strongest strategic point: channel strategy should be audience-led rather than based on one standard corporate mix.

    Overall, this is a useful, applied piece of original research. Its main value is not in dramatic headline shifts, but in showing where the practical frictions are: under-communication is more harmful than over-communication, employees still want written clarity, pay and career information remain underserved, and channel reliance varies enough by audience that a single-channel logic is unlikely to work well.

  • The State of PR 2025 by Muck Rack

    The State of PR 2025 by Muck Rack

    About the paper

    Muck Rack’s State of PR 2025 is an original survey study examining PR professionals’ roles, leadership perceptions, future priorities, media relations practices and social media use.

    The survey was distributed primarily by email between 5 June and 16 July 2025; 1,089 PR professionals participated, with 911 usable responses retained after data cleaning.

    The sample is heavily US-based, with 90% of respondents located in the United States and only 10% elsewhere, including 5% in Europe.

    Length: 31 pages

    More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/State_of_PR_2025_report.pdf

    Core Insights

    1. What does the report reveal about the current role and professional position of PR?

    Media relations remains the dominant activity within PR. Eighty-four per cent of respondents say it constitutes at least a quarter of their work, considerably ahead of thought leadership at 45%, measurement and reporting at 44%, and content creation at 42%. Corporate communications accounts for a substantial share of the work of 30% of respondents, while crisis management, influencer relations, ESG and DEI are considerably less prominent as major job functions.

    This creates a picture of a profession whose remit has broadened, but whose centre of gravity remains traditional media relations. Thought leadership, content and measurement have become important complementary disciplines, yet they have not displaced earned media as the defining PR responsibility.

    The findings on leadership perceptions are more complicated. Based on the response categories shown on page 10, 33% say leadership understands their work completely and 47% say it understands it somewhat, producing a combined figure of 80%. The accompanying narrative inconsistently states 88%, which appears to be an error in the report.

    More importantly, understanding does not necessarily translate into perceived value. Only 37% of respondents overall feel that PR is “very valued” by leadership. The gap between agency and in-house practitioners is striking: 50% of agency respondents feel very valued, compared with only 16% of brand-side respondents. At brands, 24% feel only slightly valued or not valued at all, compared with 8% at agencies.

    The report therefore points to a persistent legitimacy challenge for in-house PR. Communications professionals may believe that leaders broadly understand what they do, but many do not feel that the function is accorded correspondingly high strategic value.

    2. Which developments do PR professionals expect to shape the profession over the next five years?

    AI and automation clearly dominate expectations for the future. Fifty-nine per cent believe this area will grow in importance over the next five years, well ahead of media relations at 35%, strategic planning at 33%, reputation management at 29%, and both influencer marketing and owned content at 28%.

    This is not merely an expectation about the future. Generative AI is already mainstream among the respondents: 77% say they use tools such as ChatGPT or DALL·E in their workflow, while another 11% plan to explore them. Only 8% say they do not intend to do so.

    The findings suggest that AI has moved rapidly from experimentation to routine professional use. However, the report does not examine what respondents use AI for, how intensively they use it, whether their organisations have governance policies, or whether AI is improving quality, productivity or outcomes. Adoption should therefore not be interpreted as evidence of maturity.

    At the same time, established strategic disciplines remain important. Media relations, planning, reputation management, measurement and owned content all feature prominently among anticipated growth areas. The likely future is therefore not one in which AI replaces conventional PR functions, but one in which AI increasingly changes how those functions are performed.

    The very low ranking of DEI and ESG communication is also notable. Only 4% identify it as an area likely to grow most in importance. That does not necessarily mean such issues are becoming irrelevant, but it does suggest that respondents no longer view them as major areas of professional expansion relative to AI, reputation, media and content.

    3. Why has earned media become more difficult to secure?

    The report presents earned media as operating under severe structural pressure. Seventy-two per cent cite low response rates from journalists as a challenge, while 62% point to smaller or shrinking media lists within relevant beats. Only 2% say it has not become harder to secure coverage.

    Respondents also identify:

    • increased competition for coverage: 49%;
    • shorter media cycles and faster turnaround: 48%;
    • reduced media appetite caused by the economic or political climate: 47%;
    • a lack of timely or newsworthy stories: 42%;
    • overloaded or understaffed PR teams: 32%;
    • limited access to executives or subject-matter experts: 29%;
    • difficulty personalising pitches at scale: 26%;
    • conflicting internal priorities: 21%.

    These findings indicate that the difficulty is not caused by a single failure in pitching technique. It reflects a combination of shrinking journalistic capacity, intense competition, rapid news cycles, weak story material and internal organisational constraints.

    There is also an important asymmetry in the results: the largest barriers are external to the PR function, but several internal weaknesses compound them. PR teams may have less access to genuinely newsworthy material, insufficient time to customise outreach, or limited access to credible spokespeople. The report therefore implies that improving media relations performance cannot be reduced to better email wording. It also requires stronger story development, internal coordination and more selective targeting.

    4. What do the findings say about the quality and scale of media pitching?

    The report depicts pitching as relatively broad and only moderately personalised.

    Nearly half of respondents pitch more than 20 journalists for each campaign or announcement: 23% pitch between 21 and 50, while 25% pitch more than 50. Only 12% typically pitch five or fewer.

    These pitches are also often sent to journalists with whom the PR professional has limited previous contact. Thirty-six per cent have worked with only a few of the reporters they pitch, and 31% have worked with about half. Only 31% have previously worked with most or all of them.

    At first glance, personalisation appears widespread: 70% say they always or usually personalise their pitches. However, the next question qualifies that claim. Seventy-five per cent say personalisation consists of changing only a few sentences. Just 11% tailor every part of the pitch to the journalist, while 13% personalise only the greeting.

    The combined picture is therefore one of semi-personalised outreach at scale. Practitioners are not generally sending completely identical mass emails, but neither are most producing deeply tailored pitches for individual journalists.

    This may help explain the low response rates identified elsewhere in the report. The study does not establish causation, but it suggests a tension between scale and relevance: PR professionals are trying to reach large numbers of journalists while also claiming to personalise their messages, yet most personalisation remains relatively light.

    The report’s five-year pitching summary reinforces conventional practice: nearly 70% prefer one-to-one emails, 87% keep pitches below 300 words, 51% prefer Tuesday, 80% pitch before noon, and 54% send their first follow-up three to six days later. These findings describe prevailing practitioner preferences, however, rather than demonstrating which practices produce the best results.

    5. What are the report’s most important implications for PR strategy and measurement?

    The strongest strategic message concerns measurement. Sixty-seven per cent say that producing measurable results is the best way to increase PR’s perceived value among leaders or clients. This is far ahead of creative solutions at 12%, executive visibility at 11%, and reputation-risk management at 6%.

    This finding is particularly significant when considered alongside the low perceived value of in-house PR. It suggests that practitioners see evidence of results as the main route to stronger organisational legitimacy. However, the report does not define “measurable results”. These might range from media outputs and engagement metrics to changes in awareness, behaviour, reputation or business outcomes. The lack of definition means respondents may not share a common understanding of what meaningful measurement entails.

    The social media findings also have clear strategic implications. LinkedIn has consolidated its position as the most important professional platform:

    • 56% regard it as the most valuable platform for PR;
    • 87% include it in their organisation’s social and communications strategy;
    • 70% want to monitor it.

    By contrast, X has declined sharply. Only 11% now regard it as the most valuable platform, and 39% say they stopped using it professionally during the previous year. Nevertheless, 41% still include it in their organisational strategy and 52% want to monitor it. This suggests that X may be losing value as an active communications channel while remaining relevant as an environment that organisations feel obliged to observe.

    There is a wider gap between declared strategic importance and monitoring capability. Although respondents say their companies use an average of 3.6 social platforms, 53% do not use social listening tools at all. Only 14% use them daily and 8% weekly. This raises questions about how organisations evaluate conversations, emerging issues and audience response across their multichannel presence.

    Overall, the report implies five priorities for PR leaders:

    1. connect communication activity more clearly with measurable organisational outcomes;
    2. treat AI adoption as an operational and governance issue, not merely a tool experiment;
    3. make earned-media outreach more selective and substantially more relevant;
    4. reconsider channel investment as LinkedIn strengthens and X weakens;
    5. improve monitoring and listening capabilities so that multichannel strategies are informed by evidence rather than platform presence alone.

    The report’s conclusions should nevertheless be interpreted within its sample limitations. It is based mainly on US practitioners, agencies make up 51% of respondents, and some questions changed wording from earlier surveys. The authors therefore caution that direct year-on-year comparisons may not always be valid.

  • Future of Professionals Report 2025 by Thomson Reuters

    Future of Professionals Report 2025 by Thomson Reuters

    About the paper

    Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report 2025 examines how AI and GenAI are affecting legal, risk, compliance, tax, accounting, audit and trade professionals, with a particular focus on strategic AI adoption and ROI.

    It is an original survey-based report, drawing on 2,275 responses gathered in February and March 2025 from professionals across firms, corporations, government and in-house functions.

    The geographic scope is international, with responses from the US, Canada, UK, Mainland Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand.

    Length: 31 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/c/future-of-professionals

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report argues that AI adoption has moved from experimentation to strategic differentiation. Thomson Reuters’ core claim is that the decisive question is no longer whether professional organisations should adopt AI, but whether they do so deliberately, visibly and in alignment with broader business goals.

    The report frames a widening divide between organisations with a clear AI strategy and those relying on informal or ad hoc adoption. Organisations with visible AI strategies are presented as significantly more likely to experience AI-related benefits, including revenue growth, productivity gains and stronger operational performance. By contrast, organisations without a strategy are portrayed as at risk of falling behind within a few years.

    This is not just a technology argument. The report repeatedly emphasises that AI must be connected to organisational purpose, workflow redesign, leadership behaviour, talent strategy and individual professional development. AI is described as an enabler of broader transformation rather than a standalone tool.

    2. What evidence does the report provide that AI is already affecting professional work?

    The report provides several data points showing that AI has already become a major force in professional services and related corporate functions.

    Most prominently, 80% of respondents believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their profession within five years. At the same time, 53% say their organisation is already experiencing at least one type of benefit from AI adoption. The most common benefits are efficiency, productivity, faster response times, reduced errors, cost reduction and freed-up time.

    The report estimates that AI could save professionals around five hours per week, or 240 hours per year. In the foreword, Thomson Reuters states that for legal professionals this represents an average annual value of around $19,000 per professional, contributing to a combined annual impact of $32 billion in the US legal and tax/accounting sectors.

    However, the report also identifies a gap between expected long-term impact and current organisational change. While 80% expect AI to have a major impact within five years, only 38% expect high or transformational change in their own organisation this year, and 30% believe their organisation is moving too slowly.

    3. What distinguishes organisations that achieve stronger ROI from AI?

    The report’s main explanatory model is the “AI Success Pyramid”, which identifies four layers required for stronger AI returns: strategy, leadership, operations and individual users.

    The strongest lever is strategy. Organisations with a visible AI strategy are described as 3.5 times as likely to experience at least one form of ROI compared with organisations that have no significant AI adoption plans. They are also almost twice as likely to report revenue growth from AI compared with organisations adopting AI informally.

    Leadership is the second layer. Respondents whose leaders lead by example are 1.7 times as likely to see AI benefits. Organisations investing in AI-powered technology are twice as likely to report benefits, while those adding new governance roles are also more likely to experience positive outcomes.

    Operational change is the third layer. The report argues that organisations need to redesign workflows, roles, delivery models, services and pricing structures. This is where AI moves beyond personal productivity and begins to change how professional work is produced and delivered.

    The fourth layer is individual adoption. Professionals with good or expert AI knowledge are 2.8 times as likely to see organisational benefits as those with basic or no knowledge. Regular users of AI tools are 2.4 times as likely to report benefits compared with non-regular users. This makes individual AI literacy a strategic issue, not merely a personal skill upgrade.

    4. What risks, barriers and tensions does the report identify?

    The report identifies several barriers to more robust AI adoption. The largest barrier to investment is demonstrable accuracy, cited by 50% of respondents. This is followed by available budget, data security, ethical concerns and implementation resources.

    Accuracy is especially important because professional work often carries high stakes. The report notes that 91% of professionals believe computers should be held to higher standards of accuracy than humans, including 41% who say AI outputs would need to be 100% accurate before being used without human review. This reinforces the report’s view that human oversight remains essential.

    The report also highlights a new concern: overreliance on AI at the expense of professional skill development. Almost a quarter of respondents identify this as a negative consequence of concern. This is a subtle but important shift from earlier fears of job loss towards worries about deskilling, judgement and long-term professional capability.

    Another major tension is misalignment between organisational and individual adoption. Some professionals have personal AI goals but are unaware of any organisational strategy, meaning they are being encouraged to adopt AI without clear guidance. Conversely, some organisations have AI strategies but professionals lack personal AI goals, creating an implementation gap.

    The report also describes the “jagged edge” of AI adoption: uneven adoption across regions, functions, organisations and demographics. For example, some organisations invest heavily but see low individual usage, suggesting wasted investment and weak change management. Others see high individual usage but low organisational investment, which may create risks if employees rely on public tools without proper safeguards.

    5. What does the report imply for the future of professional work?

    The report implies that professional value will increasingly depend on the ability to combine domain expertise with AI fluency. It does not argue that AI replaces professional judgement. Instead, it argues that modern professionals will use AI to augment core abilities such as research, writing, analysis, communication, project management, technical expertise and higher-order thinking.

    The “modern professional” in the report is someone who can use AI as a working partner: to analyse patterns, compare regulations, draft documents, summarise complex material, explain specialist issues in accessible ways, manage deadlines and explore scenarios. The traditional professional skillset remains important, but the report suggests that it will increasingly be mediated and amplified by technology.

    The report also points to a significant skills gap. Forty-six percent of respondents report skills gaps within their teams, with the largest gap in technology and data skills. Technical domain expertise is also a concern. This means the future challenge is not only AI adoption but reskilling across multiple levels of the organisation.

    The report’s final implication is competitive: organisations and professionals that act deliberately are likely to gain advantage, while those that wait may lose relevance. For organisations, this means connecting AI to strategy, governance, workflow and value creation. For individuals, it means developing AI proficiency through formal training, experimentation, peer learning and active involvement in how AI is developed and used.

  • IC Index 2025 by Institute of Internal Communication

    IC Index 2025 by Institute of Internal Communication

    About the paper

    The paper is an original quantitative research report on what drives strong internal communication experiences, with a particular focus on care, connection, leadership behaviour, listening, change communication and AI communication.

    It is based on an online survey of a representative quota sample of 4,939 UK workers aged 18–64, fielded between 21 March and 4 April 2025, and covers the UK only; the report also incorporates commentary from IoIC Fellows, so it combines survey research with expert interpretation.

    Length: 33 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.ioic.org.uk/resource-report/ic-index-2025.html

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about what creates the best internal communication experiences?

    The report’s core argument is that the best internal communication experiences are driven less by channels and message volume, and more by human connection between employees and leaders. The strongest communication experience is not primarily explained by intranets, emails or strategy decks, but by whether leaders are visible, approachable, authentic, empathetic and willing to listen.

    That argument is visible most clearly in the section on what makes a “10/10” communication experience. Only 13% of employees give their organisation top marks for communication, which makes excellence rare rather than routine. Those employees are much more likely to say leaders understand the challenges employees face, that feedback is used to inform action, and that they hear regularly from senior leaders. They are also more likely to describe CEO communication as open, inspiring, clear, authentic and approachable.

    The report is therefore making a practical point to internal communicators: excellent internal communication is achieved when communication feels real. Leaders need to do more than explain strategy; they need to create a sense that they know employees, care about their experience and are prepared to engage in genuine two-way communication. That is the report’s central thesis.

    2. What evidence does the report provide that empathy, care and leader behaviour matter more than many organisations may assume?

    The report repeatedly shows that employee perceptions of empathy and care are closely tied to trust, value and advocacy. Just 51% of employees agree that leaders understand the challenges employees face, which means almost half of the workforce does not positively experience leadership empathy. That matters because employees who rate communication at 10/10 are overwhelmingly more likely to feel understood by leaders.

    The same pattern appears in relation to tone. Trust in the CEO or most senior leader is highest when communication is described as inspiring, authentic, caring, approachable and empathetic. It is far lower when leaders are seen as arrogant, unapproachable, boring, closed or indifferent. The report is effectively arguing that tone is not cosmetic; it is a trust-building variable.

    Care also matters strongly in moments of organisational strain. Only 56% say difficult people-affecting changes such as restructures or redundancies are communicated with care. Yet where employees do feel that such change is handled carefully, the uplift is dramatic: they are far more likely to feel valued and to recommend their employer as a great place to work. This suggests that care is not a soft add-on but a determinant of important organisational outcomes.

    The report also highlights a perception gap. Managers, especially senior leaders, are highly confident in their own communication skills, time and information, but employees are much less convinced on related measures such as openness, listening and follow-through. That implies many leaders may believe they are communicating effectively while employees experience something more distant or one-way.

    3. How does the report explain the importance of listening and acting on feedback?

    One of the report’s strongest conclusions is that listening only matters when employees can see evidence that their input changes something. The report distinguishes between organisations that merely invite feedback and those that “close the loop” by showing how feedback informs decisions and actions. This is one of the clearest findings in the whole study.

    Overall, 60% of employees say their organisation welcomes open and honest feedback, while only 53% say it is good at showing how colleague feedback is used. That gap is significant. It suggests many organisations are better at asking than responding. The report treats this as a live weakness, not a solved problem.

    The consequences are substantial. Among employees who say their organisation both welcomes feedback and shows how it is used, 90% would recommend their employer as a great place to work. By contrast, advocacy is far lower where organisations are seen as all talk and no action, selectively responsive, or completely disinterested. This is one of the most concrete business-case findings in the report: listening plus visible action strongly correlates with advocacy.

    The report also adds nuance about how leaders should listen. Large online Q&A sessions are the most common listening mechanism, but smaller and more personal formats such as small-group sessions, one-to-ones, reverse mentoring and discussions on internal social media are associated with stronger advocacy and stronger perceptions that feedback is welcomed. The implication is that scale does not automatically equal quality; smaller, more direct interactions often work better.

    4. What does the report reveal about organisational differences, especially the role of size, hierarchy and employee position?

    A striking pattern across the report is that smaller organisations consistently perform better than larger ones on a wide range of communication measures. Employees in organisations with 500–999 people are more positive than those in the largest organisations on leadership empathy, change communication, listening, feedback follow-through and AI clarity. The report treats organisation size as one of the most important contextual variables shaping communication quality.

    Large organisations appear to struggle particularly with emotional closeness and responsiveness. For example, perceptions that leaders understand employee challenges fall markedly as organisational size increases, and confidence that feedback informs decisions also drops sharply in the biggest organisations. Similarly, communication about difficult change is seen as less caring in larger organisations. This supports the report’s broader argument that scale makes human connection harder, though not impossible.

    Hierarchy matters too. Managers are much more likely than non-managers to believe leaders understand employee challenges, and senior leaders are the most positive group of all. The report reads this as a sign of disconnect between leadership perception and employee experience. That same pattern shows up in work identity: managers, particularly senior leaders, are much more likely than non-managers to say their job is an important part of their identity. This matters because leaders may overestimate how central the organisation is in employees’ lives, and therefore misjudge what communication employees find meaningful.

    The report also shows that clarity on strategy is strongest when it comes from the CEO or most senior leader. Employees who most commonly hear about business priorities from the CEO are the most likely to say strategy is clear. So while organisations often rely on multiple channels and local managers, the study suggests that senior leader communication remains uniquely important for strategic clarity.

    5. What does the report conclude about AI communication, and what are the wider implications for internal communicators?

    The report frames AI as a growing communication challenge defined by both opportunity and unease. Employees can see benefits in generative AI, especially for automating routine tasks, increasing productivity and saving time. But their worries are stronger and more emotionally charged: the biggest concern is loss of human jobs, followed by data privacy and security, lack of transparency, misinformation and unethical use.

    Against that backdrop, organisational clarity is weak. Only 41% say their employer has clearly communicated how generative AI is used responsibly in the organisation, and only 36% say expectations are clear on how they themselves are expected to use AI as part of their job. Again, smaller organisations perform much better than larger ones.

    The most important conclusion is that clarity changes comfort. Employees who say their organisation has clearly communicated responsible AI use are almost twice as likely to feel comfortable with AI being used to create written messages, images or video from their employer; in both cases, comfort rises to 70%. In other words, the discomfort is not only about the technology itself but also about organisational silence and ambiguity.

    The wider implication is that internal communicators should not treat AI as a purely technical issue owned elsewhere. The report strongly suggests that IC teams need to press for clear principles, practical guidance, manager support and honest explanation about where AI is used, why it is used and what safeguards exist. In the report’s logic, this is an extension of the same broader principle seen throughout the study: uncertainty damages trust, while clarity plus human-centred communication improves acceptance.

  • The New CCAO and CCO Mandate by United Minds

    The New CCAO and CCO Mandate by United Minds

    About the paper

    The paper examines how Chief Corporate Affairs Officers and Chief Communications Officers are adapting to political volatility, cultural complexity, economic uncertainty, and AI-enabled communications work.

    It is an original qualitative research report based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with CCOs and CCAOs from Fortune 1000 companies, conducted over two months in early 2025; the exact number of participants is not clearly specified in the report.

    The geographic scope includes both U.S.-based and European corporate affairs leaders.

    Length: 8 pages

    More information / download:
    https://webershandwick.com/news/new-ccao-and-cco-mandate-navigating-a-new-era-of-corporate-leadership

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report argues that the corporate affairs and communications function has not retreated in importance as companies have pulled back from the more visible social-issue positioning of the early 2020s. Instead, CCAOs and CCOs have become less publicly visible but more strategically central inside the enterprise.

    The core claim is that corporate affairs leaders are now expected to help companies navigate a volatile intersection of business, politics, culture, stakeholder expectations, employee sentiment, and reputation risk. Their mandate is no longer simply to explain corporate decisions after the fact. They are increasingly expected to help shape those decisions before they are made.

    The report frames this as a shift from communications as a reactive function to corporate affairs as a source of enterprise foresight. The ideal corporate affairs function, according to the report, helps leaders anticipate risk, understand stakeholder dynamics, interpret political and cultural signals, and protect the company’s licence to operate.

    2. How is the CCAO/CCO role changing in relation to business strategy?

    The report’s first major theme is that corporate affairs leaders are becoming proactive business partners. Their value increasingly lies in their ability to translate political, regulatory, cultural, and stakeholder signals into business implications.

    This means they are not only advising on messages, positioning, or crisis response. They are helping business leaders understand where external pressures may require changes to products, operations, stakeholder engagement, or risk management. One example in the report describes a policy-related issue around a consumer product where corporate affairs brought data to the business, prompting an eight-week sprint that helped resolve product issues and changed the relationship between corporate affairs and the product leader.

    The report presents corporate affairs leaders as “orchestrators” across functions. Because they sit close to the CEO agenda and have an enterprise-wide view, they can connect information from legal, policy, HR, product, finance, operations, communications, and external stakeholders. Their strategic value comes from synthesising those signals into business intelligence.

    The practical recommendation is to build formal cross-functional intelligence networks and develop ways to quantify external risk in financial terms. In other words, corporate affairs must be able to speak the language of business impact, not only the language of reputation.

    3. Why does political complexity matter so much in the report?

    Political volatility is one of the report’s defining conditions. The authors locate the research in the early 2025 U.S. context, following Donald Trump’s second inauguration and first 100 days in office. The report says companies are operating in a climate shaped by executive orders, economic volatility, hyper-partisanship, and sudden political attention.

    The report argues that this has forced corporate affairs leaders to rethink public engagement. Companies are moving away from broad social activism and towards brand protection, business-aligned issue engagement, and risk management. The task is no longer simply “Should we speak out?” but “Where does engagement serve the business, where does silence reduce risk, and where is private dialogue more effective than public positioning?”

    One especially important idea is the “audience of one” problem: the risk that a single powerful political figure can draw attention to a company and create operational, reputational, or regulatory consequences. Corporate affairs leaders are therefore developing scenario plans, rapid-response frameworks, and more cautious approaches to political communication.

    This also changes the advisory role of corporate affairs. The report suggests that CCAOs and CCOs are becoming voices of restraint and judgement within executive teams, helping leaders distinguish between noise, bargaining tactics, genuine risk, and issues that require action.

    4. How does the report redefine crisis and reputation management?

    The report argues that crisis management is no longer an exceptional capability. It has become a baseline expectation. In a “permacrisis” environment, corporate affairs teams must apply crisis tools continuously, not only when a discrete crisis breaks out.

    This changes the role in two ways. First, crisis work now extends beyond media response. Corporate affairs teams are expected to help solve the underlying problem, coordinate across business functions, and prevent issues from escalating. Secondly, the report says corporate affairs leaders must make the financial case for proactive reputation management.

    One quoted example describes a corporate affairs leader asking for $2.5 million for a campaign during a contentious situation and using analysis to show that the potential return was 12 times the investment. The point is that reputation work becomes more credible in the C-suite when it is connected to profit protection, revenue risk, regulatory exposure, or operational continuity.

    The implication is that corporate affairs must move from “the team that handles crises” to “the function that helps prevent avoidable business risk”. The report recommends crisis prevention scoring, financial modelling of reputational risk, and closer collaboration with finance and analytics partners.

    5. What does the report say about employees and AI as part of the new mandate?

    The report treats employee communication as a continuing priority, but one that has become more delicate. Employees are described as one of the most important stakeholder groups, especially during uncertainty. At the same time, internal communication now has to navigate political polarisation, regulatory sensitivity, DEI-related scrutiny, and the risk that different employee groups may interpret corporate messages very differently.

    The report therefore points to a more cautious, “sanitised” form of transparency. Companies may still communicate openly, but in ways designed to avoid partisan signalling or unnecessary exposure. The authors recommend mapping internal stakeholder intersections and using tools such as message testing to understand differences within the employee base.

    AI is presented as a practical accelerator for the corporate affairs function. The report says AI is being used for tasks such as preparing Q&As, analysing large volumes of stakeholder content, vetting influencers, monitoring media and misinformation, supporting strategic planning, and improving data analysis. Rather than presenting AI mainly as a replacement threat, the report frames it as a way to free communications professionals from routine work and move them towards more strategic advisory roles.

    However, the report also makes clear that AI adoption is a change-management issue. Teams need clarity on what should remain human-led, what can be AI-assisted, and what ethical guardrails are needed around bias, accuracy, and appropriate use.

    Overall conclusion

    The report’s main message is that the CCAO/CCO mandate is expanding from communications execution to enterprise-level judgement. Corporate affairs leaders are being asked to help companies interpret volatility, anticipate risk, advise CEOs, manage political exposure, support employees, use AI responsibly, and convert stakeholder intelligence into business decisions.

    Its most important contribution is the framing of corporate affairs as a foresight function. Its main limitation is methodological: while the qualitative design is described in some detail, the report does not clearly specify the number of interviewees, which makes it harder to judge the breadth of the evidence base.

  • The Ipsos AI Monitor 2025 by Ipsos

    The Ipsos AI Monitor 2025 by Ipsos

    About the paper

    The paper is a 30-country survey about public understanding of AI, trust, perceived risks, and expectations for AI’s impact on work, content, brands, economies and everyday life.

    It is original survey research conducted by Ipsos via its Global Advisor online platform and, in India, its IndiaBus platform, between 21 March and 4 April 2025, with 23,216 adults across 30 countries; India used a mixed face-to-face and online approach.

    The methodology is clear, but Ipsos notes that some country samples are more “connected” than nationally representative, and that the 30-country average is an unweighted average across markets rather than a population-adjusted global figure.

    Length: 57 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.ipsos.com/en-dk/ipsos-ai-monitor-2025

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central tension in public attitudes towards AI?

    The report’s central argument is that public opinion on AI is defined by a tension Ipsos calls the “Wonder and the Worry of AI”. People recognise AI’s potential and expect it to become embedded in many areas of life, but they also feel nervous about its consequences.

    At the 30-country average level, 52% say AI products and services make them excited, while 53% say they make them nervous. That means excitement and anxiety are not opposing camps so much as overlapping reactions: many people appear to hold both views at once.

    This tension is also geographically uneven. The Anglosphere — the US, Great Britain, Canada, Ireland and Australia — is described as more nervous than excited. European markets sit in a middle zone, with moderate excitement and less intense nervousness. Several South-East Asian markets are much more positive, while Japan is presented as an outlier: neither especially excited nor especially nervous.

    The broader meaning is that AI is not being received as a simple “innovation story”. People expect progress, but they are not automatically confident that the benefits will be fairly distributed, responsibly governed, or socially benign.

    2. How much do people understand AI, and how does knowledge vary by country?

    A majority say they understand AI at a general level, but fewer say they understand where AI is actually being used.

    Across the 30 countries, 67% agree that they have a good understanding of what artificial intelligence is. However, only 52% say they know which types of products and services use AI. That gap matters: people may feel familiar with AI as a concept while still being unsure where it is embedded in everyday services.

    There are large country differences. Indonesia, Thailand and South Africa are among the highest on claimed understanding of AI, while Japan is lowest. For knowing which products and services use AI, Indonesia and Thailand again rank high, while Belgium, Japan and Canada are at the lower end.

    This suggests that “AI literacy” is not just a question of awareness. The public may know the term, recognise the general idea, and still lack practical understanding of where AI is operating in search, marketing, recruitment, news, advertising, disinformation, customer service or workplace tools.

    3. What does the report reveal about trust in AI, companies and governments?

    Trust is one of the report’s most important fault lines. People are not simply asking whether AI is useful; they are asking who controls it, who regulates it, and whether organisations using it can be trusted.

    Only 48% across the 30-country average say they trust companies using AI to protect their personal data. Trust is much higher in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and India, while Sweden, Canada, Japan, France and the United States sit much lower. The net trust measure is only slightly positive at the global country average level, which signals a fragile trust environment for brands and platforms.

    Governments are trusted somewhat more than companies in this context: 54% say they trust their government to regulate AI responsibly. But this also varies dramatically. Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are high-trust markets, while the United States, Japan, Hungary, Great Britain and Canada are much lower. Ipsos suggests that low trust in government regulation may help explain higher nervousness in some markets, especially the US.

    One striking finding is that people say they trust AI more than people not to discriminate or show bias. At the 30-country average, 54% trust AI not to discriminate or show bias, compared with 45% who trust people not to discriminate or show bias. That does not mean people think AI is neutral; rather, it suggests that public trust in human fairness is also weak.

    The strongest trust-related consensus is disclosure. Seventy-nine per cent agree that products and services using AI should have to disclose that use. This is one of the clearest implications for organisations: transparency is not a niche concern but a mainstream expectation.

    4. How do people feel about AI-generated content, advertising and brand use?

    The report shows a clear public distinction between expecting AI-generated content and preferring it. People believe AI will be widely used, but they still prefer human-created content in most cases.

    For example, 79% think AI is likely to be used for online search results, and only 28% say they are uncomfortable with that use. That suggests search may be one of the more socially acceptable AI applications. By contrast, people are much more uncomfortable with AI-generated political ads, AI-written news stories, AI screening job applicants, and AI used to create or target disinformation.

    When asked about content preferences, the public consistently favours human-driven content. Seventy per cent prefer human-driven online news articles or websites; 71% prefer human-driven photojournalism; 67% prefer human-driven movies; 62% prefer human-driven advertising; and 60% prefer human-driven customer marketing websites.

    For brands, the picture is mixed and potentially risky. People are split on whether AI use would make them trust companies more or less. At the 30-country average, AI-enhanced product images produce 34% more trust and 38% distrust; AI-written product descriptions produce 33% more trust and 42% distrust; AI-created advertising images or video produce 30% more trust and 38% distrust; and AI-written product reviews produce 29% more trust and 36% distrust.

    The implication is that AI use in marketing is not automatically reputationally damaging, but it is not automatically efficiency-positive either. Brands may gain from AI where it improves usefulness, speed or relevance, but they risk distrust when AI is perceived as deceptive, synthetic, manipulative or insufficiently disclosed.

    5. What future impact do people expect AI to have on jobs, economies and everyday life?

    People expect AI to become more important in daily life, but their expectations are uneven across domains.

    A majority already feel AI has affected them: 52% say AI products and services have profoundly changed their daily life in the past three to five years. Looking ahead, 67% say AI will profoundly change their daily life in the next three to five years. So AI is not viewed as speculative; it is already part of people’s lived experience and expected to intensify.

    On work, the findings are ambivalent. Globally, 59% think AI is likely to change how they do their current job in the next five years, but only 36% think it is likely to replace their current job. Even more importantly, people are more optimistic about their own job than about the wider labour market. Among those with a job, 38% think AI will make their own job better, while 16% think it will make it worse. But for the job market overall, only 31% think AI will make it better, while 35% think it will make it worse.

    This “my job versus the job market” distinction is one of the report’s most useful insights. People may believe they personally can adapt, benefit or remain protected, while still worrying about broader labour disruption.

    The same pattern appears in other future-facing areas. People are optimistic that AI will improve efficiency: 55% say it will make the amount of time it takes to get things done better, compared with only 10% who say worse. They are also more positive than negative about entertainment options and health. But they are much more concerned about disinformation: only 29% think AI will make the amount of disinformation on the internet better, while 40% think it will make it worse.

    Economically, the global country average is cautiously positive: 34% think AI will improve their country’s economy, while 23% think it will worsen it. Ipsos argues that countries most excited about AI tend to be countries where people are also more likely to believe AI will benefit the economy. In other words, enthusiasm appears tied not only to technology itself, but to whether people believe AI will produce visible, shared economic benefits.

  • Future of IC Profession Survey by Institute of Internal Communication

    Future of IC Profession Survey by Institute of Internal Communication

    About the paper

    The report examines how internal communication professionals view the current state and future direction of their profession, with a focus on strategic responsibilities, skills gaps, career progression, and the rise of “shadow communication” roles.

    It is original survey research based on an online questionnaire fielded in March 2025, with 303 respondents; the data is mainly UK-based, though it also includes participants from other parts of Europe, North America and a small number from other regions.

    The methodology is clearly stated, though the report does not specify sampling method beyond the online survey format.

    Length: 29 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.ioic.org.uk/resource/new-ioic-report-reveals-evolving-role-of-internal-communication-professionals.html

    Core Insights

    1. How does the report argue that the internal communication profession is changing?

    The report’s core argument is that internal communication is moving beyond a mainly tactical delivery function and becoming a more strategic organisational role. It presents IC as increasingly tied to change, leadership, transformation, trust, resilience and organisational performance, rather than simply channels, content and campaigns. The introduction says IC is “increasingly seen as a strategic enabler of organisational success,” while the conclusion describes it as “fast becoming a critical driver of organisational performance.”

    At the same time, the report frames this change as double-edged. On the one hand, the profession is finally gaining the strategic access and recognition many practitioners have long wanted. On the other hand, that expansion of remit is happening faster than support, resourcing and development are catching up. The executive summary is explicit that many practitioners are now asked to contribute at a strategic level, but feel “ill-equipped, under-resourced and under-appreciated.”

    The report also places this shift in a wider context: AI and automation, digital transformation, remote and hybrid work, wellbeing pressures, economic uncertainty and social fragmentation are all reshaping the operating environment. In that setting, IC is no longer presented as a support service on the sidelines. It is shown as central to helping organisations maintain alignment, trust and human connection under pressure. That is the report’s main interpretive lens: IC matters more than before because organisations are harder to hold together than before.

    2. What evidence does the report provide that internal communication is becoming more strategic?

    The strongest evidence comes from the reported changes in responsibilities over the last year. The report says 56% of respondents saw an increase in change communication duties, 51% in digital transformation responsibilities, and 34% were asked to advise senior leadership more frequently. It also notes that one-third were being asked to do more influencing and advising, and that leaders increasingly see IC as a strategically important function.

    The charts on pages 9 and 10 reinforce that point visually and numerically. They show that the biggest growth areas are not classic production tasks but organisational change, digital transformation, data and analysis, leadership communication, listening, and senior-leader advising. Even where some traditional tasks remain important, the growth is disproportionately in areas associated with strategic judgement, insight and influence rather than message execution alone.

    Another useful signal is the report’s discussion of what is not changing much. Core activities such as communication planning, editing/writing/storytelling and communication strategy still dominate current roles, but practitioners now report managing an average of 15 different aspects of internal communication. That suggests the strategic layer is being added on top of an already broad tactical workload, rather than replacing it. In other words, the profession is not shedding delivery work; it is accumulating strategic work on top of it.

    This matters because the report is not simply saying IC professionals want to be strategic. It is saying organisations are already treating them more strategically. That is a major claim, and the evidence for it is fairly consistent across the report.

    3. What are the main pressures, capability gaps and morale problems affecting IC professionals?

    The report paints a picture of a profession under strain. The pressure starts with workload breadth: respondents report handling an average of 15 areas of responsibility, and the report repeatedly suggests that many are stretched too thinly to create the space for higher-value strategic work. The problem is therefore not only volume, but also role sprawl.

    The capability gap is another major theme. Only 30% of respondents in the introduction say they feel fully equipped with the necessary skills for their current roles, while later the skills section says only one in three believe they currently possess all the skills needed. The areas most often identified for development are strategic thinking, influencing, digital literacy, data literacy and change communication, with AI and digital proficiency especially prominent. The report clearly sees the future IC role as more insight-driven and technology-enabled than many professionals currently feel ready for.

    The morale findings make the picture more serious. Fewer than half say they feel happy, fulfilled or appreciated, while the report states that 80% express negative feelings about their work overall. On page 11, 51% say they feel stretched, 41% frustrated, and 37% stressed. The report interprets this not as ordinary job dissatisfaction but as a potential motivation crisis within the profession.

    The surrounding pressures help explain why. AI and automation are identified by 84% as the biggest emerging trend affecting the profession; wellbeing and burnout risk follow at 64%, and remote/hybrid work at 63%. Meanwhile, the main role challenges reported include rapid and continuous change, budget and resource constraints, the perceived value of internal communication, measurement/data, leadership buy-in, and communication noise. Together, these findings suggest that IC professionals are being asked to lead through uncertainty while also trying to justify their value, learn new tools, and absorb emotional labour.

    A particularly revealing tension in the report is that technological change is described as both promising and destabilising. Some respondents see AI as a way to reduce time spent on planning, analysis and writing so they can focus more on strategic and human work. But others worry it will increase expectations that they do more, faster, with fewer resources. So the technology story here is not techno-optimism; it is capacity anxiety.

    4. Why does career progression emerge as such a significant issue in the report?

    Career progression matters so much in the report because it acts as the point where ambition, recognition, skills and retention all collide. The introduction says 40% are uncertain about their career trajectory and around one in six intend to transition out of IC. Later sections expand this by showing that the biggest barrier to progression is the availability of suitable roles, cited by 64%, followed by confidence/imposter syndrome at 49% and work/life balance at 35%.

    The report also suggests that the issue is structural, not merely personal. Only around 39% feel there are clear opportunities for career prospects and progression within the IC profession, and only around four in ten feel they receive adequate training to keep pace with technological changes. It goes further by saying that IC careers are not well understood or adequately supported within many organisations. That means the profession is not just lacking openings; it is lacking clearly legible development pathways.

    This becomes even more important because the profession is clearly evolving. If the job is becoming more strategic, then career systems also need to evolve to reflect new specialisms and senior pathways. The report notes that many respondents want networking opportunities, career coaching, development courses and mentorship. It also highlights interest in deep specialism, not just upward promotion. That implies a profession that is maturing and differentiating, but whose career infrastructure has not fully matured with it.

    The report’s mention of the IoIC Profession Map is therefore significant. Awareness is high at 71%, but active usage is only around one-third, with just over half planning to use it. This suggests that the profession does have a development framework, but it is not yet embedded strongly enough in day-to-day career planning. So the report is implicitly arguing that clearer professional architecture is needed if the field wants to retain talent and convert strategic demand into sustainable careers.

    5. What does the rise of “shadow communication” imply for the future role and value of internal communication?

    The rise of shadow communication is one of the most strategically interesting findings in the whole report. It refers to communication activity increasingly being carried out by people outside the formal IC function. Almost two-thirds, 63%, report an increase in such activity, and the report identifies HR and operations as particularly active, followed by IT, leadership and team managers.

    The report’s view is nuanced. It acknowledges that decentralised communication can improve agility and relevance because people closer to the audience may communicate faster and more directly. But it is much more concerned with the downside: fragmentation, inconsistent messaging, misuse of channels, duplication of effort, confusion about credible information, and a weakening of internal communication’s strategic voice. In effect, shadow communication is presented as both a symptom of IC’s growing relevance and a threat to its coherence.

    This has a deeper implication for the profession’s future role. If communication work is spreading across the organisation, the IC function cannot define its value only as “the team that sends messages”. Its future value lies more in governance, coaching, partnership-building, standards, sense-making and strategic enablement. The report says internal communicators are in a prime position to coach others, enable them strategically, and preserve organisational voice and tone. That is a more distributed model of authority: less ownership of every output, more stewardship of the overall communication system.

    That is why the recommendations place so much emphasis on advocacy, clearer guidelines, stronger cross-functional relationships and support for colleagues outside IC. The report is effectively arguing that if shadow communication is now a fact of organisational life, then IC professionals must protect their relevance not by trying to monopolise communication, but by becoming the people who make organisation-wide communication more aligned, credible and effective. That is a subtle but important repositioning of the function.

  • Trends – Artificial Intelligence by BOND

    Trends – Artificial Intelligence by BOND

    About the paper

    The report is a mixed-methods, chart-led secondary analysis of artificial intelligence trends, compiled by BOND from a wide range of public and private company data, market research, government sources and additional non-public insights.

    It does not present one unified survey or a single fieldwork sample, so the total number of respondents, cases or participants is not clearly specified in the report; those figures vary by source and chart.

    The geographic scope is global, with a strong emphasis on the United States and China, alongside regional and country-level comparisons.

    BOND Capital and Mary Meeker have not released AI trend reports in years other than 2025. The 2025 “Trends – Artificial Intelligence” edition marked a revival of Meeker’s trend series after a six-year gap, evolving from her famous annual “Internet Trends” reports that ran from 1995 to 2019

    Length: 340 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.bondcap.com/reports/tai

    Core Insights

    1) Why does the report argue that AI change is happening faster than ever?

    The report’s central argument is that AI is not simply another technology cycle but a compounding force built on top of existing internet infrastructure, massive digital datasets, better chips, improving models and intense capital deployment. BOND presents AI as accelerating faster than earlier technology waves because the rails were already in place: billions of connected users, decades of data accumulation and a ready-made global digital distribution system. That is why the report repeatedly frames the current moment as unprecedented in pace and scope, spanning technical, financial, social, physical and geopolitical change all at once.

    It also argues that AI differs from earlier waves because it arrived into a world that was already organised, connected and digitally mature. In the report’s telling, the internet took years to build the conditions for mass diffusion, whereas generative AI could scale immediately on top of them. This makes AI both a product of prior technological compounding and a new multiplier on top of it. The report therefore treats AI as a step-change in how information is accessed, created and distributed, rather than as a simple continuation of software history.

    A further reason the report sees change as unusually fast is that the race is not only commercial but geopolitical. It repeatedly links AI progress to strategic competition, especially between the US and China, and suggests that this rivalry is intensifying investment, product release cycles and the urgency of deployment. In that sense, speed is presented not just as a market phenomenon but as a consequence of state-level and corporate competition feeding each other.

    2) What evidence does the report provide that AI adoption and usage are scaling at an exceptional rate?

    The report uses ChatGPT as its clearest proxy for AI adoption and argues that its scale-up has been historically extraordinary. One headline figure is that ChatGPT reached an estimated 800 million weekly active users by April 2025. Another is that BOND compares ChatGPT’s path to 100 million users with earlier consumer platforms and concludes that it reached that threshold far faster than services such as Netflix, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. The argument is straightforward: AI is not merely growing quickly; it is outpacing the adoption curves of landmark digital products.

    The report also stresses how global that adoption is. One of its most striking comparisons is that around 90% of ChatGPT app users were outside North America by year three, whereas the internet took roughly 23 years to reach a similar share. That comparison underpins one of the report’s biggest claims: unlike earlier foundational technologies that spread outwards from the US over a long period, AI reached a global audience almost immediately. The geographic focus here is explicitly worldwide, though the report notes that availability constraints in places such as China affect the underlying app data.

    Beyond end users, the report points to rising developer adoption and ecosystem participation. It highlights 6 million developers in NVIDIA’s ecosystem and says Google reported more than 7 million developers building with Gemini, up fivefold year on year. This matters because the report is not only describing consumer enthusiasm; it is also arguing that the builder base around AI is widening quickly, which in turn supports more products, more infrastructure demand and more downstream usage.

    3) How does the report explain the economics of AI, especially the tension between rising investment and falling usage costs?

    A key theme in the report is that AI economics are pulling in two directions at once. On one side, training and infrastructure costs are high and still rising. BOND highlights very large capital expenditure by major US technology firms and shows the “Big Six” reaching $212 billion in capex in 2024, up 63% year on year. That supports the report’s broader claim that AI requires enormous spending on compute, data centres and model development.

    On the other side, the report argues that the cost of using AI is falling sharply for customers and developers. Its framing is that while frontier training remains expensive, inference is becoming cheaper and cheaper, which leads to wider access, more experimentation and increasing convergence in model performance. In other words, the barriers to building frontier systems remain high, but the barriers to using AI tools are falling. That combination is central to the report’s optimism about continued adoption.

    The report also makes clear that monetisation remains unresolved. One illustrative chart compares estimated revenue and compute expense for a leading US-based AI LLM company and shows strong revenue growth alongside very large compute losses. That supports a more nuanced economic reading: AI demand is real, but profitability is not yet settled. The report therefore presents the current phase as one in which consumers and enterprise users are benefiting from rapid improvement and falling usage costs, while producers are still absorbing heavy investment burdens.

    4) What does the report suggest about competition, monetisation and the global balance of power in AI?

    The report presents competition in AI as both fierce and structurally destabilising. It emphasises that incumbents, startups, open-source communities and state-backed ecosystems are all competing at once. One reason monetisation looks fragile, in BOND’s view, is that open-source momentum and Chinese advances are placing pressure on the pricing power and defensibility of leading US model providers. The report therefore does not portray the current leaders as secure winners. Instead, it describes a market in which advantage can erode quickly.

    That point becomes especially clear in its competitive charts. BOND shows relative desktop user-share shifts across leading LLMs and highlights the emergence of a Chinese model within a short period. It also repeatedly returns to US–China rivalry as a defining strategic frame, suggesting that AI leadership may translate into broader geopolitical influence. In this sense, the report sees AI not just as a commercial contest over products and margins, but as a contest over standards, platforms and long-term international dependence.

    At the same time, the report is not purely alarmist. Its perspective is broadly pro-innovation and cautiously optimistic. It argues that intense competition may accelerate progress, widen access and keep the field dynamic, even if it also increases uncertainty. But its assumptions are clear: AI is now a strategic domain, leadership matters, and no company or country can assume its position is fixed.

    5) What broader implications does the report identify for work, society and the physical world?

    The report argues that AI is moving beyond chatbots and software assistance into the “physical world” and the workplace. One example it uses is autonomous mobility in San Francisco, where an autonomous taxi provider’s operating-zone market share rises sharply over the period shown. That chart is meant to illustrate that AI is no longer confined to digital interfaces; it is beginning to reshape real-world services, logistics and robotics-related applications.

    On work, the report says change is already visible rather than merely speculative. A chart on US IT jobs shows AI-related postings rising strongly while non-AI postings decline over the same indexed period. The implication is not simply that more technology jobs are appearing, but that the composition of demand is changing. BOND’s broader argument is that AI is likely to reconfigure the nature of work, the skills that employers value and the kinds of roles that expand or contract.

    The report also addresses social implications in a wider sense. It includes a benefits-and-risks section that acknowledges the promise of AI for productivity, science and material abundance, while also flagging risks such as surveillance, persuasion, employment disruption, biased decision-making, cybersecurity problems and safety-critical misuse. That matters because the report is not making a narrow market-growth case. It is arguing that AI is becoming a civilisation-scale force whose effects will be economic, political and societal at the same time.

    Taken together, the report’s conclusion is that AI’s significance lies in its breadth. It is changing information flows, business competition, labour demand, public power and physical systems all at once. That is why BOND treats this moment less as a discrete technology story and more as a large-scale transformation in how economies and societies operate.

  • Reimagining Tomorrow by Global Alliance for PR and Communication Management

    Reimagining Tomorrow by Global Alliance for PR and Communication Management

    About the paper

    The report is an original global survey of how PR and communication professionals are adopting, governing, and thinking about AI in their work.

    It is based on 473 responses collected between 18 February and 17 April 2025, using a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended survey questions; the geographic scope is global, with respondents from Africa, EMENA, North America, Australia/New Zealand, Asia-Pacific, and South and Central America, although the report notes self-selection bias, regional variation, and an overrepresentation of smaller organisations.

    Length: 21 pages

    More information / download:
    https://globalalliancepr.org/reimagining-tomorrow-ai-in-pr-and-communication-management/

    Core Insights

    1) What is the central argument of the report about AI in PR and communication management?

    The core argument is that AI adoption is already widespread in the profession, but governance, ethics, training, and strategic leadership have not kept pace. The report presents PR and communication as a profession at an inflection point: practitioners are using AI enthusiastically, yet the structures needed to guide that use responsibly are still underdeveloped. On page 3, the report’s summary makes this tension very clear: 91% are allowed to use AI, but only 39.4% of organisations have responsible AI frameworks, and 38.3% have no constraints at all. It also argues that the profession’s most valuable future contribution is not merely technical implementation, but shaping ethical frameworks, governance structures, and stakeholder communication about AI.

    The interpretive section on page 4 pushes that point further. It says the real opportunity for PR and communication teams is to elevate their strategic role by helping organisations develop and implement responsible AI, rather than remaining focused on tactical use. In other words, the report is not anti-AI; it is pro-adoption but strongly argues that adoption without guardrails is risky and professionally shortsighted.

    2) What does the survey reveal about how widely AI is being used, and how organisations are managing that use?

    The survey shows that AI use is already mainstream in the field. According to the report, 91% of respondents say AI is allowed in their organisations, and among the 9% who say it is not allowed, 52.8% admit they use it anyway as “shadow AI.” That alone suggests that AI adoption is not waiting for formal permission structures. Access is also relatively broad: 65.2% say all team members in PR and communication have access, while 24.3% say access is restricted to select individuals and 10.5% say it is limited to leaders only.

    At the same time, management of AI is patchy. The report says 38.3% of organisations have no constraints or restrictions in place, 37.5% rely on approved company-wide tools, 35.8% allow staff to explore freely, and only 18.3% have formal processes for AI tool recommendation and approval. Organisational support is also middling: the average support rating for implementation is just 2.78 out of 5, which the report explicitly describes as moderate but insufficient. That is an important finding because it shows that permission to use AI is much more common than meaningful support for using it well.

    So the picture is not one of controlled institutional rollout. It is closer to democratised but uneven adoption: people have access, many are experimenting, but the quality of support, governance, and process is inconsistent.

    3) Where is the biggest gap between current AI practice and what PR professionals believe their role should be?

    The biggest gap lies between tactical activity and strategic responsibility. The report says PR and communication professionals see governance and ethics as their top priorities: 33.3% rank formal AI governance structures as the number one priority, and 27.3% rank training for ethical, safe, and transparent AI use as the top priority. Yet their actual involvement patterns do not fully reflect those priorities. The report’s alignment analysis shows that teams are often more involved in technical implementation than in the activities they themselves consider most strategically important.

    This mismatch is described in detail on page 9. The report highlights the largest misalignments in lower-value technical areas such as AI certification programmes, where the gap is 80.6%, and advising on complex prompts and use cases, where the gap is 60.4%. By contrast, the smaller gaps are in ethical AI use and formal AI governance, which suggests these are the areas closest to the profession’s intended role. The report interprets this as a resource allocation problem: teams are spending time where they are currently needed, but not necessarily where they believe they create the most value.

    This matters because it reframes the profession’s future. The report is effectively saying that PR should not define its AI contribution by being good at prompts or faster outputs. It should define it by governance, ethics, risk, literacy, stakeholder engagement, and strategic counsel.

    4) What specific weaknesses does the report identify in governance, confidence, and stakeholder communication?

    The report identifies three especially important weaknesses.

    First, governance remains thin.

    Only 39.4% of organisations have a responsible AI guideline, policy, or framework. Even where such frameworks exist, they are far from universal, and coverage is uneven. Among organisations that do have guidelines, the most common elements are ethics/law, governance/standards, security/privacy, and risk/reputation. The report also notes that because of skip logic, those framework-content percentages apply only to the subset of respondents whose organisations already have guidelines, not to the entire sample.

    Second, ethical confidence is limited.

    Only 26.2% say they feel very confident evaluating the ethical implications of AI in their roles; 60.5% are only somewhat confident, and 13.3% are not confident. The report treats this as a major training opportunity, not a marginal issue. That reading is reinforced by respondents’ own definitions of responsible AI, which emphasise ethics, beneficial use, human oversight, verification, and transparency.

    Third, stakeholder communication is surprisingly weak.

    Given that communication is the profession’s core function, the report finds it striking that fewer than half communicate about responsible AI approaches to stakeholders, 46.9% communicate about AI ethics, and only 35.6% communicate about AI governance structures. The most common topic communicated is simply how to use AI tools, at 53.6%, which the report interprets as evidence of a tactical rather than strategic focus. This is one of the report’s sharpest critiques: PR professionals are not yet communicating about AI in the way their own strategic position would suggest they should.

    5) What broader implications does the report draw for the future of the profession?

    The report suggests that AI will reshape the profession significantly over the next five years, pushing it away from routine production work and towards more strategic, advisory, and governance-oriented roles. Respondents predict shifts “from content creator to content facilitator,” more focus on strategy, more automation of routine tasks, possible workforce reduction, increasing regulatory complexity, and a risk of depersonalisation or diminished creativity.

    The concern side is equally strong. On page 13, respondents describe the main threats as job displacement, reduced creativity, authenticity problems, misinformation, and loss of human interaction. That combination shows the profession is not simply optimistic about efficiency gains; it is also worried about relevance, trust, and the erosion of distinctly human value.

    The report’s conclusion is that the profession can either be diminished by AI or elevated by it. Elevation depends on moving beyond content creation, building stronger governance and ethical frameworks, investing in training, communicating more actively with stakeholders, and positioning PR as a strategic advisor on responsible AI implementation across the organisation. Its recommendations to professionals and organisations alike all point in that direction. So the deeper implication is not just that AI will change communications work, but that it may redefine what counts as valuable communications leadership in the first place.

  • Communicating with Robots, Connecting to People by the Scriptorium Initiative

    Communicating with Robots, Connecting to People by the Scriptorium Initiative

    About the paper

    The whitepaper argues that AI will fundamentally reshape corporate communications over the next decade, especially through synthetic stakeholders, predictive systems, mass personalisation, and a renewed premium on human authenticity.

    Methodologically, it appears to be an expert whitepaper built on secondary analysis and illustrative examples rather than original empirical research; no fieldwork method, sample size, timeframe for data collection, or respondent base is clearly specified.

    The geographic focus is framed as global, but the evidence cited draws from a mix of U.S.-centric examples and selected international references, so the precise geographic boundaries of the underlying data are not clearly specified in the report.

    Length: 14 pages

    More information / download:
    https://page.org/knowledge-base/communicating-with-robots-connecting-to-people-nanne-bos-aegon/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the whitepaper’s central argument about how AI will change corporate communications?

    The central argument is that AI will not merely improve existing communication workflows but will transform the entire logic of corporate communications. The paper says the profession has already moved beyond asking whether AI will change communications and must instead focus on how that change will unfold. It frames AI as both a technological and geopolitical force, and suggests that the speed, scale, and sophistication of communication will be radically altered by systems such as GPT-4, Claude, and Grok.

    At the same time, the paper insists that the core purpose of corporate communications will remain stable. It explicitly says that communicators will still need to build trust, deepen understanding with stakeholders, maintain licence to operate, and influence behaviour. In other words, the mission stays the same, but the mechanisms and operating environment change dramatically.

    The whitepaper therefore presents AI not as a side issue or a tool trend, but as a structural shift that changes who receives messages, how they are interpreted, how fast they circulate, and what communicators are actually responsible for. Its five predictions are meant as a framework for navigating that transition while staying anchored in enduring communication goals.

    2. What does the paper mean by “synthetic stakeholders”, and why does it see them as so significant?

    The idea of “synthetic stakeholders” is one of the paper’s most important claims. It argues that, by the mid-2030s, people will increasingly rely on personal AI agents as their main interface with organisations. These agents will not simply summarise information; they will filter, verify, interpret, negotiate, and sometimes even decide on behalf of the human stakeholder. That means journalists, investors, employees, regulators, and customers may no longer engage with corporate communication directly, but through AI intermediaries.

    The report sees this as significant because it changes the locus of trust. Instead of stakeholders primarily trusting brands, institutions, or traditional media, they may trust their own AI agents more. That has major implications for reputation and influence. If AI agents become the gatekeepers of credibility, then communicators must create messages that are readable, interpretable, and verifiable by machines as well as by humans.

    The paper also links synthetic stakeholders to the “death of the single narrative”. It argues that AI agents will personalise information so extensively that there will no longer be one broadly shared version of a corporate story. Different stakeholders may receive materially different framings based on personal history, biases, preferences, and risk profiles. The implication is that communication becomes less about controlling one public narrative and more about maintaining coherence and credibility across many parallel, AI-mediated realities.

    3. How does the whitepaper describe the shift from mass communication to mass conversations and from reactive to predictive communications?

    The paper’s second and third predictions work together. First, it says the old broadcast model of one-to-many messaging is ending. In its place, organisations will engage in “mass conversations”: millions of simultaneous, AI-mediated, highly personalised interactions with stakeholders. These conversations will supposedly be context-aware, emotionally intelligent, and adapted to each person’s needs, role, behaviour, and preferences. Investors, employees, and customers would all receive tailored communication rather than standardised messages.

    This matters because the communicator’s role changes from crafting a single message to designing adaptive systems. The report suggests future communicators will define narrative models, supervise tone calibration, and audit huge numbers of micro-interactions. So communication becomes less a matter of publishing and more a matter of orchestrating intelligent, ongoing relationship management at scale.

    The move from reactive to predictive communications goes even further. The paper argues that AI will enable organisations to anticipate reputational risks, stakeholder disengagement, morale problems, or regulatory friction before they are visible through conventional means. It imagines AI systems that simulate possible stakeholder reactions, run communication scenarios in parallel, forecast trust impact, and identify likely virality or misinformation risks. In this model, communications becomes a foresight function rather than just a response function.

    Taken together, these two predictions describe a future in which corporate communication is continuous, personalised, and anticipatory. The communicator is recast as a strategist and overseer of adaptive systems, rather than primarily as a writer, spokesperson, or campaign manager.

    4. Why does the paper argue that human authenticity will become more valuable as AI becomes more powerful?

    The paper’s fourth prediction is that AI abundance will increase, not reduce, the value of human authenticity. Its reasoning is straightforward: as generative AI floods the information environment with cheap, abundant, low-value content, audiences will become more resistant to anything that feels synthetic or manipulative. The report refers to this as a coming “synthetic content crisis” and says AI filters will increasingly screen out content that lacks originality, emotional value, or resonance.

    In response, the communication that cuts through will be the communication that feels genuinely human. The paper highlights three qualities that will matter most: emotional depth, ethical clarity, and human voice. It argues that trust will increasingly attach to visible human sincerity rather than to polished, scaled, anonymous messaging. This is why it says communicators will become “custodians of authenticity” in a synthetic age.

    Importantly, the whitepaper does not frame this as an anti-AI argument. Instead, it advances the idea of “co-intelligence”: AI handles scale, complexity, translation, and real-time personalisation, while humans contribute judgment, moral reasoning, emotional nuance, vulnerability, and authenticity. So the paper’s conclusion is not that AI replaces human communication, but that the distinctively human elements become more strategically valuable as machine-generated communication proliferates.

    5. What are the report’s main implications for the future role, structure, and ethics of the communications function?

    The paper argues that the communications function will become AI-native. That means the department of the future will look very different from the traditional press-office or corporate affairs structure. Routine content production will increasingly be automated, while human professionals move into roles focused on oversight, orchestration, ethics, and strategic narrative design.

    It predicts new specialist roles such as:

    • AI Narrative Designers
    • Predictive Strategists
    • Communication Ethicists
    • and even Chief Narrative Intelligence Officers.

    It also says existing silos between internal communication, PR, investor relations, and brand strategy will weaken, giving way to a more unified narrative function powered by integrated AI systems. Teams may become smaller in headcount but more specialised in capabilities, drawing on disciplines such as linguistics, data science, behavioural psychology, and ethics.

    Ethics is a major theme here. The report repeatedly warns that predictive communications and AI-generated influence raise serious questions about manipulation, informed consent, transparency, and accountability. It therefore argues that strong governance frameworks will be essential, including explainable AI, clarity about data sources and model logic, and disclosure around synthetic humans or AI-generated messages. High-stakes moments such as layoffs, mergers, or crises are still presented as fundamentally human occasions in which AI should assist rather than replace human communicators.

    The deeper implication is that the future communicator is not just a better prompt writer or AI user. The role becomes more strategic, more cross-functional, and more ethically exposed. The paper’s perspective is that AI raises the bar for human communicators: they will need more judgment, more empathy, and more moral authority, not less.

  • State of Global Workforce 2025 by Gallup

    State of Global Workforce 2025 by Gallup

    About the paper

    The report synthesises Gallup’s annual global employee-experience research, combining Gallup World Poll data with additional random samples of working populations in the United States and an opt-in web component for China.

    It is an original quantitative research report based on surveys of employed adults aged 15+; the 2024 findings draw on 227,347 employed respondents collected from April to December 2024, within a wider 2009–2024 trend dataset of 5,490,517 respondents across more than 160 countries and areas.

    Methodological details are clearly stated, though some country results are suppressed where sample sizes are too small.

    Length: 141 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.gallup.com/file/workplace/659528/state-of-the-global-workplace-2025-download.pdf

    Core Insights

    1) What is the central argument of the report about the state of the global workplace in 2025?

    Gallup’s central argument is that the global workplace is at a critical moment: employee engagement and wellbeing have deteriorated just as organisations are entering a period of major transformation driven by AI and broader workplace disruption. The report frames this as a leadership challenge rather than a purely economic or technological one. Leaders must decide whether to use this moment to strengthen management, reconnect teams and improve performance, or risk further decline.

    The report’s headline evidence is stark. Global employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, only the second decline in the past 12 years and equal in size to the fall recorded during the year of COVID-19 lockdowns. Gallup estimates that this drop cost the global economy US$438 billion in lost productivity. At the same time, global life evaluation among employees fell to 33%, suggesting that workers’ overall sense of wellbeing has weakened as well.

    So the report is not merely saying that people feel a bit less positive about work. It is arguing that the workplace is becoming more fragile at exactly the point when organisations need resilience, adaptability and trust.

    2) What does the report identify as the main driver of declining engagement and wellbeing?

    Gallup is unusually direct: the main driver is managers. The report says manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, while individual contributor engagement stayed flat at 18%. No other major worker category saw as large a decline. Young managers under 35 saw a five-point drop in engagement, and female managers saw a seven-point drop.

    The same pattern appears in wellbeing. Older managers saw a five-point decline in wellbeing, while female managers again recorded a seven-point drop. Individual contributors, by contrast, improved slightly on life evaluation. Gallup therefore presents managers as the pressure point where workplace strain is showing up first and most intensely.

    The report links this to the accumulation of post-pandemic disruption: retirements and turnover, the hiring boom and bust, rapidly restructured teams, tighter budgets, supply chain issues, changing customer expectations, digital transformation, AI tools, and new employee expectations around flexibility and remote work. Managers sit in the middle of all of that. In Gallup’s telling, they have become the human shock absorbers of organisational change.

    3) Why does manager engagement matter so much for organisational and economic performance?

    Gallup’s answer is that managers are the single biggest determinant of team engagement. The report states that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager. That means problems at management level do not stay there. They cascade downward into team morale, effort, productivity and retention.

    The report stresses that engaged employees are more productive, less absent, better at building customer relationships and more effective at generating results. It also notes that countries with less engaged managers tend to have less engaged individual contributors. So this is not just an internal HR issue. Gallup connects manager disengagement to broader business performance and even GDP growth.

    That is why the report repeatedly warns that if manager engagement keeps falling, the damage will not stop with managers and will not stop with engagement. Gallup presents manager burnout as a leading indicator of wider organisational decline: poorer performance, more absenteeism, more turnover, weaker team cultures and reduced economic output.

    4) What do the global and regional data reveal about the current pattern of employee experience?

    At global level, the picture is mixed but troubling. In 2024, 21% of employees were engaged, 62% not engaged and 17% actively disengaged. Only 33% were classified as thriving in life overall, while 40% reported daily stress, 23% daily sadness and 22% daily loneliness. Half of workers were watching for or actively seeking a new job.

    The regional pattern is highly uneven. On engagement, the highest regional levels were in the United States/Canada and Latin America/Caribbean, both at 31%, while Europe ranked last at 13%. On thriving, Australia/New Zealand led at 56%, followed by Latin America/Caribbean at 54% and the United States/Canada at 52%, while South Asia ranked lowest at 15%. Europe is notable for combining relatively high life evaluation with the lowest engagement, suggesting that people may feel comparatively well in life while still feeling detached from work.

    The emotional pattern is also revealing. Stress is especially high in the United States/Canada, Australia/New Zealand, East Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. Loneliness is highest in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, while anger and sadness are most elevated in South Asia and parts of the Middle East/North Africa. Meanwhile, Europe has the lowest regional engagement but also among the lowest levels of anger and loneliness. This suggests that disengagement is not always accompanied by emotional volatility; in some regions it may look more like resignation or detachment.

    Another notable point is the work-location breakdown. Globally, exclusively remote employees show the highest engagement at 31%, compared with 23% for hybrid workers and 19% for on-site non-remote-capable workers. Hybrid and on-site remote-capable workers have the highest thriving scores at 42%, while fully remote workers report the highest loneliness, sadness and stress. So the report hints that flexibility may boost engagement and wellbeing in some respects, but also carries emotional trade-offs.

    5) What actions does Gallup recommend leaders take in response?

    Gallup’s prescription is focused almost entirely on rebuilding management capability. The report lays out three actions.

    First, ensure all managers receive training. Fewer than half of the world’s managers, 44%, say they have received management training. Gallup argues this is the most achievable intervention and says managers who receive training are half as likely to be actively disengaged as those who do not.

    Second, teach managers effective coaching techniques. Gallup cites evidence that participants in manager training focused on best practices saw up to 22% higher engagement than non-participants, their teams saw engagement rise by up to 18%, and manager performance metrics improved by 20% to 28%, with effects lasting nine to 18 months after training.

    Third, invest in ongoing manager development to improve wellbeing. The report says manager training can raise manager thriving from 28% to 34%, and when that training is paired with active encouragement for development, thriving rises to 50%. Gallup therefore treats manager development not just as a performance tool but as one of the most effective wellbeing investments leaders can make.

    This leads to the report’s broader conclusion: the role of the manager needs to be rethought. Gallup argues that improving manager engagement is the key lever for reversing declining productivity, improving employee wellbeing and unlocking a much larger economic upside. It estimates that if the world’s workplace were fully engaged, US$9.6 trillion could be added to the global economy, equivalent to 9% of global GDP.

    Overall, the report’s message is clear: the workplace problem is not simply that employees are tired or dissatisfied. It is that the management layer is under strain, and unless leaders strengthen it deliberately, the costs will spread through teams, organisations and economies.

  • Moving Ahead – 2025 C-suite Perspectives Study by Padilla

    Moving Ahead – 2025 C-suite Perspectives Study by Padilla

    About the paper

    The paper is a mixed-methods thought leadership report on how senior business leaders are approaching 2025, combining original survey research, executive interviews and desk research.

    Padilla says it surveyed more than 100 C-suite executives and 1,000 employed adults, and interviewed nearly 50 C-suite leaders; the report does not clearly specify the countries covered, so the geographic scope is not clearly specified in the report.

    Length: 12 pages

    More information / download:
    https://padillaco.com/c-suite-perspectives

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the 2025 mindset of C-suite leaders?

    The core argument is that C-suite leaders have moved from recent years of conflict and fatigue into a more determined, forward-looking posture. They are described as “cautiously optimistic” and eager to make progress after years of reacting to disruption, but they are doing so in an environment still marked by uncertainty, mistrust, fragility and political tension. The report frames this as a balancing act: leaders want momentum, but they know the conditions for driving change remain unstable.

    The report also presents this as an evolution over time. In 2022, leaders were “conflicted”; in 2023–24, the mood shifted to “fatigue and focus”; and in 2024–25, the mindset is “moving ahead.” The recap diagram on page 11 makes this progression explicit and shows that the new phase is not about optimism alone, but about trying to capitalise on change resilience, rethink the employee-employer relationship, prepare next leaders and communicate in an era of reduced trust.

    So the report’s main meaning is not merely that leaders feel better. It is that they want to stop managing one crisis after another and start advancing strategy again. But the report is equally clear that progress depends on whether leaders can set direction clearly, manage expectations and prevent what it calls “trust erosion.” If they cannot, forward motion may stall and turnover may continue.

    2. Which pressures and leadership priorities are shaping executive decision-making most strongly in 2025?

    The report says inflation and economic uncertainty remain the top priorities, but the fastest-rising challenges now cluster around technology, security and talent. The page 3 chart shows the biggest year-over-year increases in leadership challenges as determining whether and how to leverage AI (+13), protecting data privacy and security (+11), attracting and retaining talent (+11), adapting to market shifts in consumer behaviour (+8), achieving business performance goals (+7), and modernising technology infrastructure (+7).

    This matters because it shows that the executive agenda is broadening. Leaders are not only worrying about macroeconomic turbulence anymore. They are also dealing with the practical implications of technological change, workforce expectations and business adaptation. The report interprets this as a sign that leaders are ready to “get on with it,” but need to revisit purpose, vision and direction so stakeholders understand what the organisation is trying to do.

    The report also highlights a cluster of leadership qualities rising in importance: confidence, flexibility, humility, stoicism and growth mindset. On page 4, these are presented almost as a new leadership toolkit for the moment. The message is that leaders expect criticism, know they will have to make difficult decisions, and must communicate those decisions in ways that maintain trust among employees, investors, customers and others. In other words, the report assumes that communication ability is no longer a soft extra, but central to leadership effectiveness.

    3. Where does the report identify the biggest perception gaps between leaders and employees?

    The report repeatedly highlights perception gaps between leaders and employees, especially around readiness for change, well-being and political culture at work. These gaps are among the most important findings because they suggest that executive confidence may not be matched by employee experience.

    On change readiness, page 5 shows that 67% of the C-suite believe employees are fully or very ready to embrace and assist with change initiatives, while only 41% of employees say the same about themselves. That is a substantial disconnect. The report’s conclusion is that leaders cannot assume prior change efforts have fully brought employees along; change management and change communication remain essential.

    On well-being, page 6 shows another sharp gap: 50% of the C-suite think employee well-being has improved over the past year, while only 29% of employees agree. The report adds that leaders are puzzled because they believe they have already offered support through mental-health resources and flexibility, whereas employees’ concerns are often tied to broader pressures such as health, living costs and inflation. This implies that organisational interventions alone may not feel sufficient from the employee point of view.

    A third gap concerns politics and dialogue. On page 7, 44% of C-suite leaders think politics are openly discussed among people with opposing views in a constructive way, compared with only 24% of employees. This suggests leaders may overestimate the health of internal discourse. The report then connects this to a broader movement from trust and ambivalence toward scepticism, polarization and even grievance. That is one of the report’s strongest warnings: fragile culture is not just about morale, but about the risk of deeper social fracture inside organisations.

    4. How does the report interpret current shifts in ESG, DEI and AI through a business-strategy lens?

    The report argues that ESG and DEI are being reframed less in moral or idealistic language and more in pragmatic business terms. It says these issues have consistently ranked low as explicit C-suite priorities, yet the outcomes associated with them, such as talent attraction, retention, culture and adaptation to market change, remain important. In other words, the substance still matters even if the framing changes.

    Page 8 is especially revealing. The report says pushback on ESG and DEI is causing some leaders to rethink strategy while others are continuing, sometimes more quietly, and grounding their case in business value. It explicitly calls this an “era of business pragmatism.” The table on that page contrasts “altruism” and “pragmatism,” for example framing sustainability not as leaving the Earth better for future generations, but as ensuring access to clean water needed for products; and framing DEI not simply as fairness, but as necessary for talent and innovation.

    That framing reveals one of the report’s assumptions: in the current climate, strategic legitimacy increasingly depends on proving commercial relevance. The implication is not that values disappear, but that leaders are expected to justify values-led initiatives in operational and economic terms. The report advises companies to tie ESG and DEI clearly to organisational goals, talent strategy, mission and business success, while also considering the downstream effects of any changes in approach or language.

    On AI, the report is similarly pragmatic but more overtly positive. Page 9 says 83% of C-suite respondents are selectively or aggressively adopting AI. Their main motivations are improving the quality of products and services (47%) and keeping pace competitively or gaining advantage (43%). At the same time, employees are more wary, with 24% seeing AI as a moderate or significant threat. So AI is presented as both a strategic imperative and a communication challenge. Leaders may move faster than employees, but if they do not explain the vision and bring people with them, adoption friction will increase.

    5. What are the consequences of all this for leadership communication, succession and organisational momentum?

    The report’s strongest practical conclusion is that communication sits at the centre of execution. Across change, culture, AI, politics and trust, leaders are told to communicate direction clearly, explain difficult choices, use multiple messengers, and help people understand not only what is changing but why. Page 4 even includes the blunt observation that communication is still the most important skillset a leader can have, and that too few leaders possess it.

    This matters because the report links communication directly to trust and buy-in. If employees do not feel heard, if hybrid-work shifts are not explained well, if political tensions are ignored, or if AI strategy is imposed without context, the organisation risks losing momentum. The recurring implication sections throughout the report keep returning to this idea: communication is how leaders convert strategic intent into organisational movement.

    The second major consequence concerns succession and executive stability. On page 10, the report describes an ongoing “Great Executive Resignation,” saying turnover remains at very high levels and that there has been a seven-point increase in leaders stepping back earlier than in the past, to about one in five leaders. It also notes that many next-level leaders do not necessarily want to step into top roles. Among employees aged 52+, 61% want their career or responsibilities to stay the same or be simplified, while only 31% want growth in career or responsibilities. The implication is that succession pipelines are under strain.

    The deeper conclusion is that organisational momentum is now a retention issue as well as a performance issue. Leaders who see progress are more likely to stay; those who do not may step away faster. That means companies need to build leadership capability below the top tier, strengthen communication skills across multiple levels, and create visible forward movement. The report ends by saying leaders want more trust, civility and predictability in 2025, and suggests that those who can “plan and pivot” effectively will be better placed to drive meaningful change and growth.

  • Navigating the future of communication by Burson

    Navigating the future of communication by Burson

    About the paper

    The paper is a forward-looking trends report on how AI, media change, misinformation, data consolidation, Web3, and reputation risk are expected to reshape communications in 2025 and beyond.

    It appears to be a mixed secondary-analysis and thought-leadership report rather than original research: it synthesises external forecasts, surveys, risk reports, media articles, and Burson’s own strategic framing, but does not clearly specify a formal methodology, sample, fieldwork period, or a defined respondent base.

    The geographic scope is partly global and partly U.S.-centred: many headline claims are framed globally, but several examples and the closing policy section focus specifically on the United States.

    Length: 9 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.bursonglobal.com/insights/global/navigating-the-future-of-communications-10-innovation-trends-for-2025-and-beyond

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the future of communications?

    The core argument is that communications is entering a period of accelerated, technology-driven transformation in which AI is not just another tool but the main force reshaping how organisations understand audiences, manage risk, create content, monitor issues, and protect reputation. The report presents this as both a strategic opportunity and a survival challenge: communicators who adapt quickly will become more predictive, data-driven, and resilient, while those who do not risk falling behind in an increasingly volatile environment.

    Burson’s framing is not that one single trend dominates everything, but that several trends are converging at once. AI model improvement, agentic systems, fragmented media, misinformation, explainability, and proactive reputation management all reinforce one another. That means communications is becoming more complex, more technical, and more tightly connected to business strategy. The report repeatedly returns to the idea that communicators must move from reactive messaging to continuous monitoring, predictive analysis, and earlier intervention.

    The conclusion makes this explicit: future success depends on combining data-driven strategy with ethics, adaptability, and human judgement. In other words, the report argues that communications is becoming a more intelligence-led, risk-aware, and technologically mediated function, but one that still depends on trust, authenticity, and human connection.

    2. Which trends does the report identify as most important, and what practical shifts do they imply for communicators?

    The report’s ten trends are: rapid improvement in AI models and computing capacity; the rise of agentic frameworks; a shifting media landscape; data consolidation and intelligence; misinformation as a growing threat; the continuing importance of human expertise; explainable AI; cognitive AI for proactive reputation risk mitigation; convergence between Web3 and generative AI; and the growing importance of proactive reputation management.

    Taken together, these trends imply several practical shifts. First, communicators are expected to become more technologically fluent. The report says they must understand which AI models and tools to use for predictive messaging, crisis management, engagement, and analytics. Second, workflows are likely to become more automated through AI agents, but with a continued need for human oversight and authenticity. Third, media relations and social strategy can no longer focus only on established platforms; communicators need stronger social listening and broader platform awareness as the media environment fragments and becomes more politically charged.

    Fourth, the function becomes more data-intensive. Burson argues that communicators need stronger analytics capabilities and better integration of multiple data sources in order to spot patterns, measure performance, and anticipate issues. Fifth, reputation work becomes more preventive than reactive: predictive analytics, scenario planning, and faster response systems are presented as essential. Finally, the report suggests that communication leaders must build teams that blend AI literacy with strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and crisis judgement. That is a notable shift away from seeing communications mainly as content production or media handling.

    3. What evidence and patterns does the report use to support its view of change?

    The report relies heavily on externally sourced statistics, market forecasts, and selected examples to create a picture of rapid acceleration. For AI, it cites projected global market growth to $2.58 trillion by 2032 and says training compute for leading models has doubled every six months. It also references recent model launches such as GPT-4.5, Gemini 2.5, and Gemini Robotics as evidence that capability is improving fast and expanding into more multimodal and physical-world applications.

    For media and misinformation, it points to Bluesky’s user growth, public concern about AI-driven misinformation, the spread of political deepfakes, and the World Economic Forum’s ranking of misinformation as the top short-term risk. These examples support a broader pattern: the information environment is becoming harder to control, less stable, and more vulnerable to manipulation.

    For data, trust, and reputation, the report cites enterprise adoption of real-time analytics, claims about efficiency gains from AI-driven data consolidation, projected growth in AI-powered risk-mitigation tools, and statistics linking strong reputation to faster crisis recovery and stronger purchase intent. The sector heatmap on page 7 adds another pattern: Burson argues that healthcare, technology, and financial services are likely to feel the strongest immediate impact from these trends, while trust-related issues such as explainability, misinformation, and reputation management matter broadly across sectors. Visually, the report uses charts and a heatmap to reinforce the idea that these changes are measurable, cross-sectoral, and already under way rather than speculative.

    4. What assumptions, perspective, and purpose shape the report?

    The report is clearly written from an industry advisory perspective. Its purpose is not only to describe future developments but to persuade communication leaders that they need to modernise their capabilities and invest in more advanced intelligence, monitoring, and risk-management approaches. The repeated “So what” sections show that the paper is designed as an actionable executive briefing rather than a neutral academic study.

    Its perspective is also shaped by Burson’s commercial position. The paper repeatedly frames the trends in ways that align with Burson’s services and proprietary tools, and later names products such as Sonar, Decipher, Flight School, and The Fount as solutions for the challenges described. That does not automatically invalidate the analysis, but it does mean the report should be read as strategic thought leadership with a business-development dimension, not as detached independent research.

    A further assumption running through the report is that more intelligence, more data integration, and more AI-supported foresight will generally improve communications outcomes. Another is that trust, transparency, and human judgement will remain crucial even as automation grows. The report therefore holds two ideas together: communications will become more machine-assisted, but legitimacy will still depend on explainability, credibility, and human expertise.

    5. What are the report’s main implications and conclusions for organisations and communication leaders?

    The main implication is that communications leaders need to rethink the function as an integrated capability spanning technology, intelligence, risk sensing, governance, and reputation strategy. This is no longer just about crafting messages; it is about building systems that can detect issues early, model likely reactions, respond quickly, and maintain trust across unstable media and political conditions.

    A second implication is organisational: teams will need reskilling. The report suggests that AI literacy, data fluency, and comfort with predictive tools will become baseline expectations, but that these must be combined with distinctly human strengths such as judgement, empathy, and crisis leadership. This implies changes in hiring, training, and operating models.

    A third implication concerns governance and trust. Because the report highlights misinformation, explainability, regulation, and political volatility, it suggests that communicators will increasingly sit closer to questions of ethics, compliance, public affairs, and executive risk management. The section on the 2025 U.S. administration makes that especially clear: communications is portrayed as operating in a more volatile regulatory and platform environment where policy shifts, moderation changes, tariffs, and infrastructure decisions affect both messaging and stakeholder trust.

    The final conclusion is that the winners will be the organisations that become proactive rather than reactive. Burson’s report consistently argues for earlier sensing, faster response, stronger data integration, and more scenario-based planning. Its ultimate message is that the future of communications belongs to organisations that can combine technological capability with transparency, agility, and human-centred judgement.

  • 2025 Global Communication Report by USC Annenberg

    2025 Global Communication Report by USC Annenberg

    About the paper

    The report examines how four forces—artificial intelligence, hybrid and remote work, the changing media landscape, and political polarization—are reshaping public relations, with a particular focus on generational differences across Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers.

    It is based on original research using an online survey fielded from 9 January to 1 February 2025, with 1,077 respondents drawn through non-probability volunteer sampling from PR professionals and related communicators.

    The data is international but weighted heavily towards the United States: 51% of respondents were from organisations operating in the U.S., with additional respondents from the rest of the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and 22% representing global companies.

    Length: 44 pages

    More information / download:
    https://annenberg.usc.edu/research/center-public-relations/global-communication-report

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the future of public relations?

      The report’s core argument is that public relations is entering a period of profound disruption, and that the profession’s future will be determined by how well it responds to four simultaneous pressures: AI, hybrid work, media fragmentation and political polarization. The authors argue that these trends are not isolated; together they are redefining how communicators work, what skills matter, how organisations recruit, and what kinds of strategic choices PR professionals will have to make.

      At a headline level, the profession remains notably optimistic. The report says 74% of respondents have a very or somewhat positive outlook for the future growth of public relations, despite mergers, layoffs and broader economic, political and technological upheaval. That optimism is broadly shared across generations, but the report questions whether the industry is genuinely prepared for what lies ahead or simply overly confident.

      The deeper argument is that the biggest story is not just disruption itself, but the gap in how different generations interpret it. Younger practitioners are consistently more positive about AI, new media channels, flexible work and purpose-led expectations, while older professionals tend to be more cautious, more attached to traditional models and more concerned about misinformation, staffing reductions and social risk. The phrase “Mind the Gap” is therefore not just branding; it is the report’s organising thesis about the future of the profession.

      2. How does the report say AI is changing public relations, and where are the main points of agreement and disagreement?

      The report presents AI as the most important positive force shaping the future of PR, with 60% saying it will have a positive effect on the profession and 28% saying it will have a negative one. It also finds that communicators already use AI in practical, operational areas rather than in abstract or speculative ways. The most common current uses are social media, research and analytics, and press material development, while investor relations and public affairs lag well behind.

      There is also a strong pragmatic streak in the findings. Respondents generally believe humans will remain essential to effective public relations, but their confidence varies sharply by generation. Boomers and Gen X are much more likely than Gen Z and Millennials to strongly agree that humans will remain central. At the same time, younger groups are more likely to believe AI will generate more content, reduce costs, reshape hiring and alter agency economics. In other words, younger professionals are not necessarily more idealistic about AI; they are often more commercially radical in what they think it will do.

      The report also highlights a training paradox. Most respondents do not expect entry-level employees to be AI experts; a functional level of competence is seen as sufficient by the largest share. Yet there is little confidence in universities or PR agencies as the main providers of AI training. Instead, respondents look most strongly to specialised programmes. That implies an institutional gap: AI matters enormously, but the profession does not yet appear to believe its traditional training systems are fully equipped to prepare the next generation.

      At the level of future impact, the report is mixed rather than triumphalist. Many expect AI to improve work quality and individual creativity, but substantial shares also expect reduced staffing and lower agency budgets. So the report does not portray AI as a simple productivity win. It presents it as a force that may simultaneously improve output, change business models and threaten traditional career structures, especially at entry level.

      3. What does the report reveal about hybrid and remote work, and why does it matter for the profession?

      The report shows that hybrid and remote work are no longer fringe preferences but central expectations within the profession. Respondents report an average of roughly two days per week in the office overall, and most expect the future to include either a minimum number of days on premises or some form of remote option. Only a relatively small minority expect to be in the office every day.

      The significance of this is not just logistical. The report frames flexibility as a strategic issue affecting morale, recruitment, retention and culture. Strong majorities across all generations say flexible work schedules matter, and many believe hybrid working makes it easier to recruit top talent. At the same time, there is no consensus that remote work automatically improves productivity; support is much stronger for flexibility than for the idea that home working always produces better work. That distinction matters because it suggests the debate is no longer simply about efficiency. It is about what professionals now expect from work itself.

      Generationally, younger respondents are more likely to see hybrid work as the future and more willing to trade salary for flexibility. The report points to a 25-point gap between Gen Z and Boomers on willingness to take a pay cut to work from home. It also finds that in-house professionals face tougher return-to-office pressures than agency staff, and that in-house respondents are more likely to say their organisations want employees back in the office full-time.

      The broader implication is that hybrid work has become a competitive issue for employers. The report explicitly suggests that organisations insisting on rigid return-to-office policies may face an uphill battle in attracting and retaining talent. It also notes that 74% of mid-level or higher PR professionals would hire a talented candidate regardless of where they are located. That points to a profession increasingly comfortable with distributed talent, even if organisational policies have not fully caught up.

      4. How does the report describe the changing media landscape, and what does it suggest this means for PR strategy and skills?

      The report argues that PR is moving decisively away from legacy media dominance and towards a more fragmented, platform-led environment in which social media, podcasts, apps and influencers carry growing strategic weight. Social media is rated the most relevant channel for 2030, followed by podcasts and smartphone apps, while network television, print publications and cable news are seen as least relevant.

      This shift has two important dimensions. First, it changes what communicators believe works. For marketing campaigns, viral activity on TikTok or Instagram is rated most effective overall, ahead of podcast interviews and morning television appearances. Second, it changes what skills matter. The report still places writing at the top of entry-level skill priorities, but it also shows growing importance for social content creation, research, analytics, influencer relations and paid media—especially among younger respondents.

      Gen Z is the clear outlier throughout this section. Younger practitioners are more bullish on social media, podcasts, influencer promotion, paid advertising and even the continuing utility of press releases. The report interprets this as more than a preference difference. It suggests younger communicators understand how content circulates on the platforms they grew up with, and are therefore better positioned to navigate creator relationships, platform logic and searchability. Older professionals, by contrast, tend to place relatively more value on legacy outlets and are more sceptical of the newer channels.

      But the report does not celebrate this transition uncritically. It identifies misinformation as the biggest concern arising from the changing media environment. Older generations are especially worried that declining legacy media will damage news accuracy, credibility and the public’s ability to distinguish fact from falsehood. Younger respondents are less alarmed, which the report interprets as partly reflecting their comfort with digital information environments. Still, the report warns that AI may make this harder for everyone, and even suggests PR agencies may need internal fact-checking capacity as a reputation safeguard.

      5. What does the report say about political polarization, corporate purpose and the generational divide in values?

      Political polarization emerges as the most negative of the four forces studied. It is the trend respondents are least likely to see as beneficial and one of the hardest for practitioners to navigate in day-to-day work. The report describes polarization not simply as disagreement, but as a structural feature of contemporary politics and media—something used to drive attention, fundraising and support, and something that creates uncertainty and reputational risk for organisations.

      One of the report’s most striking findings is the collapse in support for companies addressing social issues not directly relevant to their business. The share answering “yes” to that proposition fell from 89% in 2023 to 85% in 2024 and then to 52% in 2025. The report presents this as evidence that corporate purpose has run into the hard realities of backlash, consumer anger and political conflict. It explicitly links this decline to polarization and to business leaders becoming more risk-averse after high-profile controversies.

      Yet here too the generational divide is crucial. Younger communicators remain far more supportive of corporate purpose, inclusion initiatives and broader social commitments than older groups. The report shows that Gen Z places significantly greater importance on inclusion initiatives and on public policy issues such as abortion and immigration when considering whether to work for a company. It also finds that Gen Z is more optimistic that companies will continue to increase commitments to taking stands on social issues, purpose-driven campaigns and ESG-style initiatives, while older generations are more doubtful.

      This produces one of the report’s most important implications: future recruitment and retention may hinge not only on salary and flexibility, but on organisational values. The report suggests companies retreating from inclusion or broader social commitments may face talent problems, especially with younger professionals. At the same time, it shows clear limits to idealism: many respondents across generations would refuse to work for certain sectors such as tobacco, firearms and gambling, with especially strong resistance among Gen Z towards environmentally harmful industries such as mining and oil.

      Taken together, the report’s conclusion is that the future of PR will be shaped by whether older and younger professionals can work across these differences. The authors do not argue that the gaps must disappear. Rather, they argue that the profession must recognise them, understand them and avoid letting established assumptions block adaptation. That is the report’s final message: not that one generation is right and another is wrong, but that the future belongs to those willing to listen across the divide.