Category: Core Insights

  • State of Journalism 2026 by Muck Rack

    State of Journalism 2026 by Muck Rack

    About the paper

    The report examines the state of journalism in 2026 through original research based on a self-administered online survey of journalists.

    Muck Rack says it surveyed 1,044 journalists between 30 January and 2 March 2026, with 897 responses retained after data cleaning; the sample is predominantly U.S.-based, with additional representation from the United Kingdom, Canada and India, so the geographic scope is international but heavily weighted toward the United States.

    Length: 48 pages

    More information / download:
    https://muckrack.com/resources/research/state-of-journalism

    Core Insights

    1. What does the report say are the biggest pressures shaping journalism in 2026?

    The report portrays journalism as a profession under pressure from several directions at once rather than one dominant crisis. The top concerns are disinformation and misinformation and lack of funding, both cited by 32% of journalists. Just behind them are public trust in journalism and unregulated or unchecked use of AI, each at 26%, followed by government interference in the press at 25% and politicisation and polarisation at 23%. The report’s own framing is that the threat environment is broadening, with AI moving sharply up the agenda rather than replacing older concerns.

    That wider strain also shows up in how journalists describe their working lives. While 65% still say their work feels meaningful, 47% say it feels exhausting and 38% say it feels precarious. More than half say misinformation has made reporting harder over the past year, and nearly one-third say safety concerns have affected how they do their job. Altogether, the report suggests a profession that still finds purpose in the work but is operating in a more fragile, contested and demanding environment.

    2. How are journalists’ day-to-day working conditions and career outlook changing?

    The report presents a mixed picture: journalists retain some short-term confidence, but the broader career outlook is less secure. On workload, 62% say their responsibilities have expanded in the past year, exactly matching last year’s level according to the report. At the same time, most still feel they can usually meet their standards: 18% say they always have enough time and 39% say often. Even so, 15% say they rarely or never do, which points to a notable minority under significant time pressure.

    Support levels are also mixed. A slim majority, 56%, feel supported in terms of tools, training or editorial guidance, but 21% feel unsupported to some degree. On career confidence, 53% feel confident about their long-term prospects in journalism, whereas 66% feel their current job is secure over the next 12 months. That gap is important: it implies journalists are somewhat more confident in immediate job continuity than in the long-term health of the profession. The report reinforces that interpretation by noting that short-term job security outpaces long-term career confidence.

    3. What role do AI and social media now play in journalism, and how is that role shifting?

    AI is clearly moving from experimentation towards mainstream use. The report says 82% of journalists now use at least one of the listed AI tools in their work, up from 77% the year before. ChatGPT remains the leading tool at 47%, while Gemini rises to 22% and Claude to 12%. Transcription tools remain steady at 40%. At the same time, concern about unchecked AI use in journalism has risen from 18% to 26%, so adoption and anxiety are growing together. That is one of the report’s most important tensions: journalists are integrating AI more deeply while also becoming more worried about its consequences.

    Social media tells a different story. Its importance for producing journalism has weakened: only 21% now say social media is very important for their work, down 12 points from 2024. Yet it remains highly important for promotion, with 45% saying it is very important for that purpose. So the report suggests social platforms are becoming less central to reporting itself, but still crucial to distribution and visibility.

    The platform landscape is shifting too. Facebook is rated the most valuable platform overall at 28%, LinkedIn is second at 20%, and X has dropped to 17%. In trust terms, LinkedIn stands out most strongly, with 58% saying they trust it to treat journalistic content fairly. By contrast, distrust in TikTok has risen to 61%, and Bluesky’s momentum has weakened, with the share spending more time there falling by 14 points year on year. The report’s wider implication is that journalists are becoming more selective and pragmatic about platforms: they are not abandoning them, but they are recalibrating where value and trust still exist.

    4. What does the report reveal about the relationship between journalists and PR professionals?

    The report shows a relationship that is clearly important but often poorly executed. More than half of journalists, 53%, say relationships with PR professionals are important or very important to being successful at their job. And 86% say at least some of their published stories began with a PR pitch, even if for most journalists the share is modest. That means PR remains a meaningful input into the news cycle, even though it rarely drives the majority of coverage.

    However, the quality and relevance of outreach remain major problems. Only 3% say pitches are always relevant to what they cover, while 43% say relevant pitches are seldom received and 4% say never. Unsurprisingly, 88% say they immediately disregard or delete pitches that are irrelevant to their coverage, 71% reject pitches that feel overly promotional, and 50% are put off by what look like mass emails. The report is therefore quite blunt: PR can be useful, but most failures come from poor targeting and low editorial sensitivity.

    The findings also show what journalists actually want. Seventy per cent say a pitch should clearly demonstrate relevance to their beat, 58% want interview access to relevant sources, and 40% value original data or research. When the question shifts from beat relevance to audience relevance, the answers become even more revealing: 78% say a pitch feels genuinely relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to, and 45% want clear local or cultural context. So the report’s deeper message is that good PR is not just about matching a topic area; it is about understanding the outlet’s audience, community and public value.

    5. What broader conclusion does the report draw about the state and future of journalism?

    The overall picture is not one of collapse, but of a profession in uneasy transition. Journalism still appears to offer strong intrinsic meaning: that is the dominant emotional response in the survey. There is also evidence of resilience, with majorities feeling at least somewhat supported, somewhat secure in the near term, and still able to meet their standards most of the time.

    But that resilience is under strain from structural, technological and reputational pressures all at once. Funding pressures remain severe, disinformation continues to complicate reporting, AI is both increasingly embedded and increasingly feared, and journalists are operating in a more fragmented and less trusted information environment. The media relations section adds another layer: journalism still depends in part on external information subsidies from PR, but the quality of those interactions often falls short of what journalists need.

    In that sense, the report’s implicit argument is that the future of journalism will depend not only on newsroom adaptation to AI and platform change, but also on restoring relevance, trust, editorial support and sustainable resourcing. The profession still has purpose and momentum, but the survey suggests that its future will be shaped by whether institutions can reduce precarity while helping journalists navigate a noisier, more politicised and more automated media landscape.

  • The Unofficial Linkedin Algorithm Guide by Trust Insights

    The Unofficial Linkedin Algorithm Guide by Trust Insights

    About the paper

    This report is an independent secondary analysis of LinkedIn’s feed and recommendation architecture in Q1 2026, produced by Trust Insights rather than LinkedIn itself.

    It synthesises public LinkedIn engineering research, academic papers, conference material and some verified news reporting, and the report says it draws on more than 30 current LinkedIn engineering publications, with 31 primary sources consulted overall; there are no survey respondents or interview participants because this is not original field research.

    Its scope is platform-specific rather than geographic: it focuses on LinkedIn’s global product and AI systems as documented in public sources.

    Length: 138 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/whitepapers/the-unofficial-linkedin-algorithm-guide-for-marketers/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the guide?

    The guide’s core argument is that LinkedIn’s feed no longer works as a largely signal-counting system that rewards simplistic “algorithm hacks”. Instead, it argues that LinkedIn now operates through a more sophisticated two-stage AI architecture built around retrieval and ranking, and that success depends on aligning with how those systems understand relevance.

    More specifically, the report says the old game of sending numerical signals to a mechanical system is over. In its place, LinkedIn now uses two complementary systems: an LLM-powered retrieval system that reads language and a sequential ranking system that learns from behaviour over time. That leads the authors to a new premise: language quality determines retrieval, while engagement patterns determine ranking.

    The guide compresses this into three main propositions. First, relevance has displaced recency as the main logic of feed ranking, within the 30-day window of connection-based retrieval. Second, LinkedIn’s content distribution works as a two-stage pipeline, meaning content has to be retrieved before it can be ranked. Third, both retrieval and ranking depend on semantic embeddings, so coherence across profile, content and engagement shapes who sees your posts.

    In practical terms, the guide is arguing against superstition and in favour of structural understanding. It wants readers to stop obsessing over posting-time folklore and instead focus on profile clarity, topical consistency, high-quality writing and engagement that creates a coherent professional signal.

    2. What evidence and methodology does the report use to support that argument?

    This is not a survey report or interview-based study. It is an evidence synthesis built from public technical and engineering material about LinkedIn. The report states that it synthesises engineering research, academic papers and conference presentations from LinkedIn’s own AI researchers, and that it uses generative AI to help synthesise the material.

    In the methodology section, Trust Insights says it used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic’s Claude to synthesise roughly 400,000 words of source material across the primary sources. It also says that technical claims are traced back to official LinkedIn publications, peer-reviewed research or verified news sources, and that future-facing claims are labelled as goals rather than confirmed deployments.

    The source base is fairly substantial for a document of this kind. The guide says it draws on more than 30 current LinkedIn engineering publications, and elsewhere specifies that 31 primary publications were consulted overall, including 20 current 2025–2026 LinkedIn engineering publications that form the main evidentiary base.

    The report is also reasonably careful about limitations. It says LinkedIn has not endorsed or reviewed the guide, that LinkedIn’s systems change continuously, that some architectural claims are inferences where public documentation is incomplete, and that published sources do not cover everything LinkedIn uses in production. That makes the methodology stronger than a typical “guru” explainer, but it still remains an independent interpretation of partial public evidence rather than a definitive inside account.

    3. What does the guide say actually changed in LinkedIn’s architecture in 2026?

    According to the report, the big change publicly confirmed in March 2026 was that LinkedIn had replaced a fragmented older feed infrastructure with two complementary AI systems: a unified LLM-based retrieval system and a sequential ranking model. The older setup had relied on multiple separate retrieval sources and a ranking model that treated impressions more independently. The newer design is meant to understand both semantic relevance and behavioural sequences more effectively.

    On the retrieval side, the guide says LinkedIn fine-tuned LLaMA-3 as a dual encoder that generates embeddings for members and content, enabling semantic matching at scale. It describes this as a unification of several previously separate retrieval systems. The model uses profile information and positive engagement history to generate a member embedding, and it can retrieve relevant content even for users with sparse connection histories.

    On the ranking side, the report says LinkedIn’s production ranker is now the Generative Recommender, a sequential transformer that processes more than 1,000 historical interactions to identify behavioural patterns. Rather than “reading” posts in the way many users imagine, it learns from the sequence of what a member viewed and how they interacted. The report emphasises that recent engagement carries more weight because of how the sequence model works.

    The broader implication, in the guide’s telling, is that LinkedIn is no longer mainly about gaming simple engagement weights. It is about becoming legible to two AI systems at once: one that reads your professional language and one that reads your professional behaviour.

    4. What are the most important practical implications for creators, marketers and professionals?

    The guide’s practical message is that profile quality, content quality and engagement quality now reinforce one another. Since retrieval depends on semantic clarity, users need profiles and posts that clearly express expertise, use relevant professional language and stay topically coherent. Since ranking depends on behavioural patterns, users also need consistent engagement histories that reflect the professional domains they want to be associated with.

    This makes the profile much more important than in many older LinkedIn playbooks. The guide describes the profile as a foundational input to both stages of the system: it feeds the retrieval model directly, and a separate profile embedding also feeds the ranking model. In the guide’s framing, your headline, About section and experience descriptions are not just presentation devices for humans; they are inputs into machine understanding.

    The same logic applies to content. The guide argues that high-performing posts are not merely those that generate quick reactions, but those that have clear topical focus and generate sustained, meaningful engagement from the right professional communities. That is why it repeatedly stresses semantic coherence, useful content and deliberate audience alignment over tricks such as timing obsession or comment-baiting.

    It also argues that engagement should be treated strategically. Because likes, comments, shares and dwell patterns become part of the behavioural sequence the ranking model processes, what you engage with influences what you are shown and how LinkedIn understands your professional identity. In other words, your interactions do not merely boost others; they also train the platform’s understanding of you.

    5. What are the report’s biggest conclusions and limitations?

    Its biggest conclusion is that durable LinkedIn success now comes from clarity, coherence and consistency rather than from short-term “algorithm hacks”. The authors say the only sustainable strategy is to maintain a strong professional profile, create valuable content and build a legible engagement pattern, because the underlying system is continuously evolving and increasingly hard to game.

    A second conclusion is that discoverability and distribution are no longer simple matters of network size or posting frequency alone. Because the retrieval system can infer interests semantically, newer users and low-connection users may benefit more than before, provided their profile and content are clear enough. The report cites improved interaction metrics for these users as evidence of that shift.

    At the same time, the guide is careful to flag its own limits. It is not endorsed by LinkedIn, it relies on public disclosures that are necessarily incomplete, and some of its interpretation involves architectural inference. It also notes that LinkedIn updates its systems continuously, so details may change after publication.

    So the fairest reading is this: the report is a strong, well-documented interpretive guide to LinkedIn’s public technical record, not a final or official specification. Its value lies in translating scattered engineering evidence into a strategic model that creators and professionals can actually use.

  • Global Connectedness Report 2026 by DHL and NYU Stern

    Global Connectedness Report 2026 by DHL and NYU Stern

    About the paper

    The paper is a data-driven globalization report by Steven A. Altman and Caroline R. Bastian of NYU Stern, produced in partnership with DHL.

    It is not survey-based; it is a secondary-analysis and index report using more than 9 million country-to-country data points on trade, capital, information and people flows, ranking 180 countries globally.

    Its geographic scope is worldwide, with country profiles and regional analysis across major world regions.

    Length: 320 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.dhl.com/global-en/microsites/core/global-connectedness/report.html

    Core Insights

    1. Is globalization actually reversing, or is the report arguing that deglobalization is overstated?

    The report’s central argument is that deglobalization is overstated. It does not deny that geopolitical risk, tariffs, war, policy volatility and public scepticism have increased. But it argues that the actual data on cross-border flows do not show a broad retreat from international to domestic activity.

    The DHL Global Connectedness Index reached a record high in 2022 and has remained broadly stable through 2025. The report’s key measure of “depth” — international activity relative to domestic activity — sits at around 25%. That means globalization is historically high, but still limited: the world is far from “hyperglobalized”. Most economic and human activity still happens within countries rather than across borders.

    This distinction is central to the report’s logic. The authors are not saying that globalization is smooth, frictionless or politically uncontested. They are saying that globalization is being reshaped rather than reversed. The world is more volatile, but not meaningfully less connected.

    2. What evidence does the report give that global flows remain resilient?

    The report examines four broad types of flows: trade, capital, information and people.

    On trade, the report finds that goods trade grew faster in 2025 than in any year since 2017, excluding the post-Covid rebound. Part of this was driven by U.S. importers front-loading goods before tariff increases, but China’s exports to non-U.S. markets and AI infrastructure investment also supported growth. AI-related goods reportedly accounted for a large share of goods trade growth in the first three quarters of 2025.

    On capital, the picture is more mixed, but not one of retreat. Foreign direct investment and M&A activity remain broadly in line with historical patterns, even though greenfield FDI announcements weakened in some areas. The report emphasises that companies continue to invest abroad and that multinational firms still conduct close to record shares of activity outside their home markets.

    On information, the report is more cautious. Information flows have been the fastest-growing part of globalization over the past two decades, but some indicators have plateaued or weakened since 2021. International patenting has slowed, scientific collaboration has declined slightly, and cross-border intellectual property flows have eased. The report suggests that geopolitical tensions and data restrictions may now be constraining this part of globalization.

    On people, the report finds that international travel has recovered from the Covid-19 collapse, while international student mobility and migration remain on longer-term rising trends. However, people flows remain the least globalized category: only a small share of the world’s population lives outside its country of birth.

    3. How serious is geopolitical fragmentation, especially between the U.S., China and Russia?

    The report treats geopolitical fragmentation as a real risk, but argues that its global effects remain limited so far.

    The clearest evidence of fragmentation is in U.S.–China ties. Since 2016, the share of U.S. trade, capital, information and people flows involving China has fallen substantially, while China’s share involving the U.S. has also declined. Direct U.S. imports from China fell from a peak of 22% in 2017 to 13% in 2024, and then to 9% during the first three quarters of 2025.

    However, the report adds an important complication: the U.S. has not necessarily reduced its underlying reliance on Chinese content. Goods imported from third countries may still contain Chinese inputs. When looking at direct and indirect China-origin content, the report says there is no clear evidence of a major decline in U.S. reliance on goods from China through 2024.

    Russia is the more dramatic case. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s flows with the EU have collapsed across trade, investment, information and people flows. Russia’s exports have become less diversified and more dependent on a few destinations such as China, India and Türkiye.

    But the report’s broader conclusion is that these cases do not amount to a global split into rival blocs. Only a small share of global trade and investment has shifted away from geopolitical rivals. Most international business already takes place among friendly or neutral countries, which limits the likely impact of “de-risking” on globalization as a whole.

    4. Is globalization being replaced by regionalization or nearshoring?

    The report’s answer is: not yet, at least not in the data.

    Despite widespread discussion of nearshoring, friendshoring and regional supply chains, the report finds that many international flows are crossing longer, not shorter, distances. The average distance traversed by flows in the DHL Global Connectedness Index reached a record high in 2024. Goods trade and greenfield FDI crossed record average distances in 2025.

    This directly challenges the idea that globalization is giving way to regionalization. If international activity were becoming more regional, the average distance covered by flows should be falling. Instead, the report finds the opposite for several major flow types.

    That said, the report does not dismiss regionalization entirely. It notes that many governments and companies are interested in nearshoring and supply-chain resilience, and that such changes can take years to implement. It also acknowledges that international flows are already highly regionalized: roughly half of global trade, capital, information and people flows occur within major world regions. The report’s point is not that regionalization is irrelevant, but that there is not yet robust evidence of a major new shift from global to regional patterns.

    5. Which countries are most globally connected, and what does that reveal about globalization?

    Singapore ranks as the world’s most globally connected country, followed by Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong SAR, the United Arab Emirates, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Denmark.

    The report distinguishes between two dimensions of connectedness: depth and breadth. Depth measures the size of international flows relative to domestic activity. Breadth measures how widely a country’s flows are distributed across the world.

    Small, wealthy economies tend to score highly on depth because their domestic markets are limited and they rely heavily on cross-border trade, capital, people and information flows. That explains the strong performance of places such as Singapore, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Ireland and the UAE.

    Larger economies often score higher on breadth than depth. The United Kingdom ranks first on breadth, followed by the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Israel, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and Australia. These countries have flows that reach widely across the world, but their large domestic economies mean that international activity can still represent a smaller share of total activity.

    This country-level analysis reinforces one of the report’s core themes: globalization is uneven. Some countries are deeply and broadly connected, while others remain peripheral. Wealth, peace and security, openness, regional integration, infrastructure and domestic business conditions all shape how connected a country becomes.

  • Employee Communications Report 2026 Global Edition by Gallagher

    Employee Communications Report 2026 Global Edition by Gallagher

    About the paper

    This report examines the state of internal communications and employee experience, with a particular focus on what Gallagher calls the “Readiness Gap” between perceived organisational risk and the communications capabilities needed to handle it.

    It is a mixed-methods report based on a global survey, roundtables, and focus groups conducted from September to November 2025, drawing on input from more than 1,300 communications and HR professionals across 40 countries; the geographic profile is weighted heavily toward North America and the UK/Europe.

    The report is broadly descriptive and analytical rather than experimental, and its methodology is reasonably clear, though some findings are based on sub-samples rather than the full respondent base.

    Length: 48 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.ajg.com/employeeexperience/state-of-the-sector/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report, and what does Gallagher mean by the “Readiness Gap”?

    The report’s central argument is that internal communications and HR functions are operating in an environment of constant change, but many organisations are still not structurally or strategically prepared to respond well. Gallagher defines this mismatch as the “Readiness Gap”: the gap between the risks organisations face and the capabilities, governance, strategy, and operating structures communicators need in order to manage those risks effectively.

    The report argues that readiness is not about predicting the future perfectly. Instead, it is about building enough clarity, resilience, and strategic maturity to deal with volatility as a normal operating condition. In this framing, the issue is not simply that communicators face risk; it is that too many functions lack visibility into their mandate, lack codified strategy, or respond to complexity with high-volume, low-targeted communication that actually worsens overload, burnout, and mistrust.

    A major strength of the report is that it treats readiness as multi-dimensional. Its “Readiness Index” combines six dimensions: risk, agility, AI readiness, human-centric communication, strategy, and impact. The global averages show a striking pattern: risk is relatively high at 57%, while AI readiness is only 39% and impact maturity just 36%. That suggests that many teams are highly exposed to pressure but comparatively weak in the systems that would help them respond strategically.

    In practical terms, the report’s argument is that strategic maturity is the main dividing line. Mature teams do not necessarily face fewer problems; in fact, they may face more complexity. What distinguishes them is that they have stronger strategic foundations, clearer governance, more active socialisation of strategy, and better operational discipline. In other words, the report is ultimately arguing that readiness is a function-level capability problem, not just an environmental problem.

    2. What are the most important risks and structural weaknesses identified in the research?

    The report identifies a cluster of recurring risks that define the current operating reality for internal communicators. The most severe and widespread are manager effectiveness, information overload, audience burnout, budget constraints, decision exclusion, lack of strategic direction, and low trust in leadership. Among these, burnout and overload are especially prominent: 81% of respondents see employee burnout as a moderate or significant risk, and 83% say information overload is a growing problem. Manager capability is even more acute, with 87% saying that managers lacking skills and capacity is a significant or moderate risk.

    What makes these risks especially important is that they are not isolated. The report repeatedly shows that they reinforce one another. High communication volume is associated with greater overload, greater burnout, and higher perceived trust risk. For example, in high-volume environments, the risk of burnout rises sharply, and communicating heavily about change, culture, or strategy can increase trust-related problems if the communication is not matched by relevance, authenticity, or audience fit.

    The report also highlights major structural weaknesses beneath those risks. Many teams simply do not have the strategic assets or governance mechanisms needed to respond well. A majority lack formal change communications approaches, manager toolkits, audience personas, channel frameworks, and formal listening approaches. Only 15% have an active and socialised EVP, while 37% have no formal EVP at all. Fewer than one in five are satisfied with their ability to personalise communication through current channels.

    Another weakness is measurement immaturity. Most functions remain stuck measuring output rather than outcomes or business impact. The report says 70% are still largely tracking activity metrics such as opens, clicks, and views, while only a minority measure sentiment, understanding, behavioural outcomes, or business impact. This matters because teams that cannot measure what they influence struggle to prove value, gain visibility, and escape being perceived as administrative rather than strategic.

    So the report’s diagnosis is not just that communicators are under pressure. It is that too many teams are under pressure while also being under-instrumented: lacking strategy, lacking tools, lacking measurement, and lacking the authority or structure to act early rather than react late.

    3. How does the report explain the difference between high-performing and low-performing communications functions?

    The report’s most important explanatory idea is that strategic maturity separates the stronger functions from the weaker ones. Gallagher groups respondents into four “Readiness” segments: Vulnerable, Untapped, Resilient, and Stable. The low-performing ends of the spectrum are Vulnerable and Untapped; the higher-performing ends are Resilient and Stable. What distinguishes them is not simply team size or sector, but the interaction of maturity, visibility, governance, and strategic activation.

    Vulnerable teams operate in high-risk environments with low maturity. They are more reactive, less likely to track their mandate, more likely to be driven by leadership requests than employee insight, and more likely to experience burnout and low leadership trust. Untapped teams are slightly different: they report lower perceived risk, but they also score low on the capabilities that would actually reduce risk. The report suggests that they may be living with a false sense of security.

    By contrast, Resilient teams operate under pressure but maintain control. Stable teams combine lower risk with strong maturity and governance. These higher-performing groups are much more likely to have active, socialised strategies, better measurement practices, stronger visibility into what they are accountable for, and a more consultancy-like operating model. Stable teams, for instance, are described as most likely to operate as a strategic consultancy, while Resilient teams prove that high performance is possible even in high-pressure settings if discipline and strategic structure are in place.

    One of the report’s strongest findings is the emphasis on socialisation of strategy, not just the existence of strategy. Only 27% say their strategic documents are well understood by stakeholders, yet those with active, socialised strategies are much more likely to report stronger engagement, better influence, better measurement, and lower perceived risk. The report even suggests that teams with a living strategy can double their odds of success and substantially reduce missed KPIs.

    This means the report is not really celebrating strategy as a document. It is celebrating strategy as an active operating system. High-performing teams write things down, align stakeholders, use their frameworks to guide decisions, and connect communications work to outcomes. Low-performing teams often have fragments of strategy, but not enough codification or shared understanding to turn intent into consistent action.

    4. What does the research reveal about change, AI, and the future capability demands on communications teams?

    The report presents change communication as the new baseline capability for the profession. It explicitly argues that change is no longer a specialist area; it is now central to the job. Change management communication ranks as the most critical skill for the coming 12 months, yet 61% of teams do not have a formal change communications approach. This is one of the clearest examples of the report’s broader argument: the capability needed most urgently is often the one least systematically developed.

    The report also shows that workforce readiness is constrained by team size, structure, and budgets. Across organisations of all sizes, 69% have fewer than six people in a comms role, and one in three have no dedicated communications budget. The research suggests a particular strain as organisations move past 500 employees, when complexity rises faster than capability. Gallagher describes a mid-market “capacity crash”, where communicators per 1,000 employees drop sharply and perceived risk rises.

    On AI, the report takes a relatively sober line. It does not present AI as a transformative equaliser by default. Instead, it argues that AI amplifies pre-existing maturity. Most respondents are using AI for drafting and summarising, but far fewer are using it for higher-value applications such as measuring outcomes, automating workflows, generating insight, or supporting strategic decisions. Three-quarters of functions remain in early-stage experimentation or ad hoc use, and only 36% of respondents feel they have the skills and literacy needed to use AI effectively.

    The strongest AI finding is about governance. Teams with high governance, clear policies, training, and support are far more likely to move from experimentation into enabled or strategic use. The report says those with stronger governance are 10 times more likely to reach enabled maturity, and that higher-maturity teams use AI to amplify thinking and measurement, whereas lower-maturity teams mainly use it to draft faster. That is a significant claim because it reframes AI readiness as a management and governance issue, not just a tooling issue.

    So in future-capability terms, the report points to a new skills mix: change capability, leadership coaching, stakeholder management, AI literacy, and data literacy. It is effectively arguing that the future communicator is not just a channel manager or content producer, but a strategic advisor with stronger analytical, coaching, and transformation skills.

    5. What are the report’s main implications for communication leaders, and what should they take away from it?

    The report’s biggest implication is that communication leaders should stop thinking of function maturity as a nice enhancement and start treating it as a risk-management necessity. In Gallagher’s framing, readiness is directly linked to organisational performance, employee trust, and the ability to absorb change. That means communication leaders need to invest less in simply pushing more content and more in building the strategic and operational conditions that make communication effective.

    A second implication is that audience-first communication is no longer optional. The report repeatedly shows that segmentation, human tone, relevant formats, and better listening reduce risk and improve effectiveness. Teams that communicate in more human-centric ways are better able to cut through noise, protect trust, and reduce burnout and overload. Yet most organisations still fall short on segmentation, personalisation, and audience profiling. The implication is clear: relevance is becoming a core performance discipline, not a stylistic bonus.

    A third implication concerns proof of value. The report strongly suggests that communicators will struggle to gain strategic standing if they remain trapped in activity metrics. If the function wants to close the gap between aspiring to be a strategic consultancy and actually being seen as one, it has to improve measurement maturity and link communication efforts to business outcomes, risk reduction, behaviour change, and employee sentiment. Otherwise, the “admin” label persists.

    Finally, the report implies that leaders should focus on four priorities for 2026: clarity and direction, workforce readiness, operational enablement, and human-centric communication. These are not presented as separate workstreams but as mutually reinforcing. Clarity without enablement will stall. AI without governance will remain shallow. Listening without strategy will stay anecdotal. Human-centric intent without time, permission, or systems will remain uneven.

    Taken together, the report is less a celebration of best practice than a warning against drift. Its core message is that many communication functions are trying to operate in a strategic age with reactive-era structures. The teams that do better are not necessarily louder or larger; they are more codified, more socialised, more disciplined, and more human in how they communicate.

  • Leading at the Intersections 2026 by Weber Shandwick

    Leading at the Intersections 2026 by Weber Shandwick

    About the paper

    Weber Shandwick’s Leading at the Intersections 2026 is a short corporate affairs trends report about the strategic shifts reshaping modern corporate affairs, especially in the U.S. and for U.S. multinationals.

    It is primarily an expert commentary / advisory perspective, with one referenced survey of Fortune 1000 communications and corporate affairs executives conducted by Weber Advisory and Gravity Research; the sample size, fieldwork method and timeframe are not clearly specified in the report.

    The geographic focus is mainly the United States, with some attention to global stakeholder expectations around U.S. companies abroad.

    Length: 13 pages

    More information / download:
    https://webershandwick.com/news/the-five-shifts-redefining-the-c-suite-agenda-in-2026

    Core Insights

    1. What is the central argument of the report?

    The report argues that corporate affairs leaders are now operating “at the intersections” of several forms of disruption:

    • geoeconomic instability
    • polarised U.S. politics
    • reputational volatility
    • AI-driven transformation
    • workforce anxiety
    • cultural fragmentation
    • and changing expectations around responsible business.

    Its core message is that corporate affairs can no longer be treated as a reactive communications function. The authors frame it as a strategic leadership capability that must help organisations make sense of complexity, protect licence to operate, create stakeholder value and support business resilience.

    The report’s strongest underlying assumption is that the operating environment has become too volatile for narrow, bottom-line-only communication. Companies need to understand how business value, stakeholder expectations, culture, politics, technology and social impact now interact. In that sense, the report positions modern corporate affairs as a form of integrated strategic intelligence.

    2. How does the report suggest companies should think about value in a time of disruption?

    The report warns that in uncertain times, leaders may be tempted to focus narrowly on economic value and the bottom line. Weber Shandwick argues the opposite: disruption is precisely when companies need to broaden their understanding of value.

    It identifies several value dimensions beyond financial performance:

    • functional value
    • emotional value
    • and societal value.

    The point is not that profit becomes irrelevant, but that companies’ licence to operate depends on more than profit. Trust, relevance, purpose, stakeholder relationships and perceived contribution to society all become part of the value equation.

    The report links this especially to the 2026 U.S. midterm environment. Affordability, cost of living, inequality, trade, healthcare, housing, immigration and AI regulation are all described as issues shaping public expectations. In this environment, companies face reputational risk if they are seen as detached from ordinary stakeholder concerns.

    One particularly useful insight is that “corporate speak” is no longer neutral. The report frames over-polished, generic language as a credibility risk. Companies are advised to communicate with more emotion, empathy and candour — not as a stylistic preference, but as a trust-building necessity.

    3. What new expectations does the report identify for corporate diplomacy?

    The report argues that U.S. multinationals will be pushed into more explicit forms of corporate diplomacy in 2026. The key issue is that foreign stakeholders may increasingly expect U.S. companies to show that they are not simply proxies for U.S. foreign policy.

    This is an important distinction. The report suggests that U.S. brands have, so far, retained some independence from declining perceptions of U.S. political leadership. But that separation may become harder to maintain if U.S. government actions become more confrontational or less aligned with international norms.

    Three expectations stand out. First, companies must demonstrate local accountability: where decisions are made, how local interests are protected and which commitments endure despite political shifts in Washington. Second, they need deeper local relationships across government, business and civil society, because these relationships become a form of reputational defence. Third, executives may need to speak more visibly and carefully abroad, because silence can increasingly be interpreted as alignment.

    The report also connects this to B2G strategy in an “America First” context. For tech companies in particular, it recommends local storytelling around outcomes governments already care about: workforce upskilling, manufacturing, energy resilience, defence readiness and public-sector efficiency.

    4. Why does the report treat cultural intelligence as a leadership capability?

    The report presents cultural intelligence as a core leadership currency because companies are increasingly pressured to respond to cultural flashpoints in real time. Digital discourse, ideological polarisation, influencer dynamics, bots and platform algorithms all make it harder for organisations to remain silent or generic without others filling in the blanks.

    The report’s argument is not that companies should comment on everything. Rather, leaders need to know their organisation’s “true north” and make sharper decisions about when to engage, how to engage and when not to engage. Cultural intelligence is therefore both an external sensing capability and an internal decision-making discipline.

    The report highlights three ways to build cultural adaptation fluency. Companies should internalise organisational values so they function as an operating system rather than decorative statements. They should dig deeper into the “why” behind cultural signals, not just track what is trending. And they should make scenario planning a routine practice, using AI and other tools to anticipate how cultural communities and influencers may react.

    A useful nuance here is the distinction between audiences and algorithms. The report notes that meaning still comes from human belief, but reach is shaped by platforms. Leaders therefore need to design communication for both human interpretation and algorithmic circulation.

    5. What implications does the report draw for responsible business and AI transformation?

    The report argues that responsible business is not disappearing, even if the language around ESG, sustainability or social impact changes for political and practical reasons. The fundamentals remain important because companies still need to balance material business pressures, stakeholder tensions and reputational risk.

    Three responsible business challenges are highlighted.

    1. First, companies must define the future of human work as AI integration accelerates. Stakeholders will expect human-first integration plans, workforce readiness and credible opportunities for future talent.
    2. Second, the report argues that climate action is becoming more fragmented because coordinated multilateral action is weakening, while “China First” green tech and “America First” energy politics reshape the context.
    3. Third, companies must separate values from “vibes”: in a fragmented information environment, responsibility strategies must be anchored in the business model rather than broad, consensus-seeking purpose claims.

    On AI, the report’s position is pragmatic rather than utopian. AI transformation is treated as unavoidable, but the authors warn against simplistic winner/loser narratives. Companies need a transformation narrative that proves the business case while addressing the human side of change.

    The report identifies three AI-related communication challenges:

    • real-time stakeholder insight
    • machine readability intelligence
    • and human-centred generative creativity.

    The most distinctive point is “machine readability”: companies now need to understand how they appear in AI search and AI-generated summaries, which sources shape those outputs, and how to correct misinformation or poor representations.

    The final message is: be AI-enabled, not AI-enthralled. For B2B marketing in particular, AI should not replace the entire martech stack or become a reason to defund other vital technologies. The stronger argument is for deliberate integration: clear use cases, regulatory awareness, privacy safeguards and attention to workforce impact.

  • Fast + Flexible – 2026 C-suite Perspectives Study by Padilla

    Fast + Flexible – 2026 C-suite Perspectives Study by Padilla

    About the paper

    The paper is a mixed-methods report on how C-suite leaders are approaching uncertainty, workforce change, AI, hybrid work, well-being, social impact, and DEI/ESG positioning in 2026.

    Padilla says it combines an online survey of 100 C-suite executives and 1,000 employed adults, more than 60 interviews with C-suite leaders analysed using both AI and human interpretation, and desk research conducted in the latter half of 2025; the geographic scope appears U.S.-focused, but the respondent geography is not clearly specified in the report.

    Length: 10 pages

    More information / download:
    https://padillaco.com/c-suite-perspectives-2026

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the 2026 C-suite mindset?

    The core argument is that senior leaders are no longer waiting for uncertainty to pass. Instead, they are treating instability as a permanent condition and responding by trying to move faster while keeping room to pivot. The report frames this as a shift from earlier stages of disruption management toward a new posture it calls “fast + flexible.” It explicitly contrasts previous years’ mindsets — “conflicted” in 2023, “fatigue + focus” in 2024, and “moving ahead” in 2025 — with a 2026 mood defined by urgency, adaptability and momentum.

    That shift is not presented as optimism in the simple sense. The report says leaders want more stability, but do not expect to get it. In other words, their confidence is pragmatic rather than serene. They are trying to make decisions under pressure, operate through volatility, and show progress despite persistent ambiguity. This is especially visible in the report’s emphasis on inflation, policy change, regulation, AI and innovation as rising leadership challenges.

    For communicators, the deeper meaning is that organisations are entering a period where flexibility itself becomes a strategic capability. The report suggests that leadership credibility now depends less on promising certainty and more on showing agility, direction and steadiness amid ongoing turbulence.

    2. Where does the report find the biggest gaps between leaders and employees?

    The report’s most important pattern is a recurring perception gap between the C-suite and employees. It argues that leaders and employees do not experience organisational reality in the same way, and that this divergence is now showing up across several high-stakes issues. The report even describes this as a kind of “K-shape” divide in viewpoints between leadership and employees.

    The clearest gap concerns change readiness. According to the report, 67% of leaders believe employees are “fully” or “very” well equipped to embrace and support change initiatives, while only 43% of employees agree. That is a substantial disconnect, especially given that the changes in question include AI, mergers and acquisitions, and leadership transitions. The report interprets this as evidence that some leaders may be overestimating workforce readiness.

    A second gap concerns well-being. Leaders say their own well-being has improved and are also relatively upbeat about employee well-being, with 48% believing employee well-being has improved. Only 25% of employees say the same. Importantly, when people do report improvements, the report says these are tied more to personal boundaries, health and self-care than to better workplace conditions or stronger business performance. That weakens any claim that organisations themselves have solved the well-being issue.

    A third gap appears around AI. The report says 88% of leaders describe their organisations as adopting AI aggressively or selectively, yet only 43% of employees view AI as a net benefit to their job. The report is careful here: it does not present employees as outright rejecting AI, but rather as uncertain about its value and impact. That distinction matters, because uncertainty can still become resistance if not addressed.

    Taken together, these gaps support one of the report’s strongest underlying messages: organisational change is not just about strategic decisions at the top, but about whether employees understand, trust and can absorb those decisions.

    3. What does the study say about the leadership qualities now seen as most necessary?

    The report argues that leadership today requires an unusual combination of traditional authority and human openness. It says the three most important “classic” leadership qualities are credibility, vision and authenticity, which together create what the report calls a paradoxical need to show both certainty and vulnerability.

    What has risen most sharply, however, are qualities associated with toughness and steadiness under pressure. On page 4, the visual “Qualities on the Rise” shows the biggest year-over-year increases for fearlessness (+18), stoicism (+14), vision (+13), certainty (+13), authenticity (+7) and inclusivity (+7). That pattern is revealing. It suggests leaders feel pressure to be decisive, resilient and unflinching, but also to remain credible through honesty and attentive listening.

    The report does not celebrate hard-edged leadership on its own. It explicitly warns that while leaders may be leaning into traditional executive traits to power through uncertainty, employees may need more empathy, transparency and humanity in order to come along with them. So the model of leadership implied here is not pure command-and-control. It is stronger than that in one sense, but softer than that in another: leaders must project direction without pretending to know everything.

    This has direct communication implications. The report says employees and leaders are broadly aligned on which traits matter, and that communicators can use this alignment to support strategy. That means internal communication should not just explain decisions; it should also help leaders perform the right balance of realism, openness and conviction.

    4. How does the report interpret current organisational flashpoints such as hybrid work, AI, social issues, and DEI/ESG?

    The report treats these issues not as isolated debates but as examples of a wider strategic tension: leaders want to keep adapting quickly, but employees do not always share their assumptions or pace. Hybrid work is a good example. The report says 79% of leaders expect their organisations to maintain or move toward hybrid models, but 21% are becoming stricter about in-office policies. Its interpretation is that organisations have settled into hybrid work operationally, but not psychologically or culturally. In other words, hybrid remains workable, but unresolved.

    AI is presented as having crossed an inflection point. The report says it is no longer seen by the C-suite as experimental, but as core infrastructure. Yet employee uncertainty remains significant. The implication the report draws is not merely that firms need AI tools, but that they need a clear narrative about AI’s intent, value and expectations. It explicitly recommends combining change management with thought leadership around AI. That is a notable framing, because it positions communication not as a support function after adoption, but as part of adoption itself.

    On social issues, the report suggests leaders are more willing to speak out than before, but selectively and mainly when issues are directly relevant to the business. It says 54% of leaders believe it is important to speak out on relevant external social issues, while 26% of employees think their companies are avoiding taking a stand at all costs. The report’s explanation is that companies may now be communicating their positions more internally or to directly affected groups, rather than through broad public declarations.

    On DEI and ESG, the report argues that language is changing more than underlying intent. It says these commitments still rank low as formal C-suite priorities, but the benefits associated with them remain valued. On page 7, the report says organisations are using alternative terms such as belonging, inclusion, fairness, representation and culture instead of DEI, while ESG is increasingly treated as “good business hygiene” focused on practical actions such as emissions reductions, efficiency and sustainable sourcing. The key idea is not abandonment, but repositioning in more business-linked language.

    5. What are the main implications for communicators and organisations?

    The report’s most consistent conclusion is that communication now has to do more than inform. It has to reduce gaps in perception, build trust in leadership intent, and help organisations carry people through instability. Nearly every section ends with an implication that points back to communication as a strategic enabler rather than a downstream messaging function.

    First, communicators need to treat change readiness as a live organisational risk. Since leaders appear more confident than employees about workforce preparedness, internal communication should not assume readiness; it has to build it. That means clearer explanations, more deliberate engagement, and more effort to create what the report calls change-resilient cultures.

    Second, communicators have an especially important role in AI. The report makes clear that executive enthusiasm alone is not enough. Employees need a believable account of why AI is being used, where it adds value, what expectations apply, and how risks are being managed. In effect, AI adoption requires narrative leadership as much as technical implementation.

    Third, the report suggests that hybrid work, well-being, and social-impact positions all require stronger internal sense-making. Tightening office expectations without buy-in may damage retention. Assuming employee well-being has improved may mask unresolved strain. Taking stands selectively without explaining the “why, when and how” may create internal scepticism. In all three cases, silence or vague messaging widens the gap between leadership intent and employee interpretation.

    Finally, the broader strategic implication is that communicators should help leaders embody the report’s central formula: move fast, but not blindly; stay flexible, but not vague; build momentum, but through alignment, clarity and trust. That is the real communication agenda running through the entire study.

  • Global Foresight 2036 by the Atlantic Council

    Global Foresight 2036 by the Atlantic Council

    About the paper

    The report is a mixed-methods strategic foresight publication from the Atlantic Council that combines original survey research, expert commentary, six “snow leopard” horizon-scanning essays, and a shorter AI discussion section.

    Its core empirical base is the organisation’s fourth annual survey of 447 geostrategists and foresight practitioners from 72 countries, fielded in November and December 2025; the respondent pool is global, though roughly half are US citizens and the sample is drawn from the Atlantic Council’s network rather than a general population sample.

    Length: 76 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/global-foresight-2036/

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the world of 2036?

    The report’s central argument is that the decade ahead is likely to be more unstable, more fragmented, and more dangerous than the present, even though the exact future cannot be predicted with certainty. Rather than offering a single forecast, the report uses foresight to map the pressures, risks, and directional shifts that experts think are most likely to shape 2036.

    Its overall tone is notably pessimistic. The opening findings state that 63 percent of respondents expect the world in 2036 to be worse off than it is now, while only 37 percent think it will be better. The report frames this darker mood through a cluster of reinforcing trends:

    • intensifying US-China rivalry
    • a possible hot conflict over Taiwan
    • weakening multilateral institutions
    • democratic decline
    • nuclear proliferation
    • climate stress
    • and rapid AI advances whose benefits are matched by growing concern.

    At the same time, the report is not purely apocalyptic. It argues that foresight is valuable precisely because it helps policymakers and readers prepare for multiple possible futures, including surprising ones. That is why the publication pairs survey findings with under-the-radar “snow leopards” and a separate AI section: the aim is not just to describe probable big trends, but to widen the reader’s field of vision.

    2. What are the report’s main findings from the expert survey?

    The report organises its main survey results into ten headline findings. The most prominent is that respondents broadly expect China to surpass the United States economically by 2036, even if they do not think China will simply replace the US as an uncontested global hegemon. Instead, most foresee either bipolar competition or a more diffuse multipolar system. They also increasingly expect China to attempt to take Taiwan by force, and more than 40 percent foresee another world war, most likely sparked in Taiwan or surrounding waters.

    A second major finding is that NATO is expected to survive, but not unchanged. Respondents are divided on whether it will become more or less influential, yet 44 percent think it will no longer exist in its current form by 2036. The survey also suggests growing doubts about whether the United States will still play the same commanding role within the alliance.

    On Russia and Ukraine, the survey points away from a decisive Russian victory and toward a frozen conflict. Respondents also see Russia as a diminished power by 2036, though still potentially dangerous, especially in nuclear terms. On AI, a majority believe artificial general intelligence could emerge within the decade, and more respondents still see AI as a net positive than a net negative, though the gap has narrowed as concern rises.

    Other major findings include:

    • expectations of wider nuclear proliferation, especially involving Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, and some NATO countries
    • a more autonomous but still strategically limited Europe
    • declining climate cooperation even as warming worsens
    • weakening global institutions alongside democratic erosion
    • and continued dollar dominance, though with crypto seen as the biggest challenger rather than another national currency.

    3. What evidence and patterns in the report best reveal how experts think power is shifting?

    One of the clearest patterns is that respondents do not think the future belongs to a single dominant actor in the way the post-Cold War era was often understood. The report repeatedly points to diffusion, contestation, and erosion of established forms of leadership. China is seen as rising strongly in economic power, nearly matching the US in technology and diplomacy, while the United States is still expected to remain militarily pre-eminent. That split itself is telling: respondents appear to be imagining a world where different forms of power are no longer concentrated in one state.

    Another pattern is institutional weakening.

    Respondents expect the United Nations, UN Security Council, WTO, World Bank, and IMF all to lose influence over the next decade.

    That suggests not merely dissatisfaction with current institutions, but a broader expectation that the post-1945 order is fraying. The report explicitly connects this decay with democratic recession, arguing that respondents who foresee deeper democratic decline are especially likely to expect institutional weakening and a worse overall world.

    A third pattern concerns regional and bloc-level reconfiguration. Europe is not expected to become the world’s leading military, economic, or tech power, yet respondents increasingly think it will achieve greater strategic autonomy. NATO may endure, but in altered form. The Global South section then adds another layer by showing that respondents from those countries often expect even sharper shifts away from US primacy and are more inclined to see China rising, Russia doing better in Ukraine, and even internal US breakdown.

    Together, these patterns show that the report is less about simple replacement of one superpower by another and more about a messy redistribution of influence across states, blocs, technologies, markets, and non-state actors.

    4. What does the report suggest about the role of technology and underappreciated trends in shaping the future?

    The report treats technology as both a direct force of change and a lens that reshapes how other global risks unfold. AI is the most obvious example. Respondents expect major advances, including the possible arrival of AGI within a decade, and the report presents AI as a technology with systemic implications for economics, geopolitics, knowledge production, and everyday life. But the accompanying expert discussion is more cautious than the survey toplines: Atlantic Council specialists stress that today’s AI is not good at truly forecasting the future, that AGI is far from certain, and that trust, energy demands, and market instability could constrain progress.

    The six “snow leopards” deepen this technological and horizon-scanning emphasis. These essays focus on phenomena that may be easy to overlook now but could become highly consequential. They include:

    1. Private tech firms shaping conflict outcomes
    2. Circular rather than one-way migration
    3. Kelp forests as climate and economic assets
    4. The erosion of the human rights order
    5. AI-driven cultural erasure
    6. Neurotechnology capable of decoding thought.

    What unites these cases is the report’s belief that future disruption will not come only from the usual headline issues. Some of the biggest shifts may emerge from domains that sit between established categories: companies behaving like geopolitical actors, migration functioning as an innovation loop, environmental restoration becoming industrial strategy, or data bias turning into cultural loss. This part of the report broadens the frame beyond interstate competition and argues for paying attention to early signals and second-order effects.

    5. What are the report’s biggest implications for policymakers, strategists, and communicators?

    The report’s main implication is that leaders should prepare for a world defined less by stability and rule-bound cooperation than by rivalry, fragmentation, and institutional stress. For policymakers, this means planning for deterrence, alliance adaptation, nuclear risk, democratic erosion, and climate-related conflict at the same time rather than treating them as separate silos. The report’s structure itself makes that point: geopolitics, democracy, climate, finance, and technology are deeply entangled.

    A second implication is that strategic assumptions inherited from the post-Cold War period look increasingly fragile. The report suggests that US leadership can no longer be taken for granted, NATO may need redesign rather than maintenance alone, and multilateral bodies may not be capable of managing future crises in the way they were once expected to. That pushes strategists toward resilience, contingency planning, and coalition-building under less favourable conditions.

    For communicators, the report is especially useful as a map of narratives that may dominate the coming decade:

    • democratic decline
    • technological disruption
    • geopolitical fragmentation
    • and competing visions of order.

    It also shows that audiences are unlikely to share a single worldview.

    The section on Global South respondents is particularly important here, because it demonstrates that expectations about the future vary significantly by geography and political vantage point. In practical terms, this means communication about global risk, strategy, or public policy will increasingly need to account for fragmented perceptions rather than assuming one shared interpretive frame.

    The final implication is methodological: the report argues implicitly for foresight as a discipline of disciplined imagination rather than prediction. Its value lies not in claiming certainty, but in helping readers test assumptions, notice emerging signals, and think more seriously about consequences before they fully arrive.

  • 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer by Edelman

    2026 Edelman Trust Barometer by Edelman

    About the paper

    The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer is based on Edelman’s 26th annual online survey, fielded from 25 October to 16 November 2025 across 28 countries, with 33,938 respondents and roughly 1,200–1,501 respondents per country; the report states the data are representative of the general population by age, gender and region within each market.

    The report also uses partial-sample questions for some topics, including future outlook, media exposure, trust brokering and foreign-company trust, so some findings rest on smaller subsamples with larger margins of error.

    Methodology is generally clear, though several analyses rely on derived scales or partial samples explained in the technical appendix.

    Length: 77 pages

    More information / download:
    https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the state of trust in 2026?

    The core argument is that trust has not simply weakened in a uniform way; it has become more inward-looking. Edelman frames this as a progression from polarization to grievance and then to insularity, which it defines as a reluctance to trust anyone who is different from you. The report’s main claim is that economic displacement, cost-of-living pressures, misinformation, discrimination, geopolitical tension and the pandemic have pushed many people towards safety, familiarity and sameness rather than openness.

    That argument is supported by one of the report’s most important headline findings: globally, 7 in 10 respondents are classified as having an “insular trust mindset”, meaning they are either hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who differs from them in values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or culture/background. The segmentation is not casual wording; it is built from a specific measurement model in the appendix, where respondents are grouped as unwilling, hesitant or open based on their average willingness to trust people unlike themselves.

    The report therefore presents 2026 not as a simple trust crisis, but as a trust reorientation. Trust is moving away from broad, shared institutions and towards one’s own immediate circle, local ties and familiar actors. That is why the title, Trust Amid Insularity, matters: trust still exists, but it is increasingly conditional, local and bounded.

    2. What evidence does the report provide that people are turning inward rather than outward?

    The strongest evidence is the combination of pessimism, fear and narrowing openness. Globally, only 32% say the next generation in their country will be better off than today, down 4 points year on year. That is a strikingly low level of forward optimism for a study centred on public trust, because it suggests that many respondents do not see broad-based future progress as plausible.

    The report also shows elevated economic anxiety. Among employees, worry about losing one’s job because of a looming recession and concern about international trade and tariff conflicts hurting one’s employer have both reached all-time highs in the global trend data presented. Alongside that, fear that foreign countries are deliberately contaminating domestic media with falsehoods has risen sharply and reached an all-time high in many countries.

    A further sign of retreat is informational narrowing. Only 39% say they get information at least weekly from sources with a different political leaning than their own, a 6-point drop from 2025, with statistically significant declines in 20 of 28 countries. This matters because the report links insularity not just to emotion, but to reduced exposure to difference itself.

    Finally, the report shows that recent societal events have increased trust in people close at hand while reducing trust in shared institutions. Among those who say major events affected their trust, respondents report net gains in trust for neighbours, family and friends, coworkers and CEOs, but net losses for national government leaders, major news organisations and foreign business leaders. In other words, “we” gives way to “me” and “my circle”.

    3. How uneven is trust across countries, classes and institutions?

    The report makes clear that trust is highly uneven geographically. The global Trust Index rises slightly from 56 to 57, but this masks a sharp divide between developing and developed countries: developing countries average 66, while developed countries average 49. China, the UAE, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia sit near the top of the ranking, while Japan, France, the UK and Germany are much lower. So the story is not one of universal decline, but of divergence.

    There is also a pronounced income divide. On the long trend shown in the report, the gap in the Trust Index between high-income and low-income groups has widened from 6 points in 2012 to 15 points in 2026 in the 21-market tracking average. In the current 28-market snapshot, high-income respondents score 65 on trust versus 50 for low-income respondents. The report explicitly describes these as “different trust realities”.

    At the institutional level, employers and business remain the most trusted institutions globally. The report shows trust at 78% for “my employer” among employees and 64% for business overall, compared with 58% for NGOs, 54% for media and 53% for government. That hierarchy matters because it underpins Edelman’s later argument that employers and business are best placed to act as trust brokers.

    The report also argues that insularity and grievance are closely linked. Among people with an insular mindset, a moderate or high sense of grievance is substantially more common than among those with an open mindset. That gives the report a broader sociological claim: distrust is not just about institutions failing in abstraction, but about groups feeling excluded, harmed or left behind.

    4. What does the report say are the consequences of insularity for society, work and business?

    One of the report’s most important claims is that insularity is not just an attitudinal problem; it has concrete economic and organisational costs. On page 18, sizeable minorities say they would rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values, would put less effort into helping a project leader with different political beliefs succeed, or would support reducing foreign companies in their country even if it led to higher prices. This is Edelman’s case that insularity can damage productivity, increase workplace conflict and reinforce economic nationalism.

    The report also shows that people with insular mindsets trust their own circle but distrust institutions led by people unlike them. Among this group, neighbours and CEOs inside their own frame score relatively well, while journalists and government leaders score much lower. Separate analysis shows large trust gaps between open-minded and insular respondents when institutions are imagined as being led by people who differ from them in values, facts, approaches or background.

    For multinational business, the consequence is geopolitical insularity. Respondents in several countries trust companies headquartered in their own country markedly more than foreign-headquartered firms. The report’s implication is that global scale alone no longer guarantees legitimacy; local embeddedness matters more. That is why it argues multinationals may need a more “polynational” model rooted in long-term local relationships.

    The broader consequence is that difference itself becomes a barrier to cooperation. The report warns that if perfect alignment becomes a prerequisite for trust, progress stalls: innovation becomes harder, leadership weakens and social divides deepen. In that sense, the report is not only describing a mood, but warning of a drag on collective problem-solving.

    5. What solution does the report propose, and who does it believe should lead it?

    Edelman’s answer is “trust brokering”. The report defines this as a set of practices and behaviours that counter insularity by facilitating trust across difference. Crucially, it says trust brokering is not about changing people’s identities or forcing consensus. Instead, it is about surfacing common interests, listening without judgement and translating the needs and realities of one group to another.

    The report finds that this approach resonates more than simple side-taking. When asked what would most increase trust in a business responding to a highly divisive social issue, the top answer is encouraging people to cooperate on solutions without taking a side, ahead of supporting a position consistent with the company’s values or supporting the respondent’s own position. That is a revealing finding: respondents appear to prefer a convening role over performative alignment.

    It also argues that long-term local relationships matter more than one-off gestures. If a foreign company from a distrusted country wanted to operate in a local community, respondents were most likely to say it could earn trust by investing in long-term community projects and hiring local people, rather than merely helping during crises or donating to social organisations. The report’s logic is that trust is built through durable presence, not episodic signalling.

    As for who should lead, the report gives the strongest practical role to employers. It says all major institutions are seen as having an obligation to bridge divides, but employers have the smallest gap between perceived obligation and current performance. It also finds high support for employer actions such as promoting a shared identity, building teams that require people with different values to work together, and providing training for constructive dialogue. That is why the report’s concluding argument is so employer-centric: business, and especially employers, are portrayed as the institutions best positioned to scale trust brokering in practice.

  • State of AI in PR 2026 by Muck Rack

    State of AI in PR 2026 by Muck Rack

    About the paper

    The report is an original research survey about how PR professionals are using, governing and judging generative AI and emerging AI agents in their work.

    It is based on a survey of 564 PR professionals fielded from 5 December to 24 December 2025 and distributed primarily via email; responses were reviewed for low-effort patterns and outliers.

    The geographic scope is not clearly specified in the report, and the methodology is useful but relatively thin on sampling detail beyond distribution method and data cleaning.

    Length: 28 pages

    More information / download:
    https://muckrack.com/resources/research/state-of-ai-in-pr

    Core Insights

    1. What is the report’s central argument about the current state of AI in PR?

      The core argument is that generative AI has moved from novelty to normal practice in PR, but that adoption has now largely plateaued. The report says AI use has “peaked” at around three-quarters of PR professionals, with 76% already using generative AI in their workflow and only modest shares still undecided or resistant. In other words, the market now appears split between a large majority who have already incorporated AI and a smaller minority who are unlikely to change their minds soon.

      The report also argues that this is no longer just an individual experimentation story. Organisations are adapting to AI institutionally: 51% of respondents say their company has an AI use-case policy, and 43% say their workplace offers AI training. That suggests AI in PR is becoming formalised, governed and embedded in workplace practice rather than remaining a purely ad hoc tool used by curious individuals.

      At the same time, the report draws a clear line between generative AI and agentic AI. While text-generation and workflow support are mainstream, AI agents have not yet crossed into broad professional adoption. Only 12% say they use AI agents in their work, and most respondents remain uncomfortable with autonomous action without human review. So the report’s bigger message is not “AI is coming”; it is “AI is here, but autonomy is not yet trusted.”

      2. How are PR professionals actually using AI, and where do they see the most value?

      The report shows that PR professionals are using AI mainly in mainstream knowledge and writing tasks, not in highly specialised or fully automated ways. The most common use case is editing and refinement, cited by 86%, followed by research and insights at 76%, writing and content creation at 74%, and strategy and planning at 68%. Administrative tasks are also significant at 51%, whereas media outreach, measurement and creative asset production remain much less central.

      That distribution matters because it shows where AI currently fits the profession best: it acts primarily as a cognitive and editorial assistant. It helps polish drafts, speed up background work, support ideation and assist with planning. The report says PR pros use AI in an average of four distinct work areas, which reinforces the idea that adoption is broad across tasks even if it is not yet deep in every part of the workflow.

      Perceived value is also very strong. Eighty-two per cent say AI has improved the quality of their work, while 93% say it helps them complete projects more quickly. When asked where the greatest time savings occur, respondents again point to core communication work: editing and refinement, research and insights, and writing and content creation. This suggests AI’s practical value in PR is currently less about replacing judgement and more about compressing routine labour around producing and shaping communication.

      3. What does the report suggest about trust, oversight and the limits of AI in PR practice?

      A key theme running through the report is that PR professionals are using AI extensively, but they do not trust it enough to leave it unsupervised. The clearest sign of this is editing behaviour: 98% say they always or often edit AI-generated text before using it. Although the extent of editing has decreased over time, the human review step remains almost universal. That implies AI is accepted as a draft partner, not as a final author.

      The report also reveals a selective approach to data input. Large majorities say they avoid entering financial data, personally identifiable information and proprietary or strategic material into AI systems. Yet far fewer avoid entering client or brand names and internal communications. This points to a practical but uneven data-risk mindset: many PR professionals recognise serious information-governance risks, but boundaries around what is safe to share with AI are still inconsistent.

      Trust drops even further when the report turns to AI agents. Only 7% say they would be comfortable allowing an AI agent to send messages or publish updates without human review, while about nine in ten are uncomfortable. The main conditions for greater trust are strong evidence of reliability, explicit human approval before publishing or sending, strong privacy and security safeguards, and transparent records of what the agent did. The report therefore implies that the profession is not rejecting automation outright, but it wants clear guardrails, accountability and a human in the loop.

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

      The biggest concern in the report is not that AI will immediately destroy PR jobs, but that it could erode professional formation. Seventy-seven per cent say the main risk is that younger or newer PR professionals will fail to learn the principles of the profession and rely too heavily on tools. That is a profound concern because it goes to capability-building, judgement and the long-term health of the field.

      Other major concerns are also closely tied to quality and professional standards. Sixty-three per cent worry about unscrutinised AI output lowering the quality of communication, while 61% fear content becoming less original or creative and 61% think audiences may be overwhelmed by rising volumes of content. There is also concern that clients or firms may conclude they no longer need content creators. Together, these findings show that respondents fear AI may devalue craft, raise noise levels and weaken the human distinctiveness of communication work.

      Among non-users, the resistance is often principled rather than merely practical. The report notes that the 7% who do not plan to explore generative AI often cite environmental impact, plagiarism and broader ethical concerns. Many of them do not appear persuadable: 80% say they do not see themselves using AI in the future no matter what. That is important because it means non-adoption is not simply a training gap for everyone; for some, it reflects a deeper values-based objection.

      5. What are the report’s main implications for the future of PR work, capability-building and organisational practice?

      The report points towards a future in which the competitive edge in PR will come not from whether someone uses AI, but from how well they use it under proper governance. Since adoption has already stabilised at a high level, the next differentiator is likely to be capability. Respondents say the most important new skills are prompt writing or engineering, ethical decision-making, AI tool evaluation and selection, and data literacy. That suggests the profession is shifting from simple tool familiarity to a broader blend of technical fluency, judgement and governance awareness.

      There is also a strong implication for employers. Training and policy appear to matter. Among those open to AI but not yet using it, 60% say training or proven examples would help them start. At the same time, the growth in workplace policies and training since 2024 suggests companies are beginning to respond to that need. So the report implies that organisational maturity around AI is no longer optional; it is becoming part of professional infrastructure.

      Finally, the report suggests that PR is heading towards a hybrid future rather than a fully automated one. Paid AI use is rising rapidly, and everyday AI-supported work is now common, but agentic AI remains marginal because trust, accountability and reputational risk still demand human control. The underlying conclusion is that PR professionals are prepared to augment their work with AI, but not to surrender authorship, responsibility or final judgement to it. That is probably the report’s most important strategic implication.

    1. A.I. Radar 2026 by BCG

      A.I. Radar 2026 by BCG

      About the paper

      BCG AI Radar 2026 is a survey-based report on corporate AI investment, CEO ownership of AI transformation, and the rise of agentic AI.

      It is based primarily on BCG’s 2026 AI Radar Survey of 2,360 executives, including 640 CEOs, across multiple industries and markets including the US, Europe, India, Japan, Greater China, the Middle East and Africa.

      The methodology is original survey research, supplemented in places by BCG analysis, BCG client experience, and a separate BCG–MIT Sloan Management Review dataset.

      Length: 29 pages

      More information / download:
      https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/as-ai-investments-surge-ceos-take-the-lead

      Core Insights

      1. What is the central argument of the report?

      The report argues that AI has moved from experimental technology investment to a strategic, CEO-level transformation agenda. BCG’s core claim is that corporate AI investment is not only increasing sharply, but is also becoming more durable: organisations are planning to keep investing even if near-term financial returns disappoint.

      The clearest evidence is that projected AI investment has roughly doubled from 2025 to 2026, rising from around 0.8% to 1.7% of organisational revenue. At the same time, 94% of organisations say they will continue investing even if their AI initiatives do not pay off in 2026. Only 6% say they would pull back.

      The deeper message is that BCG sees AI no longer as a CIO-led technology programme, but as a broad business transformation. This is why the report places so much emphasis on CEOs: 72% of CEOs surveyed say they are now the main decision maker on AI, twice the share reported the previous year.

      2. What evidence does BCG provide that AI investment is becoming more serious and sustained?

      BCG provides three main pieces of evidence.

      First, AI investment as a share of revenue is projected to double in 2026. The report shows AI investment rising from about 0.6% of revenue in 2024, to 0.8% in 2025, and then to 1.7% in 2026. That is a significant escalation, especially because BCG notes that the average base revenue of the underlying companies has remained almost the same.

      Second, the increase is broad-based across industries. The chart on page 7 shows all industries planning higher AI investment in 2026. Technology leads at 2.1% of annual revenue, followed by financial institutions at 2.0%, insurance and energy/utilities at 1.9%, consumer at 1.7%, and healthcare at 1.6%. Industrials and real estate are lower at 0.8%, but still show an increase.

      Third, the commitment appears resilient. On page 5, BCG reports that 70% of respondents would “stay the course” or make strategic changes if AI does not deliver the desired financial impact in the next 12 months, while 24% would ramp up resourcing or invest in outside experts. That means disappointment would not necessarily reduce investment; for many organisations, it could trigger more disciplined or more aggressive implementation.

      3. How is leadership of AI changing inside organisations?

      The report’s second major argument is that AI transformation is becoming CEO-led rather than CIO-led. This is one of the most important shifts in the deck.

      BCG reports that 72% of CEOs say they are the main decision maker on AI in their organisation, twice the level from the previous year. It also reports that 82% of CEOs are more optimistic about AI’s ability to deliver ROI than they were 12 months earlier.

      The report goes further by linking AI success to CEO job security. Half of surveyed CEOs believe their job stability depends on getting AI investments and strategy right by 2026. That is a striking framing: AI is not presented merely as a productivity tool, but as a defining test of executive leadership.

      BCG also shows that CEOs express stronger conviction than other executive groups. On page 13, CEOs are slightly ahead of CIOs/CTOs in saying they are ready to lead an AI transformation, confident AI will pay off, and expecting major role disruption by 2030. The implication is that AI is becoming a top-management issue because it affects operating models, workforce design, competitive advantage, and future business models.

      4. What role does agentic AI play in the report’s argument?

      Agentic AI is presented as the next major mechanism through which organisations expect to see measurable value from AI. BCG reports that around 90% of CEOs believe AI agents will enable their organisations to report measurable ROI in 2026, and that CEOs have committed more than 30% of their organisation’s 2026 AI investment to agentic AI.

      The report describes agentic AI as both an opportunity and a risk. On cybersecurity, for example, 59% of leaders see AI agents as both a threat and an opportunity. The same capabilities that make agents useful — automation, scale, system access, continuous learning — can also make them dangerous if misused, hacked, or poorly governed.

      The report also uses BCG–MIT Sloan Management Review data to show that AI applications are expected to take on broader roles in organisations. Currently, 26% of organisations say AI acts as an assistant; in three years, that rises to 61%. The expected role of AI as colleague, coach, mentor, rival, and even boss also increases substantially. This supports BCG’s point that agentic AI is not just a software upgrade; it changes how companies organise work, decision-making, and governance.

      5. What does BCG believe separates leading CEOs from the rest?

      BCG identifies three CEO archetypes: Followers, Pragmatists, and Trailblazers.

      Followers, around 15% of CEOs, recognise AI’s potential but lack full conviction and make cautious early investments. Pragmatists, around 70%, are excited and confident but invest when they see clear value and lower risk. Trailblazers, around 15%, are the most committed group: they invest more heavily, upskill more of their workforce, spend more time deepening their own AI expertise, and are more confident that AI will deliver ROI.

      The report’s most important distinction is that Trailblazers create a “positive flywheel”. They make AI and agentic AI a top priority, deepen their own AI literacy, commit capital at scale, upskill the organisation, and track measurable ROI. For example, Trailblazers spend around 60% of their AI budget on agentic AI, compared with 25% for Pragmatists and Followers. They also allocate around 60% of their AI budget to upskilling and retraining the current workforce, and report that around 70% of their workforce has been upskilled or reskilled on AI.

      BCG’s practical conclusion is therefore quite direct: CEOs must act decisively. The final recommendation is a five-part agenda:

      1. Make AI a key priority
      2. Deepen AI literacy
      3. Commit investments at scale
      4. Upskill the organisation
      5. Track measurable ROI.

      The report’s underlying assumption is that AI advantage will not come mainly from adopting tools, but from executive commitment, organisational redesign, workforce capability, and disciplined measurement.

    2. The Global Risks Report 2026 by World Economic Forum

      The Global Risks Report 2026 by World Economic Forum

      About the paper

      The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 examines global risks across 2026, 2028 and 2036, framing the period as an “age of competition” shaped by geo-economic confrontation, societal fragmentation, technological acceleration and environmental stress.

      It is a mixed-methods report based on the Global Risks Perception Survey of over 1,300 experts worldwide, the Executive Opinion Survey of over 11,000 business leaders in 116 economies, and foresight input from 161 experts through interviews and workshops conducted between May and November 2025.

      Length: 102 pages

      More information / download:
      https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/

      Core Insights

      1. What is the report’s central argument about the global risk landscape in 2026–2036?

      The report’s central argument is that the world is entering an “age of competition” in which cooperation is weakening just as global risks are becoming faster, more interconnected and more systemic. The report does not present predictions, but rather a set of plausible risk trajectories intended to support prevention and preparedness.

      Its core diagnosis is that geopolitical and geo-economic rivalry are no longer separate risk categories; they are becoming organising forces that shape the entire risk landscape. Trade, finance, technology, supply chains and infrastructure are increasingly treated as instruments of power. This creates a world in which confrontation replaces collaboration, and where multilateral institutions struggle to manage cross-border problems.

      The report’s tone is notably pessimistic. Half of surveyed experts expect a turbulent or stormy global outlook over the next two years, rising to 57% over the next decade. Only 1% expect a calm outlook across either time horizon. The implication is that instability is not viewed as a temporary disruption, but as a structural condition of the coming decade.

      2. Which risks dominate the short-term outlook, and why?

      In the immediate and two-year outlook, geo-economic confrontation is the dominant concern. It is identified as the top risk most likely to trigger a material global crisis in 2026, selected by 18% of respondents, followed by state-based armed conflict at 14%. Over the two-year horizon, geo-economic confrontation is also ranked as the most severe risk.

      This reflects the report’s view that economic instruments are increasingly being used for strategic advantage. Sanctions, tariffs, investment controls, technology restrictions, supply-chain weaponisation and resource competition are no longer peripheral policy tools; they are becoming central features of international rivalry. The report argues that this threatens the core of the interconnected global economy.

      Other short-term risks cluster around the same underlying instability. Misinformation and disinformation ranks second over the two-year horizon, societal polarisation third, extreme weather fourth, and state-based armed conflict fifth. Cyber insecurity, inequality and erosion of civic freedoms also feature in the top 10. This shows that the report sees short-term risk as a combination of geopolitical confrontation, social fragmentation and information disorder.

      Economic risks also rise sharply in the two-year outlook. Economic downturn and inflation each rise eight places compared with the previous year, while asset bubble burst rises seven places. The report links these concerns to debt pressures, volatile markets, potential AI-related investment bubbles and the broader uncertainty created by protectionism and geo-economic rivalry.

      3. How does the long-term risk outlook differ from the two-year outlook?

      The long-term outlook shifts from geopolitical and economic confrontation towards environmental and technological risks. Over the 10-year horizon, extreme weather events rank first, followed by biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems, misinformation and disinformation, and adverse outcomes of AI technologies. Half of the top 10 long-term risks are environmental.

      This creates one of the report’s central tensions: environmental risks are being deprioritised in the short term even though they remain dominant in the long term. The report notes that most environmental risks decline in the two-year ranking and also show reduced short-term severity scores compared with the previous year. Yet over 10 years, environmental risks remain the most severe category.

      The report’s interpretation is that immediate geopolitical, economic and societal pressures are crowding out longer-term collective priorities. In practical terms, climate and biodiversity risks remain existential, but political attention is being pulled towards wars, protectionism, inflation, debt, social unrest and technological disruption.

      This is one of the report’s most important implications: the world may be paying less attention to the risks that experts still see as most severe over the coming decade.

      4. What role do technology, AI and quantum developments play in the report’s risk assessment?

      Technology is presented as a source of enormous opportunity and systemic risk. In the short term, the report is most concerned with misinformation and disinformation, cyber insecurity and the way digital technologies amplify social polarisation. Misinformation and disinformation ranks second in the two-year outlook, while cyber insecurity ranks sixth.

      AI becomes much more important over the long term. “Adverse outcomes of AI technologies” rises from #30 in the two-year outlook to #5 in the 10-year outlook — the largest upward shift across all 33 risks surveyed. The report highlights several possible consequences: labour-market disruption, higher inequality, loss of purpose and social belonging, information chaos, concentration of economic power, and risks from military uses of AI.

      The report’s AI chapter is especially concerned with a scenario it describes as “jobless productivity”: productivity rises because of AI, but employment opportunities shrink or become more unevenly distributed. This could deepen inequality and social polarisation, particularly if middle-class and white-collar work is disrupted faster than societies can adapt.

      Quantum technologies are treated as a more distant but potentially severe frontier risk. The report highlights the possibility that quantum computing could undermine current cryptographic systems, threatening digital authentication, data privacy and trust infrastructure. It also warns that quantum leadership could become another domain of strategic rivalry, widening economic and geopolitical divides.

      5. What does the report imply about cooperation, governance and resilience?

      The report’s underlying message is that cooperation is becoming harder at precisely the moment when it is most needed. Multilateralism is described as under pressure from declining trust, protectionism, weakening rule of law and the rise of more adversarial national strategies.

      The report does not argue that cooperation has disappeared. Rather, it suggests that cooperation will need to look different. In a more fragmented world, global treaties may be harder to achieve, so the report points to coalitions of the willing, minilateral agreements, public-private partnerships, multi-stakeholder engagement, public awareness, education, R&D and corporate resilience strategies as practical mechanisms for risk reduction.

      The report’s perspective is pragmatic rather than optimistic. It assumes that the current order is weakening, but not that collapse is inevitable. Its conclusion is that resilience will depend on rebuilding trust, protecting institutional capacity, investing in adaptive infrastructure, preparing societies for technological disruption, and finding new forms of cooperation even amid competition.

      The most important strategic implication is that risk management can no longer be treated as domain-specific. Geopolitics affects economics; economics affects social trust; social distrust affects governance; technology affects all of them; and environmental risks continue to intensify in the background. The report’s core warning is that leaders must prepare for compounding risks, not isolated crises.

    3. The Global Reputation Economy by Burson

      The Global Reputation Economy by Burson

      About the paper

      This Burson report argues that reputation should be treated as a measurable corporate asset class, which it calls “Reputation Capital”.

      It is a mixed-methods, proprietary modelling report combining stakeholder input, brand tracking, media analysis and stock-market modelling; the methodology is more fully described than many agency papers, though some elements remain proprietary.

      The analysis covers 66 publicly traded companies, drawing on tens of thousands of stakeholders, and spans October 2024 to October 2025 across companies headquartered in the United States and other countries.

      Length: 30 pages

      More information / download:
      https://www.bursonglobal.com/p/reputation-economy

      Core Insights

      1. What is the report’s central argument about reputation, and why does Burson believe it matters now?

      The core argument is that reputation is no longer a soft, retrospective PR concept but a quantifiable form of capital that can be measured, managed and used as a strategic business asset. Burson argues that in a hyper-connected environment, where companies are exposed to constant scrutiny from legacy media, social platforms, activists and independent publishers, traditional reputation tools are too slow and too shallow. In that context, companies need something closer to near real-time intelligence rather than annual surveys or periodic brand tracking.

      The report therefore reframes reputation as “Reputation Capital”: an asset that can create competitive advantage, build resilience, support bolder decision-making and fuel sustainable growth. It also claims this asset matters not just to communications teams, but to investors, boards and corporate leaders because it can be linked directly to upside and downside in business performance.

      The deeper point is that reputation affects strategic freedom. Companies with strong reputations can absorb setbacks more easily, take bigger risks and retain stakeholder trust. Companies with weak reputations are more exposed: a single misstep is interpreted not as an exception, but as proof of a broader pattern. In that sense, the report presents reputation as a buffer, an enabler and a financial driver all at once.

      2. How does the report measure reputation, and what kind of evidence does it use?

      Burson presents this as a mixed model connecting three domains: stakeholder belief, media signals and financial outcomes. It says the model draws on tens of thousands of stakeholders, including consumers, business decision-makers and opinion leaders, using a comprehensive question set alongside daily brand tracking. It then combines that with large-scale monitoring of traditional and social media, described as terabytes of daily mentions, to build a media profile for each company. Finally, it links those inputs to stock performance by isolating the “unexpected return” in share price movement that cannot be explained by normal market trends or financial fundamentals alone.

      That is important because the report is not presenting original survey data alone, nor a pure media audit, nor a simple financial analysis. It is explicitly a mixed-methods modelling exercise designed to connect perception to business value. Burson says this is what allows reputation to move from an attitudinal concept to a leading indicator of performance. The model was also externally validated, according to the report, by Dr Felipe Thomaz of Oxford/Saïd Business School.

      At the heart of the model is an eight-lever framework: Products, Innovation, Financial Performance and Creativity on one side, and Leadership, Governance, Workplace and Citizenship on the other. Burson treats these as the building blocks of reputation and claims the framework can show not just how a company is perceived overall, but which levers are driving strength, weakness and business impact.

      3. What does the report claim about the financial value of reputation?

      The headline claim is that reputation produced an average of 4.78% in added, unexpected annual shareholder returns across the companies studied. Burson defines these returns as “unexpected” because they sit beyond what standard financial indicators such as revenue or margins would predict, and “additional” because the model attributes them directly to reputation.

      From that base, the report extrapolates to the wider market and estimates the global “Reputation Economy” at just over $7 trillion. It also says that, within its sample, the value of reputation varied widely by company, ranging from $2 million to as much as $202 billion. These numbers are used to support the broader thesis that reputation is not merely symbolic or narrative-based, but economically consequential.

      The report also argues that the biggest opportunity is not simply to maintain a good reputation, but to move from “Reputation Stagnation” into “Reputation Cultivation”. It groups companies into three categories: cultivation, stagnation and erosion. Roughly 60% of firms fall into stagnation, according to the report, suggesting that many companies are leaving value on the table because they lack a deliberate, data-driven reputation strategy.

      That framing reveals Burson’s perspective clearly: reputation management should be treated as value creation, not just risk mitigation. The report is effectively making the case for boards and leaders to think about reputation in capital-allocation terms.

      4. According to the report, what separates reputation leaders from laggards?

      Burson’s argument is that there is no single silver bullet. The biggest difference between leaders and laggards is not one lever but broad, disciplined strength across all eight. The report says the top quartile scores 11 to 15 points higher on every lever and that the gap between top and bottom performers is 13.8 points on a 100-point scale.

      Even so, three gaps stand out most strongly in the report’s description of a modern reputation leader: visionary innovation, excellence in product delivery and unimpeachable governance. Those are presented as the clearest markers of the firms that convert reputation into strategic advantage.

      What matters here is the report’s underlying assumption that reputation is systemic. Leaders do not just communicate better; they manage the organisation more coherently. Workplace culture supports innovation, governance underpins product quality, and credibility across the system gives leaders resilience. That resilience then changes the CEO’s risk calculus: strong-reputation firms can launch ambitious products, enter complex markets and recover from setbacks more easily because stakeholders grant them the benefit of the doubt. Laggards, by contrast, become defensive, incremental and strategically paralysed.

      So the report’s model of leadership is not glamour-driven. It is operational. It suggests that reputation leadership comes from sustained excellence, cross-functional consistency and the ability to avoid weak links.

      5. What are the report’s most important conclusions for sector strategy, workplace investment and AI?

      One of the most interesting parts of the report is its claim that industries have different “reputational centres of gravity”. Tech, for example, remains highly valuable in Reputation Capital terms and scores strongly on Products and Innovation, but its growth is now almost flat. Burson argues that tech’s future reputation gains will depend less on disruptive launches and more on Governance, Leadership and Citizenship, especially as AI raises broader social concerns.

      Other sectors reveal different lessons. Aerospace is presented as a comeback story built not just on better products, but on fixing foundational levers such as Governance and Workplace. Automotive is described as facing a “Citizenship Challenge”, where EV narratives are not enough if stakeholders see gaps in labour practices, safety, supply-chain ethics or broader societal impact. Finance is shown as especially vulnerable because it is declining across three protective levers at once: Leadership, Governance and Citizenship.

      The report’s strongest practical recommendation, however, is about the Workplace lever. Burson calls this the highest-ROI reputation investment because it is under-valued and under-invested, despite showing a large performance gap between best and worst performers. The argument is that employees are now the most credible carriers of company culture, so internal culture becomes a driver of external trust. In other words, the hidden engine of reputation is not the flashiest campaign, but the quality of the employee experience.

      That leads directly to the AI section. Burson says most companies discuss AI in terms of innovation and efficiency, but the more important reputational question is people. The report argues that a company’s AI strategy is effectively a statement about how it values employees. Firms that use AI for augmentation, reskilling and transparent co-creation with staff may gain a “reputation dividend”. Firms that use it mainly for opaque top-down cost cutting may pay a “reputation tax” through backlash, talent loss and weaker Workplace scores. The key question, in Burson’s words, is no longer whether a company has an AI strategy, but whether it has an “AI people strategy”.

    4. Global State of Internal Communications 2026 Edition by ContactMonkey

      Global State of Internal Communications 2026 Edition by ContactMonkey

      About the paper

      This report examines the 2026 state of internal communications, arguing that the central problem is no longer engagement alone but a widening “culture gap” between organisational systems and employee experience.

      It is based on original survey research, but the report does not clearly specify the total number of respondents, fieldwork dates, or survey method; it does state that responses came from internal communicators across multiple regions worldwide, with participation led by North America and additional representation from Europe, Asia-Pacific, and other global regions.

      Length: 51 pages

      More information / download:
      https://www.contactmonkey.com/ebook/global-state-of-internal-communications-report-2026

      Core Insights

      1. What is the report’s main argument about the current state of internal communications?

      The report’s core argument is that internal communications has become more strategically important, but not proportionately more effective. Its central thesis is that “the culture gap is the new engagement problem”: organisations may have formal strategies, established channels, and leadership recognition in place, yet employees still experience misalignment, uneven trust, poor feedback follow-through, and communication fatigue. In other words, engagement metrics may look stable on the surface, but they conceal deeper structural weaknesses. This framing appears in both the editor’s note and the conclusion, where the report argues that culture problems are often symptoms of system failures rather than simply messaging failures.

      The report therefore repositions internal communication from a delivery function to a strategic lever for culture, performance, and resilience. But it also stresses that many teams are still too under-resourced, too tactical, and too limited in their measurement capabilities to fulfil that role consistently. The broad message is not that internal communications lacks value, but that organisational expectations have outpaced the systems and resources needed to support it.

      2. What does the report reveal about the organisations and communicators represented in the data?

      The respondent base is globally distributed, though weighted heavily toward North America. The geography section shows 49% of respondents in the United States, 16% in Asia-Pacific, 10% in the UK and Ireland, and 9% in Europe excluding the UK and Ireland, with smaller shares from Canada, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and an unspecified category. The report explicitly notes that North America still dominates participation, while international representation has grown, especially in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

      The organisational profile is tilted towards mid-sized and larger employers. The biggest single company-size group is 1,001–3,000 employees at 21%, followed by organisations with more than 10,000 employees at 18%, though smaller organisations are also represented. Internal communications teams are typically very lean: 49% of respondents work in teams of 2–5 people, 19% in one-person teams, and 9% report no dedicated internal comms team at all. Nearly half of organisations rate their internal communications maturity as “established”, while only 18% describe it as advanced and strategically integrated with business goals. Together, these details matter because they show that the report reflects a profession dealing with large-scale complexity using relatively small teams and often only moderate maturity.

      3. Which issues and priorities dominate internal communications in 2026?

      AI has moved to the centre of the agenda. The top topic of interest for 2026 is artificial intelligence in the workplace, selected by 57% of respondents, followed by employee experience at 48% and change management at 43%. Measurement and analytics also rank highly at 40%, while automation in internal communications stands at 31%. The report interprets this as a sign that communicators are under pressure to scale, personalise, analyse, and prove value more effectively, not merely to experiment with new technology.

      At the same time, the surrounding business context is shaped by uncertainty. Sixty-nine per cent of respondents say their organisation has been affected by external market conditions in the past year, with political or government policy changes cited most often at 70%, followed by inflation at 40%. Inside organisations, this pressure shows up as falling morale, budget cuts, stalled decisions, layoffs, and hiring freezes. The report’s interpretation is that internal communicators are increasingly expected to provide clarity and stability amid volatility, even as their own budgets and tools may be constrained. So the 2026 agenda is defined by a combination of technological change, organisational disruption, and rising demands for strategic relevance.

      4. What does the report say about culture, engagement, trust, and behaviour change?

      One of the report’s most interesting findings is that engagement is not collapsing, but it is stagnating. Fifty-four per cent rate employee engagement as moderate and only 6% as very high; organisational alignment follows a similar pattern, with 50% rating it moderate and fewer than 4% very high. The report reads this as evidence that many employees are coping rather than feeling deeply connected or aligned. That matters because moderate scores can mask friction, confusion, and weak follow-through.

      The same pattern appears elsewhere. Recognition and feedback systems are widespread: 73% report a formal employee recognition system and 95% collect employee feedback. But only 15% say their organisation clearly communicates visible actions taken from that feedback, while 31% describe follow-up as inconsistent or delayed. Communication culture is more often described as transparent and open than empowered and participatory, and leadership communication is mostly trusted rather than fully trusted. Behaviour change is especially fragile: only 11% say DEI messages lead to visible behavioural change consistently, and only 25% say internal communication campaigns often or always change employee behaviour. The report’s broader argument is that organisations are getting better at listening and communicating, but much weaker at reinforcing action, trust, and sustained behavioural shifts.

      5. What are the report’s main strategic conclusions and implications for practice?

      The report concludes that internal communications is now widely recognised as valuable, but is still not consistently empowered as a strategic function. Eighty-two per cent agree that leadership recognises the value of internal communications, and 70% say their organisation has an internal communications strategy. Yet 54% say they do not have sufficient resources to deliver that strategy fully. Meanwhile, 78% say content and template creation takes up most of their time, showing how tactical execution still crowds out strategic work.

      This leads to the report’s most important implication: organisations should stop treating internal communications as a service layer and start treating it as infrastructure. The function is expected to drive culture, support leadership, improve alignment, reach frontline and hybrid workforces, and prove impact, but it cannot do this sustainably without better systems, clearer mandates, and stronger measurement. The report is especially strong on the idea that the “cost of inaction” is already being paid through lost time, manual rework, communication overload, and avoidable labour costs. Its practical conclusion is that closing the culture gap will require not just better messages, but better operating conditions for the people responsible for communication.

    5. License to Lead by FleishmanHillard

      License to Lead by FleishmanHillard

      About the paper

      The report examines what FleishmanHillard calls a company’s “License to Lead” — the stakeholder permission leaders need to change course, move quickly and manage disruption without losing legitimacy.

      It is based on original quantitative research: an online survey conducted by TRUE Global Intelligence from 15 December 2025 to 4 January 2026 among 5,550 respondents, comprising 4,000 engaged consumers, 1,400 executives and 150 policy stakeholders.

      The data is global in scope, covering 15 markets across four regions: North America (US, Canada), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico), Europe & Middle East (UK, France, Germany, Brussels, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa) and Asia Pacific (China, Japan, South Korea).

      Length: 42 pages

      More information / download:
      https://fleishmanhillard.com/2026/01/license-to-lead-playbook/

      Core Insights

      1. What is the report’s central argument about leadership in an age of permanent uncertainty?

      The core argument is that uncertainty is no longer a temporary disruption but the standing condition of leadership. On pages 2–3, the report says leaders now have to make high-stakes decisions faster, with less certainty, under greater scrutiny, and in environments shaped by political volatility, geopolitical change, technological acceleration, media fragmentation and rising stakeholder expectations.

      Its main claim is that the real constraint on execution is no longer strategy quality alone. It is whether stakeholders are willing to let leaders act, especially when strategic shifts involve disruption, short-term pain or visible course correction. FleishmanHillard calls this permission structure “License to Lead”. On page 3, the report explicitly argues that organisations stall not because they lack strategic brilliance, but because stakeholders do not have enough confidence that the new direction is justified and worth following.

      That framing is important because it shifts the leadership discussion from planning to permission. In this report’s logic, reputation is not a nice-to-have or a downstream outcome of success. It is a precondition for making strategy executable when conditions change.

      2. What does the global survey reveal about stakeholder expectations of business leaders today?

      The report shows that stakeholders increasingly expect leaders to be adaptable, clear, accountable and visibly fair. On page 5, 84% of engaged consumers and 82% of policy stakeholders say the current business environment is more unpredictable and disruptive than it was three years ago. Among engaged consumers, the top leadership quality for the next decade is the ability to adapt quickly to change, cited by 51%. Clear and simple communication comes next at 40%, followed by the ability to communicate effectively about changes and pivots at 37%.

      Page 6 deepens this picture. Around half of engaged consumers say their expectations of companies have risen when it comes to acting with customers in mind (52%), doing the right thing (50%) and taking a balanced stakeholder approach (47%). More than 90% say several actions are key to confidence in leadership: clear communication of strategy, message consistency, transparency about difficult decisions, genuine listening, and accountability when things go wrong. The highest figure is 95% for taking accountability when things go wrong.

      The report also shows that long-term loyalty is not driven by lofty rhetoric alone. On page 6, the top three loyalty drivers are the product itself (42%), the company’s mission and purpose (38%), and how the company treats employees and stakeholders (38%). That suggests stakeholders still value purpose, but they place it alongside product performance and treatment of people, not above them.

      3. Where is the biggest trust gap between leaders and stakeholders?

      The sharpest gap is between how executives assess corporate leadership and how engaged consumers assess it. Page 7 is the clearest evidence. While 49% of executives are very optimistic that large companies will address major challenges over the next 10 years, only 20% of engaged consumers say the same. Likewise, 51% of executives say they have “a lot” of confidence that leaders of large companies will act in the best interests of society, compared with just 19% of engaged consumers. On preparedness, 44% of executives believe large companies are very prepared to lead effectively during future disruption, versus only 15% of engaged consumers.

      The report reinforces this perception gap on page 9 and in the appendix tables on pages 37–38. Engaged consumers place extremely high importance on integrity and honesty, accountability, transparency and consistency, but far fewer believe company leaders demonstrate those qualities often. For example, 76% of engaged consumers say integrity and honesty are very important, yet only 23% say leaders often demonstrate them. Accountability shows a similar gap: 74% say it is very important, but only 22% say leaders often demonstrate it.

      This matters because the report is not merely saying trust is low. It is saying business leaders systematically overestimate how much trust and legitimacy they currently enjoy. That misreading, in the report’s view, is itself a strategic risk.

      4. What are the practical consequences when companies lose this “License to Lead”?

      The report argues that the consequences are commercial and operational, not just reputational. Page 8 is especially direct: 98% of engaged consumers say they are paying attention to corporate follow-through, and 48% say inconsistent or conflicting messages from leadership greatly decrease their confidence in the company. A further 44% say such inconsistency somewhat decreases confidence, meaning only a tiny minority are unaffected.

      The behavioural consequences are significant. In the past 12 months, after losing confidence in a company, 58% of engaged consumers say they stopped buying from it or significantly reduced spending, 50% switched to a competitor, and 40% privately advised friends or family against the company. Those figures appear both in the key findings and in the appendix table on page 35.

      The report’s broader argument is that poor alignment and weak explanation create friction that slows execution. Pages 10–11, in the “License to Lead Maturity Curve”, describe how low-maturity organisations become reactive, then merely stabilising, because stakeholders interpret abrupt pivots as instability rather than disciplined adaptation. The report’s implication is that execution failures are often self-inflicted: leaders do not sufficiently prepare stakeholders before and during change, so even necessary moves become harder to carry through.

      5. What leadership model does the report propose as the answer, and what are its wider implications?

      The proposed answer is a leadership and corporate affairs model built around five conditions and an integrated operating system. On pages 12–17, the “new leadership playbook” identifies five practices: simplification as an antidote to complexity, ruthless leadership alignment, campaigning the strategy, owning the “why”, and stakeholder relevance without shortcuts. These are presented not as communications tactics in isolation, but as interdependent conditions for sustaining permission to act.

      The logic is consistent across these sections. Simplification means reducing complexity into a repeatable direction that stakeholders can understand. Alignment means leaders must resolve disagreements privately and present a unified public narrative. Campaigning the strategy means treating strategy as an ongoing effort rather than a one-off announcement. Owning the “why” means showing the logic, trade-offs and changed assumptions behind a pivot rather than presenting it as an unexplained verdict. Stakeholder relevance means proving fairness through operational decisions, not just values statements.

      Pages 18–24 then elevate corporate affairs into an “operating system” built on three capabilities: insight, influence and adaptability. The report argues that insight helps leaders distinguish real external signals from noise; influence turns reputation into an active enabler of execution; and adaptability helps organisations maintain legitimacy across repeated cycles of change.

      The wider implication, especially on pages 23–25, is that corporate affairs should no longer be treated as peripheral or reactive. The report claims that execution velocity is now partly a reputational capability. Strategy will keep changing; reputation must be built before it is needed; and corporate affairs now determines whether leaders can move quickly without losing stakeholder backing. In that sense, the report is not just about communications. It is an argument for repositioning corporate affairs as core leadership infrastructure in conditions of permanent volatility.

    6. State of PR 2026 by Meltwater

      State of PR 2026 by Meltwater

      About the paper

      The paper is a global survey-based industry report on how PR and communications professionals are navigating resourcing pressure, measurement, AI, media relations, collaboration and future skills.

      The report is original survey research based on more than 1,100 international PR professionals, including almost 500 from the United States, 100 from Canada and respondents from across the world, with Europe described as particularly well represented.

      The fieldwork method, sampling approach and timeframe are not clearly specified in the report.

      Length: 56 pages

      More information / download:
      https://www.meltwater.com/en/blog/state-of-pr

      Core Insights

      1. What is the central picture the report paints of the PR industry in 2026?

      The report presents PR as an industry caught between familiar old pressures and a new wave of technological disruption. On the one hand, many of the profession’s core challenges remain highly recognisable: lack of resources, difficulty measuring impact, managing stakeholders, getting journalists to respond and doing more with less. On the other hand, AI, social media, data and changing audience behaviour are reshaping the environment in which those classic challenges now have to be solved.

      The report’s strongest overarching argument is that PR is becoming more strategically important, but still struggles to prove that importance in business terms. It explicitly links this to generative AI: as LLMs increasingly influence how brands are described and discovered, earned media and public narratives may become even more central to brand visibility. In that sense, the report positions PR not as a shrinking discipline, but as one whose relevance could grow if it can modernise its tools, metrics and internal influence.

      At the same time, the report is clear that the profession has not fully made the shift from activity-based communication to business-aligned communication. Many teams are still judged by volume and reach of media placements, while challenges around ROI, business KPIs and leadership understanding remain persistent. The conclusion frames the core issue as one of alignment: between PR and leadership on strategy and metrics, between PR and marketing on execution, and between human creativity and AI in daily workflows.

      2. What are the main operational challenges facing PR professionals?

      The most frequently cited challenge is insufficient resources, named by 24% of respondents. Measurement follows closely, with 21% identifying measuring impact and ROI as a top challenge. Managing stakeholder expectations comes next at 16%, followed by getting responses from journalists at 12% and adopting new technologies at 10%.

      This distribution matters because it shows that the profession’s biggest pressures are not only external. The difficult media environment is part of the story, but the larger picture is organisational: PR teams are under-resourced, expected to prove impact, and often dependent on leaders who may not fully understand the value or mechanics of communications work.

      The report reinforces this with budget data. A majority expect PR budgets to stay flat, while only 21.3% expect an increase and 17.3% expect a decrease. Budget decisions are also often made outside the PR function: 36.7% say the CEO decides PR spending, while 19.2% say a C-level marketing leader does. Only 32.6% say a C-level PR or communications executive makes these decisions.

      Time pressure is another recurring theme. The biggest time sinks are reactive work such as crisis response and urgent requests, cited by 27.9%, and content creation, cited by 27.5%. Measurement and reporting account for another 20.3%. The report’s implied diagnosis is that PR teams are stuck in a reactive operating model, spending too much time on urgent execution and too little on strategic, higher-value work.

      3. How mature is the industry’s approach to measurement and business impact?

      The report suggests that PR measurement remains stuck between aspiration and reality. Many teams understand that they need to connect communication to business outcomes, but their most common metrics still lean heavily towards activity and visibility.

      The most important metrics for evaluating PR success are the number of media placements and reach/impressions, both at 20.9%. Social media engagement follows at 11%, while more business-relevant or interpretive metrics such as website traffic/conversions, message pull-through, share of voice and sentiment analysis rank lower. This supports one of the report’s central criticisms: the industry is still often measuring what is easiest to measure rather than what best demonstrates business value.

      The measurement section makes this even clearer. When asked about challenges, 34.7% cite aligning metrics to business KPIs, and 27.8% cite proving PR’s value to leadership. Another 22.4% point to over-reliance on outdated metrics such as impressions and AVE. Although nearly three quarters say they have at least some of the tools needed to connect PR activity to wider business outcomes, only 32.1% say they fully have those tools; 39% say they only partially do.

      The report’s perspective is therefore not that measurement is impossible, but that PR measurement is underdeveloped and uneven. It implies that the profession needs more sophisticated reporting, closer linkage to business objectives and better executive-facing narratives about what PR contributes.

      4. How is generative AI affecting PR work, and what concerns does it raise?

      Generative AI is presented as both a practical tool and a major strategic disruptor. A majority of respondents say AI is already integrated into communication workflows: 13.3% describe it as highly integrated and 42.1% as somewhat integrated. Only 9.8% say it is not integrated at all.

      Current use is heavily concentrated around content work. The most common applications are external content creation, content optimisation and review, campaign brainstorming, internal content creation, writing press releases and crafting media pitches. Measurement and reporting are much lower at 2.1%, which suggests that many teams still use AI primarily as a production assistant rather than as a strategic analysis or intelligence tool.

      The report also highlights a gap between adoption and governance. While 36.2% say their organisation has a formal AI policy and 26.4% say one is in development, 31.4% say they do not have one. This makes AI governance one of the more practical risks in the report: usage is becoming normal before policies, training and operating models are fully mature.

      The biggest concern about AI is that it may reduce the need for human talent, cited by 28.6%. Other concerns include shrinking communications budgets and reducing PR’s seat at the table. Interestingly, concerns about accuracy and content quality appear very low in the report’s results, which may suggest either that respondents are less worried about quality than job security, or that the survey options did not fully surface deeper concerns around misinformation, ethics and brand risk.

      Looking ahead, AI dominates the future-facing findings. AI integration is the top skill PR professionals believe they will need over the next five years, and navigating new technologies such as AI is seen as the biggest future challenge. AI as a tool for content creation and data analysis is also identified as the emerging trend likely to have the greatest impact on PR.

      5. What are the most important implications for PR leaders and communication teams?

      The report’s main implication is that PR teams need to become more strategically aligned, more data-literate and more operationally efficient. The conclusion explicitly argues that success in 2026 and beyond will depend on using powerful new tools without losing the human skills that make PR valuable: storytelling, relationship-building and creativity.

      For PR leaders, the most immediate implication is the need to speak more directly in business language. Since resources and budgets are major concerns, and since budget decisions often sit with CEOs or marketing leaders, PR teams need to show clearer links between communication activity and organisational outcomes. The report repeatedly suggests that better reporting and business-aligned metrics are essential not only for measurement, but for influence.

      A second implication is that PR needs stronger collaboration across the organisation. Respondents already collaborate most often with executive leadership and marketing, but they want more involvement from leadership, customer experience, marketing and product development in communications strategy. The main barriers are misaligned priorities, departmental politics or silos, and lack of communication. This points to a broader strategic role for PR, but also to the difficulty of securing that role inside complex organisations.

      A third implication is that AI cannot simply be treated as a content shortcut. The report encourages teams to operationalise AI, formalise policies, invest in tools and training, and use AI to reduce time spent on repetitive or low-value tasks. The opportunity is not just faster content production, but freeing up capacity for more rewarding and strategic work.

      Finally, the report implies that the human fundamentals of PR remain durable. Media relevance, timeliness and reporter relationships are still the most important factors in securing coverage. Individual email remains by far the most effective pitching channel. LinkedIn is the most valuable professional social platform. These findings suggest that while the tools are changing rapidly, the profession’s underlying value still depends on judgement, relationships, relevance and trust.