Tag: trends

Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 by Reuters

About the paper

The report examines the strategic pressures, technology shifts, and business-model changes likely to shape journalism in 2026, with a strong focus on generative AI, platform dependency, creators, video, and misinformation.

It is a mixed-methods industry trends report drawing primarily on a closed survey of 280 senior news leaders from 51 countries and territories, supplemented by background interviews, industry examples, and third-party data such as Chartbeat analytics; the survey is global in scope but not a representative sample of the wider industry.

Length: 47 pages

More information / download:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2026

Core Insights

1. Why does the report argue that journalism faces a particularly acute strategic squeeze in 2026?

The report’s central argument is that journalism is being squeezed simultaneously by technological disruption and cultural-platform disruption. On one side, generative AI is changing how people access information, especially through search engines turning into answer engines and AI tools surfacing information directly in chat interfaces rather than sending traffic to publishers. On the other side, creators and influencers are pulling attention towards more personality-led, platform-native content that often feels more direct, relevant, or entertaining than traditional institutional journalism.

The report frames this as an existential challenge because it affects both economics and legitimacy. Economically, publishers fear a major drop in referral traffic from search and social platforms. Culturally and politically, journalism is also under pressure from declining trust, direct-to-audience communication by politicians and celebrities, and continued attacks on news media as biased or fake. The report suggests that journalism is no longer just competing with rival publishers, but with AI intermediaries, platform algorithms, and creator ecosystems that change how audiences discover and value information.

This squeeze is reflected in industry sentiment. Only 38% of surveyed leaders say they are confident about journalism’s prospects in the year ahead, which the report says is 22 percentage points lower than in 2022. At the same time, 53% remain confident about their own organisation’s prospects. That contrast matters: the report suggests many executives believe their own brand may survive or adapt, even while the broader health of journalism as a public institution deteriorates.

2. What evidence does the report provide that AI and platform shifts are already reshaping access to news and publisher traffic?

One of the report’s most concrete findings is that publishers expect search traffic to decline by 43% on average over the next three years. That expectation is linked to Google AI Overviews, AI mode, and the wider shift from search engines that send users outward to answer engines that satisfy users inside the interface. The report also notes that around a fifth of respondents expect a loss of more than 75% of their company’s search traffic.

The report backs this up with Chartbeat data. Across a network of more than 2,500 sites, Google Search referrals were down 33% globally year-on-year between November 2024 and November 2025, and down 38% in the United States. Google Discover traffic was also down. By contrast, Facebook and X showed modest year-on-year increases in that specific comparison period, but the longer trend remains negative: over roughly the last two and a half years, Facebook referrals fell by 43% and X referrals by 46%. The point is not that one channel is collapsing overnight, but that publishers are losing stability across several external traffic sources at once.

The report also shows that AI referral growth is real but still tiny in commercial terms. ChatGPT referrals to publishers are rising quickly, yet they remain a tiny fraction of overall traffic. The report says Google delivers 500 times as many referrals as ChatGPT from search alone, and 1,300 times as many if Google Discover is included. So the immediate issue is not that AI platforms already replace traditional traffic at scale, but that they may erode old discovery systems much faster than they create meaningful new value for publishers.

This is why the report highlights publisher ambivalence towards AI platforms. Publishers are weighing lawsuits, licensing deals, visibility strategies, and new optimisation practices such as AEO and GEO. The implication is that access to audiences is becoming less about classic SEO and more about negotiating with, supplying, or optimising for AI-mediated distribution systems.

3. How does the report think publishers will respond editorially and strategically to these pressures?

The clearest editorial response in the report is a shift towards distinctiveness. Survey respondents say journalism should focus more on original reporting, contextual analysis, community-building, human stories, fact-checking, and opinion or commentary. These are all framed as forms of journalism that are harder for AI systems to commoditise or summarise into generic output. Conversely, publishers expect to pull back from service journalism, evergreen content, and general news, because those formats are more easily absorbed by chatbots and aggregators.

The report also points to a format shift. Publishers increasingly see video and audio as strategic priorities in response to AI. Seventy-nine per cent say it is important to invest more in video, and 71% say the same for audio. Text is still important, but the report suggests its economic and competitive position is weakening because AI can cheaply generate, remix, and summarise text-based content. Video and audio are seen as more defensible, more engaging, and more suited to platform discovery.

Distribution strategy is changing too. For 2026, publishers plan to put more effort into YouTube, AI platforms, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, while reducing effort on X, Facebook, and old-style Google Search optimisation. This reflects a move away from legacy social and search habits towards video-heavy environments and AI interfaces. It also reflects the report’s broader argument that publishers need to meet audiences where attention is moving, even if that means adjusting tone, format, and production logic.

The report adds an important nuance: not all publishers will pursue the same path. Some will double down on distinctiveness and direct audience relationships, while others will lean further into automation and scale. The report describes a possible “barbell effect”, with highly distinctive human journalism at one end and highly automated low-cost publishing at the other, leaving mid-market undifferentiated outlets especially vulnerable.

4. What does the report say about the growing influence of creators, video culture, and personality-led journalism?

The report treats the creator wave as one of the defining shifts in the media environment. It argues that platform changes have turbo-charged creator economics by favouring viral, personality-led, video-first content over traditional link-sharing and institutional distribution. Publishers are worried primarily about creators taking time and attention away from publisher content: 70% are somewhat or very concerned about that. A smaller, but still significant, 39% are concerned about losing talent to the creator ecosystem.

Importantly, the report does not present creators purely as a threat. It suggests they have become a model for authenticity, voice, and audience connection, even if much creator content is more opinion-led and partisan than traditional journalism. That duality matters: creators are competitors, but also proof that audiences respond to content that feels human, recognisable, and direct. Publishers, the report suggests, are learning from this without fully embracing its norms.

That is why 76% of surveyed publishers say they will try to get journalists to behave a bit more like creators in 2026. Half plan to partner with creators for distribution, 31% say they may hire creators, and 28% are considering creator studios or joint ventures. Examples in the report include Wired building writers into platform personalities, CNN Creators, SPIL in the Netherlands, and various creator partnerships or branded ventures at the Independent, Vox Media, and the Washington Post.

But the report also flags risks. Making journalists more personality-led may create conflicts around editorial standards, reputation, and independence. It may also help staff build their own followings and then leave. More fundamentally, moving too far towards creator logic may undermine some of the things audiences still value in institutional journalism, such as fairness, verification, and a consistent editorial voice. So the report sees creator influence as both necessary stimulus and strategic tension.

5. What broader conclusions does the report draw about the future of journalism, newsroom AI, and sustainable business models?

The report’s conclusion is neither apocalyptic nor reassuring. It argues that journalism is still in transition: old models are fading, new ones are emerging, and the eventual settlement is unclear. It suggests the industry will probably get smaller overall, with some audience attention permanently shifting elsewhere, but it rejects the idea that journalism becomes irrelevant. Reliable reporting, human stories, analysis, and trust still matter, especially in a media environment polluted by AI slop, misinformation, and manipulative content.

On newsroom AI, the report is pragmatic rather than evangelical. AI use is spreading across back-end automation, coding, product development, commercial applications, newsgathering, and content creation with human oversight. Yet the impact so far is mostly described as promising or limited rather than transformational. Only 13% describe newsroom AI initiatives as transformational, while 44% say promising and 42% say limited. Likewise, AI has not yet translated into major labour savings for most organisations: 67% report no job cuts, 16% say they cut only a small number, and 9% say they have actually added jobs.

On business models, subscriptions and membership remain the main priority, followed by display and native advertising, with events also important. The most notable emerging revenue area is platform payment for content, including AI-related licensing or revenue sharing, though the report makes clear that most publishers expect this to be, at best, a minor contribution rather than a transformative income stream. It also identifies structural barriers to innovation, especially lack of resources, skill shortages, siloed organisations, and weak strategic alignment.

The final implication is that survival will depend less on chasing every trend and more on strategic clarity. The publishers most likely to thrive, according to the report, are those with a clear sense of their audience, their role, and the value they can create. That means being human where it matters, adaptable where necessary, and organised enough internally to experiment with new formats, products, and business models without losing editorial purpose.

12 January 2026
Inside PR 2026: Trends, challenges and what’s next by Cision

About the paper

The report examines how PR professionals see the industry’s challenges, priorities, opportunities, skills and AI use heading into 2026.

It is an original survey-based report drawing on responses from 561 industry professionals collected in September and October 2025 across the U.S. and UK; respondents came from different job levels and organisational settings, including agencies, in-house teams, nonprofits and the public sector.

The methodology is clearly stated, though the report is based on a self-selected survey distributed through Cision’s customer/subscriber database, newsletters and social channels.

Length: 40 pages

More information/download:
https://www.cision.com/resources/guides-and-reports/2026-inside-pr-report/

Core Insights

1. What does the report say are the biggest pressures reshaping PR right now and into 2026?

The report’s core argument is that PR is being reshaped by a mix of external disruption and internal constraint. Right now, the top challenges are the changing media landscape, cited by 60% of respondents, and resource pressures, cited by 58%, with AI and automation close behind at 50%. That means the profession is being squeezed from several directions at once: media roles are blurring, budgets are tight, and teams are expected to adapt quickly to new technologies.

Looking specifically ahead to 2026, resource pressures become the single biggest anticipated challenge, selected by 34% of respondents, followed by the changing media landscape at 21% and AI and automation at 18%. So the report suggests that, while media disruption remains highly important, many PR teams believe the more immediate pain point will be practical capacity: doing more with less, with leaner teams and tighter budgets.

The report also shows that these pressures are experienced differently depending on role and organisational type. Executives are more focused on the media landscape, while managers are more likely to name resource pressures. Agency teams are more likely to emphasise external disruption, especially the changing media landscape and AI, whereas in-house teams are more likely to highlight internal operational strain, especially resource pressures and demands for data-driven strategy. That distinction matters because it shows there is no single PR reality; the sector is fragmented by business model and seniority.

2. How does the report portray the gap between PR’s ambitions and its operational reality?

A major theme in the report is that PR teams may think they are agile, but many structural factors prevent them from acting with real speed. Overall, 57% of respondents describe their teams as “very” or “extremely agile”, which sounds positive at first glance. But the report immediately complicates that picture by showing that executives rate their teams as “extremely agile” at roughly twice the rate of other colleagues. In other words, leadership appears more optimistic than those closer to day-to-day execution.

The underlying barriers are fairly concrete. Sixty-three percent cite team size and structure as an obstacle to agility, and 53% point to slow executive decision-making. The report uses this to argue that agility is not just a cultural aspiration; it depends on organisational design, approval processes and access to timely information. That is an important analytical point, because it reframes agility from a vague buzzword into an operational issue.

Again, agency and in-house teams diverge. Agency respondents are more likely to see team size and structure as the main barrier, while in-house teams are especially hindered by lack of real-time data. Agency respondents are also much more likely to cite skill diversity and access to the right tools and technology as obstacles. The implication is that PR’s effectiveness increasingly depends on whether organisations remove friction from the system rather than simply asking teams to work faster.

3. What priorities and opportunities are PR teams focusing on for 2026, and what does that reveal about the direction of the profession?

The report shows a profession trying to balance traditional communications goals with growing pressure to prove business value. Brand awareness remains the dominant priority, named by 73% of respondents as a top priority and by 36% as the single top priority. But driving sales and revenue through PR is also highly prominent, named by 55% as a top priority and 26% as the single top priority. PR measurement and ROI follows at 50%.

That combination reveals an important shift. Brand building is still central, but the report suggests that communicators are under stronger pressure to connect PR activity to measurable commercial outcomes. Executives are more concerned than others with driving sales and revenue, while agencies also lean more heavily towards revenue and ROI than in-house teams, which remain more focused on brand awareness. The report interprets this as a possible misalignment between leadership expectations and how practitioners define PR’s core value.

On the opportunity side, AI and automation lead clearly at 48%, followed by strengthening journalist and creator relationships at 39%, closer alignment with marketing and business strategy at 32%, and data and analytics to demonstrate ROI at 31%. This is one of the report’s most revealing sections, because it shows the future of PR being defined by two simultaneous moves: more technology and more integration with business strategy, without abandoning relationship-building. The direction of travel is not simply “more AI”; it is a more hybrid model where technology supports efficiency and insight, while human connection and strategic alignment remain essential.

4. Which tools and skills does the report identify as most important, and what does that suggest about what successful PR work will look like?

The toolset that respondents value most is led by media monitoring and analysis, cited by 60%, followed by content creation tools at 49% and media database or relationship management tools at 44%. Analytics and reporting dashboards and press release distribution both sit at 33%. This indicates that successful PR work is increasingly built on a mix of intelligence gathering, content production and relationship infrastructure.

The organisational split is telling here as well. Agency teams place much higher value on media database and relationship management tools, while in-house teams place more emphasis on content creation. That makes sense within the report’s logic: agencies need broad contact networks across multiple clients and sectors, while in-house teams are more focused on brand storytelling and owned content.

On skills, storytelling and content creation come first at 59%, followed by media relations at 44%, strategic planning at 34%, and AI integration at 33%. ROI measurement is lower down at 21%, which is striking given how much the report emphasises pressure to prove impact. That suggests the field still sees core communicative craft as more central than technical evaluation skill, even as accountability expectations rise.

Overall, the report presents the ideal PR professional of 2026 as someone who combines creative and relational strengths with strategic and analytical capability. The future winner is not just a storyteller, and not just a data person, but someone who can connect narratives to business outcomes while using new tools intelligently.

5. What does the report conclude about AI’s role in PR, and what broader conclusion does it draw about the future of the profession?

AI is presented as both a pressure point and a major opportunity. The report says 40% of respondents use AI-powered media monitoring tools and 31% use AI features in analytics and reporting dashboards. When it comes to stand-alone generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, use is already widespread: 73% use them for brainstorming ideas, 68% for writing or refining press releases, pitches or other content, 55% for research, 36% for drafting or scheduling social posts, and 31% for analysing data or generating reports. Only 8% say they do not use generative AI tools.

That makes AI a mainstream workflow reality rather than an emerging experiment. But the report is careful not to frame this as a fully automated future. Its repeated position is that human creativity, storytelling and relationships remain indispensable. AI is valuable for efficiency, insight and scale, but it does not replace the human dimensions that make PR effective.

The broader conclusion is that PR is moving into a more demanding, more hybrid era. The profession must adapt to unstable media dynamics, economic pressure and growing performance expectations, while also absorbing AI into everyday practice. The teams most likely to succeed, according to the report, will be those that align strategy and execution, remove structural barriers to agility, strengthen storytelling and data capabilities, and combine machine efficiency with human authenticity. In that sense, the report’s ultimate message is not that PR is being reinvented from scratch, but that its traditional strengths now have to operate inside a far more data-driven, resource-constrained and technology-enabled environment.

6 January 2026
Corporate Affairs Trends for 2026 by FleishmanHillard

About the paper

This is a forecast-style corporate affairs report for 2026 from FleishmanHillard, centred on three linked forces shaping the field: fragmentation, declining trust, and a more confrontational geopolitical environment.

Methodologically, it is best described as a mixed-methods thought-leadership report grounded in the author’s original analysis, observation, discussions with colleagues, contacts and clients, and selective use of external datasets; there is no single disclosed sample, respondent count, or fieldwork design, and the geographic scope is broad but not clearly delimited, drawing on examples from markets including the UK, US, Germany and Japan.

Length: 32 pages

More information / download:
https://fleishmanhillard.co.uk/2025/12/corporate-affairs-trends-for-2026/

Core Insights

1. What is the report’s central argument about the corporate affairs landscape in 2026?

The core argument is that corporate affairs is becoming harder because the environment is simultaneously more fragmented, less trusting, and more geopolitically adversarial. The report says three forces stand out for 2026: fragmentation, decline of trust, and an increasingly confrontational geopolitical landscape. Rather than treating these as separate developments, it presents them as mutually reinforcing pressures that reshape how communicators reach audiences, build credibility and advise leadership.

The report also makes clear that AI is not a standalone trend in this edition because its effects are now embedded across all the others. In other words, AI is treated as a horizontal force altering research, measurement, publishing, direct engagement and execution, but not replacing the need for human judgement in areas such as geopolitical assessment.

Taken together, the report argues that the traditional model of corporate affairs, built around broad-reach media, relatively stable trust assumptions and a more predictable global environment, is no longer sufficient. The emerging model requires more precision, more segmentation, more direct publishing capability and greater sophistication in dealing with political risk and stakeholder complexity.

2. Why does the report say that “everything gets smaller,” and what does that mean in practice?

“Everything gets smaller” is the report’s shorthand for accelerating fragmentation. Drawing on Nicco Mele’s The End of Big, it argues that media, audiences, brands and institutions are all under pressure from digital atomisation, polarisation and weakening institutional authority. In practical terms, this means audiences are harder to reach at scale, general-interest channels are less dominant, and niche publishers, creators and platforms matter more than before.

The report says audiences are moving towards specialist, high-value and trusted outlets, including titles such as the FT, Economist and Wall Street Journal, alongside podcasts and subscription platforms such as Substack. On page 13, it also points to the visual evidence that major news sites are seeing steep traffic declines while Substack shows growth, reinforcing the idea that the mass-media centre is weakening.

A second part of this trend is economic: digital publishing is under pressure. The report argues that advertisers are likely to favour retail media networks and more directly attributable formats over traditional display advertising, while referral traffic from Google is declining as more users get information through AI-driven systems. That combination threatens publishers’ business models and may shrink the overall supply of quality journalism and analysis.

For corporate affairs leaders, the implication is strategic rather than merely descriptive. The report says they will need to widen relationship-building beyond the “usual suspects”, understand audience channel preferences in greater depth, include niche publishers and influential Substack writers in plans, and adjust measurement frameworks to prioritise relevant reach and business-linked outcomes over broad reputational proxies.

3. How does the report redefine trust, and why does it argue that “absolute trust” is ending?

The report argues that trust can no longer be treated as a stable, universal measure of reputation. For years, communicators often used trust as a broad proxy for reputational strength, but the report says that assumption is breaking down because trust is now polarised and audience-relative rather than generalised.

Its key evidence is that broad trust in institutions and news sources is weakening, while audiences increasingly trust the sources that align with their existing worldview. The report cites the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report and notes that in 53 of the 54 countries surveyed there is a gap between trust in news generally and trust in “the news I use”. It also cites falling generalised trust levels in the UK, Germany and Japan, with US trust remaining low and flat.

This leads to a fundamental strategic shift. A channel cannot simply be labelled “trusted” in the abstract. It may be trusted by one stakeholder segment and distrusted by another. On page 19, the report uses the US example to show how left-leaning and right-leaning audiences consume and trust different sources. That means communicators must think in terms of relative trust within specific audience groups rather than aggregate trust across society.

The report pushes the logic further with the claim that “sounds true” increasingly beats “is true”. That is one of its strongest interpretive claims: in public debate, authority, emotional resonance and perceived credibility may matter more than factual correctness alone. The implication is not that facts no longer matter, but that institutions can no longer assume facts will persuade by themselves. They must communicate in ways that connect with audiences that do not automatically grant them trust.

4. What role does AI play in the report’s view of communications strategy and direct audience engagement?

AI runs through the report as an enabling and disruptive force. Early on, the author says AI is woven through the trends rather than isolated as its own section. The report’s view is that AI can materially improve efficiency, research, measurement and tactical delivery, but that its organisational adoption remains uneven and its limitations still constrain full replacement of human work.

In the context of fragmentation and trust, AI also changes how audiences discover information. The report argues that communicators now need to think not only about reaching humans through media and owned channels, but also about influencing the GPT-based systems those audiences may consult. On page 23, it says earned media accounts for about half of the sources cited by common GPTs in responses about companies or brands, while owned content contributes roughly another fifth. That makes credible earned and owned content strategic assets in both human and machine-mediated discovery.

This is one of the report’s more forward-looking ideas: businesses increasingly need to act as publishers, not only to reach stakeholders directly but also to shape the information environment from which AI systems draw. That makes publishing strategy more central to corporate affairs than in older media models. It also ties back to trust, because the report frames credible earned and owned content as “vital levers of influence”.

At the same time, the report draws a limit around AI. In the geopolitical section, it says AI can help manage the growing complexity of communications execution, but management’s demand for geopolitical intelligence, assessment and advice remains a uniquely human capability. So the report is neither techno-utopian nor dismissive: it sees AI as highly useful, but not as a substitute for senior judgement.

5. What are the report’s main conclusions for corporate affairs leaders, especially in a more zero-sum geopolitical world?

The report’s third major conclusion is that geopolitical uncertainty is no longer a background condition; it is becoming a central operating reality for corporate affairs. It describes a world in which governments are more nationalistic, businesses are increasingly treated as instruments of power projection, and economic security is becoming intertwined with national security.

This produces a “zero-sum” environment in which political actors increasingly think in terms of winners and losers, while global companies are trying to create value across multiple markets and stakeholder groups. The report says this tension makes life harder for multinational firms because supporting one government position can complicate operations elsewhere, and localisation strategies, though increasingly attractive, also multiply stakeholder complexity.

Its practical conclusion is that corporate affairs teams must become more sophisticated systems operators. They need better geopolitical sensing, more formal scenario planning, stronger risk tracking and more structured use of AI for targeted execution. But they also need deeper human expertise, because navigating cross-currents between governments, markets and audiences is presented as a high-judgement advisory function, not just a communications task.

So the report’s broader meaning is this: corporate affairs is moving away from broad-message distribution and towards high-complexity influence management. Success in 2026 will depend on understanding fragmented audiences, working with relative rather than universal trust, building stronger direct and AI-visible publishing capabilities, and helping leadership navigate a world where politics, economics and communications are tightly fused.

10 December 2025
Internal Communications Trends Report 2026 by Workshop

About the paper

This report examines the state of internal communication heading into 2026, focusing on foundations, channels, manager communication, feedback, strategy, and AI adoption.

It appears to be a mixed-source report built primarily on a survey of 312 responses, supplemented by open-ended comments and data from Workshop customers; the precise fieldwork method and country list are not clearly specified.

The data is international in scope, with respondents drawn from a range of locations and industries, but the exact geographic coverage is not clearly specified.

Length: 69 pages

More information / download:
https://useworkshop.com/internal-communications-trends-report/

Core Insights

1. What is the report’s central argument about where internal communication stands in 2026?

The central argument is that internal communication is becoming more strategic, but the function is still under considerable operational strain. The report repeatedly frames the field as moving beyond simple message distribution towards a more intentional role centred on alignment, clarity, employee support, and business contribution. It says teams are getting “more strategic and more intentional”, but that expectations still outpace available resources, with workloads growing faster than team capacity.

That core tension runs through the whole report. On the one hand, there are signs of maturity: stronger foundations, more deliberate channel use, wider adoption of measurement practices, and AI becoming part of everyday work. On the other hand, communicators still face major structural barriers such as limited time, insufficient staffing, weak budget support, being brought in too late, and difficulty proving impact.

So the report’s main message is not that internal comms is in crisis, nor that it has fully “arrived”, but that it is in a transitional stage. It is increasingly recognised as a strategic function, yet many teams still operate with the tools, access, and organisational support of a more tactical service role.

2. What evidence does the report provide that internal communication is strengthening as a function?

The strongest evidence comes from the combination of improved foundations, perceived employee value, and clearer strategic ambition. The report says 51 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their organisation has a solid foundation for internal communications, and 81 percent believed employees would say internal comms helps them do their jobs better. That is important because it suggests internal communication is not being seen merely as corporate messaging, but as practical operational support.

There is also evidence of greater strategic clarity. A large majority, 73 percent, said their internal comms strategy needs to adapt for 2026, which implies that teams are actively thinking about strategy rather than simply maintaining existing activity. At the same time, the top goals remain consistent: employee engagement, alignment across the organisation, and support for business goals. That combination suggests a function that is evolving, but around a stable strategic core.

The report also points to a more sophisticated understanding of channels and content. Email remains dominant and highly effective, but communicators are not just expanding channels for the sake of it. The report argues that teams are becoming more intentional about the role each channel plays, especially by combining push channels such as email with pull channels such as intranets. Similarly, content priorities are shifting from volume towards meaning, with greater emphasis on leadership communication, employee spotlights, values-based content, and change communication.

Taken together, this suggests internal comms is strengthening not because everything is working perfectly, but because practitioners are becoming more deliberate about how communication supports understanding, connection, and organisational coherence.

3. What are the report’s main findings about the practical challenges internal communicators still face?

The report shows very clearly that resource pressure remains one of the defining realities of the profession. Only 44 percent say they have the resources they need to deliver on strategy, and only 18 percent strongly agree that they have a dedicated budget for internal comms in 2026. The accompanying commentary makes the same point in plain language: many teams, including “teams of one”, are trying to meet growing expectations without matching support.

The operational barriers are also quite specific. The most common broad challenge is getting content from other departments, cited by 61 percent. Measurement comes next at 56 percent, followed by not having enough time in the day at 48 percent and not being “in the loop” early enough at 45 percent. This pattern matters because it shows the problem is not just one of budget. It is also about internal process, governance, stakeholder behaviour, and the positioning of comms within the organisation.

The report’s qualitative comments deepen this picture. Respondents describe being treated as order takers rather than strategic partners, being forced to accommodate too many stakeholders, and being asked to distribute messages rather than shape them upstream. That implies one of the biggest constraints on internal comms is not simply capacity, but organisational role clarity. Teams may be expected to produce high-quality, strategic communication, while being denied the early access and authority needed to do so.

In effect, the report suggests that internal communication’s biggest challenge is not a lack of commitment or skill. It is the mismatch between its strategic potential and the conditions under which many teams are still expected to operate.

4. What does the report reveal about the channels, content, and management systems that seem to matter most in 2026?

The report presents a fairly clear hierarchy. Email remains the anchor channel: 95 percent use it and 81 percent rate it as one of their most effective tools. Intranet use is also widespread at 74 percent, but it is described as the most challenging channel, even while being the top investment priority for 2026 at 52 percent. This is one of the report’s most interesting tensions: the intranet is frustrating in practice, but still seen as strategically important when it works as a reliable knowledge hub.

The report’s broader argument is that communicators should stop expecting one channel to do everything. Instead, they should design an ecosystem in which push and pull channels support one another. That is a more mature view of internal communication architecture, and it reflects a concern with actual employee behaviour rather than simply channel ownership.

On content, leadership updates are the most commonly delivered type today, and leadership communication is also the top content priority for 2026. Employee spotlights, values-based content, change communication, and performance storytelling also rank highly. The report interprets this as a move away from simply sending updates towards creating meaning, context, and connection. In other words, content is becoming less transactional and more interpretive.

Manager communication stands out as especially important. It is again the number-one trend for 2026, chosen by 56 percent, yet only 4 percent say managers are very effective at cascading communication. That gap is central to the report’s diagnosis. Managers remain the crucial relay point between organisational messaging and employee understanding, but the capability is still weak. Hence the report’s repeated emphasis on leader digests, manager toolkits, cascade templates, and training. It sees better systems for managers not as a side issue, but as one of the main ways internal comms can increase impact.

5. What does the report say about AI, and what broader implications does that have for the future of internal communication?

The report treats AI as having moved decisively from novelty to normal workflow tool. It says 42 percent of respondents use AI every day and another 31 percent use it a few times a week. More than half describe themselves as actively experimenting, while 33 percent say AI is already integrated into some workflows. That is a strong sign that AI is no longer peripheral to the field.

Current use is still concentrated in content production, where 72 percent use AI, followed by strategy or planning, summarising feedback or survey results, and repurposing content. But when respondents look ahead, the biggest priority is automation of repetitive tasks, cited by 68 percent. That matters because it shows communicators do not just want faster drafting. They want relief from low-value repeat work so they can spend more time on strategic judgement, nuance, and relationship work.

At the same time, the report is careful not to frame AI in purely celebratory terms. The main concerns are accuracy or misinformation, loss of human tone, and privacy or security. These are not fringe objections: they are held by majorities or near-majorities of respondents. The report’s perspective is that these concerns are healthy constraints, not reasons to reject AI outright. Its implied model is human-centred augmentation: use AI for the early lift, then apply human review for trust, tone, and judgement.

The wider implication is that internal communication may be heading towards a sharper division between work that can be accelerated and work that remains distinctly human. Drafting, summarising, formatting, repurposing, and workflow support will increasingly be automated or AI-assisted. But meaning-making, employee trust, leadership credibility, and organisational judgement will become even more central to the communicator’s value. In that sense, AI does not reduce the strategic importance of internal comms. The report suggests it may actually increase it.

1 December 2025
The State of PR 2025 by Muck Rack
About the paper

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

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

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

Length: 31 pages

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

Core Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respondents also identify:
- increased competition for coverage: 49%;
- shorter media cycles and faster turnaround: 48%;
- reduced media appetite caused by the economic or political climate: 47%;
- a lack of timely or newsworthy stories: 42%;
- overloaded or understaffed PR teams: 32%;
- limited access to executives or subject-matter experts: 29%;
- difficulty personalising pitches at scale: 26%;
- conflicting internal priorities: 21%.
These findings indicate that the difficulty is not caused by a single failure in pitching technique. It reflects a combination of shrinking journalistic capacity, intense competition, rapid news cycles, weak story material and internal organisational constraints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The social media findings also have clear strategic implications. LinkedIn has consolidated its position as the most important professional platform:
- 56% regard it as the most valuable platform for PR;
- 87% include it in their organisation’s social and communications strategy;
- 70% want to monitor it.
By contrast, X has declined sharply. Only 11% now regard it as the most valuable platform, and 39% say they stopped using it professionally during the previous year. Nevertheless, 41% still include it in their organisational strategy and 52% want to monitor it. This suggests that X may be losing value as an active communications channel while remaining relevant as an environment that organisations feel obliged to observe.

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

Overall, the report implies five priorities for PR leaders:
1. connect communication activity more clearly with measurable organisational outcomes;
2. treat AI adoption as an operational and governance issue, not merely a tool experiment;
3. make earned-media outreach more selective and substantially more relevant;
4. reconsider channel investment as LinkedIn strengthens and X weakens;
5. improve monitoring and listening capabilities so that multichannel strategies are informed by evidence rather than platform presence alone.
The report’s conclusions should nevertheless be interpreted within its sample limitations. It is based mainly on US practitioners, agencies make up 51% of respondents, and some questions changed wording from earlier surveys. The authors therefore caution that direct year-on-year comparisons may not always be valid.
14 August 2025
Future of Professionals Report 2025 by Thomson Reuters

About the paper

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

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

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

Length: 31 pages

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

Core Insights

1. What is the central argument of the report?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 June 2025
The Ipsos AI Monitor 2025 by Ipsos

About the paper

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

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

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

Length: 57 pages

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

Core Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 June 2025
Trends – Artificial Intelligence by BOND

About the paper

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

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

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

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

Length: 340 pages

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

Core Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 May 2025
Navigating the future of communication by Burson

About the paper

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

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

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

Length: 9 pages

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

Core Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 April 2025
2025 Global Communication Report by USC Annenberg
About the paper

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

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

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

Length: 44 pages

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

Core Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taken together, the report’s conclusion is that the future of PR will be shaped by whether older and younger professionals can work across these differences. The authors do not argue that the gaps must disappear. Rather, they argue that the profession must recognise them, understand them and avoid letting established assumptions block adaptation. That is the report’s final message: not that one generation is right and another is wrong, but that the future belongs to those willing to listen across the divide.
27 March 2025
Employee Communications Report 2025 Global Edition by Gallagher
About the paper

The report is a mixed-methods industry report on the state of internal communication and employee experience, focusing on communicator performance, purpose, measurement, relationships, channels, AI, change and wellbeing.

It combines 2,000+ survey responses with qualitative input from a steering committee of 8, a dashboard discussion group of 20, and six focus groups involving 37 attendees; fieldwork ran between August and December 2024, with the survey itself conducted from October to November 2024.

The data is global in scope, covering 55 countries, though the respondent base is weighted towards North America, the UK and Europe.

Length: 40 pages

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

Core Insights

1. What is the report’s main argument about what makes internal communicators successful in 2025?

The central argument is that communicator success is shaped less by sheer effort or tactical busyness and more by two reinforcing capabilities: using data well and building productive relationships across the organisation. The report states this explicitly in both the introduction and conclusion, arguing that the communicators who perform best are those who can collect, synthesise and apply data tied to business impact, while also maintaining strong cross-functional and leadership relationships.

That argument is strengthened by the report’s “communicator profiles”: Survivors, Strivers and Thrivers. Thrivers stand out because they score better on KPI performance, confidence, relationship quality, purpose progress and data effectiveness. They are described as aligned, future-focused and consistently able to exceed targets, whereas Survivors tend to operate reactively in poor conditions with weak structures and limited room for growth.

The report therefore presents success not as a matter of output volume, but as a matter of operating model. Thrivers spend more time on architectural work such as strategy, planning and leadership support, while Survivors spend more time on administration and reactive tactical work. In effect, the report says that the strongest communicators are not simply producing more content; they are better positioned to shape decisions, interpret evidence and influence the business.

2. How do communicators currently define their purpose, and where is the biggest tension in that purpose?

The report finds that the top three purposes of internal communication in 2025 are strategic alignment, culture and belonging, and organisational agility. In other words, communicators see their role as helping employees understand the business direction, feel part of the organisation, and adapt to change. Employee listening ranks just outside the top three, but the report treats it as a critical enabling function running through all of them.

The biggest tension is what the report calls the “purpose vs. perception paradox”. Unlike finance or operations, communications does not have a universally fixed, easily understood mandate. That flexibility can be useful because the function can adapt to business needs, but it also creates risk: when communicators have to define their own purpose rather than receiving a clear top-down mandate, the function may be seen as less indispensable. The report suggests this ambiguity contributes to scope creep and weakens the perceived strategic standing of communication.

There is also a notable performance gap hidden inside the purpose data. Around two in three respondents are satisfied with progress on strategic alignment and culture and belonging, but satisfaction is far lower on areas such as employee listening and organisational agility. The report notes a roughly 50-point gap between Thrivers and Survivors on progress in the top-ranked purpose areas. So the issue is not only defining purpose, but converting stated purpose into actual progress.

3. What barriers are most undermining communicator performance, and what do they reveal about the organisational environment?

The top barriers for 2025 are lack of time and capacity, change fatigue, poor people-manager communication, lack of clear direction from the top, and poor leadership communication. These barriers point to a communications environment under strain, where the problem is not simply channel overload or lack of tools, but wider organisational conditions: too much change, too little clarity, and too much dependence on leaders and managers who are not consistently effective communicators.

The report goes further by showing that the most damaging blockers are all closely tied to leadership and organisational power.

The five barriers that most strongly depress communicator confidence are:
- lack of involvement in decision-making
- lack of clear direction from the top
- lack of analytics and measurement
- lack of involvement in change management
- and lack of support from senior leaders.
In other words, communicators struggle most when they are excluded from strategy, lack evidence, or are expected to execute without influence.

Change fatigue is especially important. It is a new entry in the barrier list yet immediately becomes one of the most significant. The report argues that employees are dealing not just with external uncertainty but with multiple internal change initiatives, often poorly coordinated. Communicators describe a situation where leaders push messages because they feel they are important, without enough attention to what employees actually need to know. That reveals an environment of change saturation rather than disciplined transformation.

4. What does the report show about measurement, data and cross-functional relationships as drivers of impact?

One of the report’s strongest themes is that communicator impact depends on both measurement capability and relationship quality. The average communicator is accountable for seven KPIs, most of them shared with other departments, especially HR and the C-suite. That means internal communication rarely “owns” success alone; it operates through joint accountability.

However, the report also finds a gap between accountability and actual measurement. For instance, while 92% of respondents have some accountability for employee engagement, only 71% regularly monitor it. Likewise, 56% are accountable for employee retention, but only 40% track it as a business metric. This suggests that communicators are often held responsible for outcomes they do not consistently measure, access, or interpret well enough.

At the same time, the report shows that using data well is closely associated with better outcomes. Communicators who exceed targets are more likely to use data to understand communication effectiveness, inform tactics, evaluate tactics, demonstrate value and shape content decisions. Thrivers are especially strong here, and the report links their success not only to data usage itself but to their ability to connect that data to leadership priorities.

Relationships are the second half of the equation. Collaborative relationships with HR and the C-suite correlate positively with data use, KPI performance and satisfaction with progress toward purpose. The report is particularly emphatic about the C-suite: communicators with collaborative leadership relationships are more satisfied with progress, more likely to meet or exceed targets, and even show markedly better wellbeing. So data and relationships are not separate findings; they work together as the mechanism through which communicators gain influence and prove value.

5. What practical implications does the report draw for communicators and organisations heading into 2025?

The report’s practical conclusion is that communicators need to shift attention from reactive busyness towards strategic capability-building. It recommends clarifying and leadership-aligning the purpose of communication, learning the basics of change management, improving meeting discipline, strengthening visibility with leaders, and building stronger data literacy, especially the non-technical side such as critical thinking, communication and business acumen.

For organisations, the implication is that communication cannot be treated as a tactical support service if better employee outcomes are expected. The report shows that communicators are often under pressure from constant change, blurred remits and limited resources, while also being asked to support AI adoption, leadership communication and employee listening. If businesses want better results, they need to invest in the function not only with tools and budgets, but with clearer direction, stronger inclusion in decision-making and better cross-functional coordination.

The AI findings sharpen this point. While maturity has improved somewhat, 38% say there is no AI governance or guidance in place, and many communicators have not decided how transparent they should be about AI use. The report treats this as a strategic risk, not just a tooling issue, because communicators are expected to help shape employee attitudes to AI while lacking organisational clarity themselves.

Taken together, the report’s practical message is quite clear: in 2025, successful communication functions will be those that can translate evidence into business language, build strong stakeholder coalitions, and impose more clarity on environments marked by overload, ambiguity and continual change.
24 February 2025
Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025 by Reuters

About the paper

The report examines the pressures, priorities, and strategic bets shaping journalism in 2025, with a particular focus on platform disruption, AI, product innovation, and the changing relationship between publishers and audiences.

It is based primarily on original survey research with 326 senior media leaders from 51 countries and territories, fielded online between 20 November and 20 December 2024, and supplemented by background interviews and industry examples. The geographic scope is global, though the report notes that respondents were concentrated in the UK, US, and Europe.

Length: 47 pages

More information / download:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2025

Core Insights

1. What does the report identify as the central challenge facing journalism in 2025?

The report argues that journalism is under pressure from several directions at once: hostile politics, economic strain, weakening platform relationships, and the rise of AI-driven intermediaries that may displace publishers in the discovery chain. Its core claim is not that journalism is disappearing, but that institutional journalism is being forced to redefine its value in a far more contested information environment. Publishers face attacks from populist politicians, a growing creator-led alternative media ecosystem, and a technology landscape in which search, social, and conversational interfaces are all shifting against them.

A key tension in the report is the contrast between low confidence in journalism as a sector and higher confidence in individual companies’ prospects. Only 41% of surveyed leaders say they are confident about journalism’s prospects in the year ahead, while 56% are confident about their own company’s business prospects. That gap suggests leaders believe the wider institution is weakening even while some organisations think they can adapt and survive.

The report’s underlying perspective is that journalism’s challenge is no longer just commercial. It is also structural and civic. Publishers are losing control over distribution, are being bypassed by politicians and creators, and may increasingly find their reporting summarised or repackaged by AI systems before audiences ever reach the original source. The report therefore frames 2025 as a year in which journalism must fight for visibility, authority, and economic leverage all at once.

2. How does the report describe the impact of platform change and search disruption on publishers?

The report presents search disruption as one of the most serious emerging threats to news publishers. After major declines in referral traffic from Facebook and X, publishers are now worried that search could be next as AI overviews and conversational search products replace traditional link-based discovery. The report cites Chartbeat data showing Facebook referrals to news sites down 67% over two years and X down 50%, while aggregate Google search traffic had not yet fallen overall at the time of writing. Even so, 74% of respondents say they are worried about possible declines in referral traffic from search engines in 2025.

The concern is not just fewer clicks. It is that AI products increasingly look like replacements for publisher interfaces rather than gateways to them. The report points to ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Particle, Grok Stories, and other automated news interfaces that summarise multiple sources and foreground the platform’s answer over the publisher’s full article. That changes the economics of discovery. A publisher may still be cited, but citations are not equivalent to traffic, habit, subscriptions, or control of the audience relationship.

This leads to a second issue: compensation and bargaining power. The report notes that some major publishers have secured licensing deals with AI companies, but these arrangements are uneven and opaque. Nearly three-quarters of respondents, 72%, say the industry should push for collective agreements rather than company-by-company deals. The report therefore treats AI licensing not as a settled revenue opportunity, but as a contested and potentially unequal new layer in the publisher-platform relationship.

3. What strategic responses are publishers prioritising to adapt their business models?

The report shows publishers leaning harder into reader revenue, product diversification, and direct relationships. Subscription and membership remain the most important revenue focus, cited by 77% of commercial publishers, ahead of display advertising at 69% and native advertising at 59%. But the report also emphasises that most companies are now combining several revenue streams, including events, platform funding, e-commerce, philanthropy, donations, and related businesses.

A major theme is that strengthening the core product is no longer seen as sufficient on its own. While 55% still say strengthening the existing product is the main priority, 44% say developing new products and services will be most important for future growth. Publishers are exploring youth products, audio, video, education, games, food, international editions, and bundled offerings. The report presents this as a strategic shift from a narrow news product to a broader portfolio model, influenced especially by the New York Times example.

The report also suggests that bundling may become more important as a retention strategy. Publishers are looking to combine news with adjacent services and lifestyle products in all-access subscriptions, both to reduce churn and to compete in a crowded subscription market. This reflects a larger assumption in the report: that publishers will need stronger owned-and-operated ecosystems because platform-dependent growth is becoming less reliable.

4. What role does generative AI play in newsroom transformation, according to the report?

The report makes clear that generative AI is no longer a speculative issue for news organisations. It says newsrooms are already being transformed, with 87% of respondents saying GenAI is transforming newsrooms fully or somewhat. The strongest emphasis remains on back-end and workflow uses, such as tagging, transcription, copyediting, recommendation systems, coding support, research assistance, and commercial modelling. These are seen as more mature and less risky than fully automated publishing.

At the same time, the report argues that audience-facing uses of AI are becoming the next frontier. Publishers say they are actively exploring text-to-audio, AI-generated summaries, translation, chatbots, new search interfaces, and text-to-video conversion. The most widely planned initiatives are text into audio at 75%, AI summarisation at 70%, and translation at 65%, with 56% exploring chatbots or new search interfaces. The direction is towards more personalised, reformatted, and conversational news experiences.

But the report is not triumphalist about AI. It repeatedly notes uncertainty about whether these investments will generate savings or sustainable advantage. It also warns that third-party tools may outpace in-house newsroom tools, and that a flood of synthetic content could increase misinformation risks and further weaken the visibility of original journalism. So AI appears in the report both as an efficiency tool and as a destabilising force that publishers must adapt to quickly without assuming it will solve their core business problems.

5. What broader shifts in audience behaviour, talent, and media culture does the report see as shaping journalism’s future?

One of the report’s most important arguments is that journalism is being reshaped by the rise of personalities, creators, and more socially native forms of news consumption. It highlights research showing that many younger audiences increasingly get news from influencers and creators rather than established news brands, and it notes that publishers themselves are split on whether this trend is good or bad for journalism. The report positions this “creator-fication” as both a competitive threat and a creative challenge to legacy media.

This shift has implications inside news organisations too. The report says talent concerns are especially acute in engineering, data science, product, and design. While most respondents are confident about retaining editorial staff and even editorial stars, they are far less confident about attracting and keeping technical talent. That matters because the same organisations that need to innovate most aggressively around AI, product development, and user experience are struggling to recruit the people required to do it.

The report also points to audience fatigue as a major issue. It describes efforts to respond through explainers, more human-centred storytelling, constructive or positive products, and “less noise, more signal” formats. This suggests the future challenge is not just reaching audiences but making journalism feel usable, sustainable, and worth returning to in a saturated and exhausting information environment. In that sense, the report’s broader conclusion is that journalism’s future depends not only on defending its principles, but on redesigning its formats, products, and relationships for a very different media culture.

9 January 2025
Future of Jobs Report 2025 by World Economic Forum

About the paper

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 analyses how technological change, geo-economic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and the green transition are expected to reshape jobs, skills and workforce strategies by 2030.

It is primarily an original employer survey, supplemented by data partnerships with ADP, Coursera, Indeed and LinkedIn; the survey covers more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies.

The methodology is employer-perspective forecasting rather than labour-market measurement alone: the survey was conducted in late 2024 and asks organisations to estimate expected changes over the 2025–2030 period. The report is global in scope, but it explicitly focuses on larger companies and does not fully cover small enterprises or the informal sector.

Length: 290 pages

More information / download:
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/

Core Insights

1. What are the main forces expected to transform global labour markets by 2030?

The report identifies five broad forces: technological change, geo-economic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and the green transition. These are presented not as separate trends, but as overlapping pressures that will reshape business models, employment and skill needs simultaneously.

The most prominent single trend is broadening digital access, which 60% of employers expect to transform their business by 2030. Within technology, AI and information-processing technologies stand out even more strongly: 86% of employers expect them to transform their business, followed by robotics and automation at 58%, and energy generation, storage and distribution at 41%.

Economic pressure remains highly important. Rising cost of living is the second-most transformative overall trend, cited by 50% of employers, while slower economic growth is cited by 42%. The green transition is also central: 47% expect climate-change mitigation to transform their business, and 41% expect climate adaptation to do so. Demographic change adds a further layer, with ageing populations affecting mainly higher-income economies and growing working-age populations affecting many lower-income economies.

The report’s perspective is clearly employer-led: it is concerned with how organisations expect these forces to affect business transformation, jobs, skills and workforce planning. That gives the report practical value, but it also means its findings reflect employers’ expectations rather than a neutral prediction of what will definitely happen.

2. What does the report predict about job creation, job displacement and the changing composition of work?

The report predicts substantial labour-market churn. Based on employer expectations, structural labour-market transformation between 2025 and 2030 is expected to affect the equivalent of 22% of today’s jobs. That consists of 170 million jobs created, equal to 14% of current employment, and 92 million jobs displaced, equal to 8%, producing a net increase of 78 million jobs, or 7%.

This is an important nuance: the report does not present the future of work as simple mass unemployment caused by technology. Its argument is that disruption will be large, uneven and reconfigurational. Some roles will grow quickly, some will decline sharply, and many workers will need to shift skills, roles or sectors.

Technology is described as especially double-edged. Broadening digital access and AI are expected to create jobs and displace jobs at the same time. Robotics and autonomous systems are more clearly associated with net job displacement. The report’s underlying message is therefore not “technology destroys work” or “technology creates work”, but that technology changes the distribution of work and the skill profile required to remain employable.

3. Which jobs are expected to grow or decline most, and why?

The fastest-growing roles in percentage terms are mainly technology-related. These include Big Data Specialists, FinTech Engineers, AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Software and Applications Developers, Data Warehousing Specialists, Information Security Analysts and related roles. Green-transition roles also feature strongly, including Autonomous and Electric Vehicle Specialists, Environmental Engineers and Renewable Energy Engineers.

However, the largest growth in absolute numbers is expected in frontline and foundational roles, not only in high-tech occupations. The report highlights Farm-workers, Delivery Drivers, Construction Workers, Salespersons and Food Processing Workers, alongside care and education roles such as Nursing Professionals, Social Work and Counselling Professionals, Personal Care Aides, and Tertiary and Secondary Education Teachers.

The largest declines are expected in clerical and secretarial work. Cashiers and Ticket Clerks, Administrative Assistants and Executive Secretaries, Postal Service Clerks, Bank Tellers and Data Entry Clerks are among the roles expected to decline most. This reflects the combined impact of digitalisation, AI, automation and changing business processes.

A key implication is that “future jobs” should not be understood only as AI engineers and data scientists. The report points to a more mixed labour-market future: high-growth technology roles, green-transition roles, care and education roles, and continued demand for many frontline jobs.

4. How are skills expected to change, and what does this imply for workers and employers?

The report estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated over the 2025–2030 period. This is lower than the 44% estimate in the 2023 report and much lower than the 57% estimate in 2020, but it still represents a major level of disruption.

Analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skill, with seven in 10 companies considering it essential in 2025. It is followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, and leadership and social influence. This matters because the report does not frame the future skills agenda as purely technical. Human, cognitive and adaptive capabilities remain central.

The fastest-growing skills are AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy. These are followed by creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, curiosity and lifelong learning, leadership and social influence, talent management, analytical thinking and environmental stewardship. Manual dexterity, endurance and precision are expected to see a notable net decline in demand.

The report’s underlying assumption is that employability will increasingly depend on combining technical fluency with adaptability and judgement. This is especially important because the skills that differentiate growing from declining roles include resilience, flexibility and agility; resource management and operations; quality control; programming; and technological literacy.

5. What workforce strategies do employers expect to use in response to these shifts?

Upskilling is the dominant response. The report says 85% of employers plan to prioritise upskilling their workforce. In addition, 70% expect to hire staff with new skills, around half plan to transition staff from declining to growing roles, and 40% expect to reduce staff as some skills become less relevant.

The scale of the training challenge is large. If the global workforce were 100 people, the report estimates that 59 would need training by 2030. Of these, 29 could be upskilled in their current roles, 19 could be upskilled and redeployed elsewhere in the organisation, and 11 would be unlikely to receive the reskilling or upskilling they need.

Employers also identify skill gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation, cited by 63% of respondents. This makes skills not just an HR issue, but a strategic bottleneck. The report also highlights employee health and well-being as a top strategy for improving talent availability, cited by 64% of employers, while reskilling, upskilling and better progression are also seen as important.

Finally, AI-specific workforce strategies are central. Half of employers plan to reorient their business in response to AI, two-thirds plan to hire talent with AI-specific skills, and 40% anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks. The report’s practical conclusion is that organisations face a dual challenge: they must adopt technology fast enough to remain competitive, while also redesigning jobs, training systems and talent pipelines fast enough to avoid widening skill gaps.

7 January 2025
UK Corporate Affairs Trends for 2025 by FleishmanHillard

About the paper

The paper is a forecast-style corporate affairs report on the challenges and priorities likely to shape 2025 for organisations operating in the UK.

It is a mixed-input outlook rather than original survey research, grounded in firm data, observation, client discussions, and input from FleishmanHillard’s UK corporate affairs experts; the report does not clearly specify a respondent count, case count, interview number, or formal fieldwork process.

Its geographic focus is primarily the UK corporate affairs landscape, though several trends are framed as global pressures affecting UK-based decision-making.

Length: 32 pages

More information / download:
https://fleishmanhillard.co.uk/2024/12/corporate-affairs-trends-for-2025/

Core Insights

1. What is the report’s central argument about corporate affairs in 2025?

The report’s main argument is that corporate affairs leaders are entering a more volatile, fragmented and demanding environment in which complexity itself becomes the defining condition. FleishmanHillard argues that leaders are being asked to do more by boards, executives and stakeholders at the very moment the information environment is becoming harder to read and harder to influence. Traditional media still matters, but it is no longer sufficient as the primary route to key audiences, whose media habits are spreading across more platforms and formats.

The report says this new reality will be shaped by five interlocking trends: the politicisation of business values, the rise of geopolitics as a day-to-day business issue, the spread of misinformation and inauthentic content, the erosion of reliable data sources alongside the emergence of new ones, and the accelerating operational importance of AI. In other words, the report does not present 2025 as a year of one dominant disruption, but as a year in which multiple pressures converge and force corporate affairs teams to become more adaptive, audience-led and strategically embedded.

2. What are the five key trends the report identifies, and why do they matter?

The first trend, The Values Imperative, argues that politics is increasingly entering business life through employees, public debate and direct political targeting. Companies are under greater pressure to take positions, but the report warns that expression is only rewarded when audiences agree with the stance taken. That makes corporate values more than branding language; they become a decision framework for whether and how to engage on contentious issues.

The second trend, The Corporate Diplomat, says geopolitical issues are no longer distant matters for government relations teams alone. Populism, nationalism, regulatory divergence, supply-chain disruption and state-linked cyber risks mean senior executives and corporate affairs leaders must increasingly act as diplomats themselves. The report suggests that success in one market may now depend on managing tensions involving another market, including a company’s home market.

The third trend, Ubiquitous Malignancy, describes misinformation as a persistent feature of nearly every communications situation, not a rare exception. The report argues that communicators must judge how much of a situation is being shaped by inauthentic or misleading content and develop specific capabilities for intervention, especially as AI-driven deepfakes raise the stakes.

The fourth trend, Data Erosion & Accretion, focuses on the weakening usefulness of old monitoring approaches, especially those heavily dependent on X/Twitter and text-based media. At the same time, audience attention is moving toward harder-to-monitor environments such as podcasts, video, WhatsApp and other closed or semi-closed platforms. New tools may help, but the report says the overall picture will become more cluttered and demand more sophisticated interpretation.

The fifth trend, AI Moves Ahead, argues that generative AI is already improving speed and efficiency in communications work, but that bigger structural change is still ahead. The report sees current tools as operationally useful but limited, while newer models may reshape analysis, memory and self-learning capabilities more profoundly. That makes today’s experimentation a preparation phase for deeper transformation.

3. What assumptions or perspective shape the report’s interpretation of these trends?

The report is written from the perspective of a strategic communications adviser addressing corporate affairs leaders who must help organisations navigate uncertainty rather than merely manage publicity. Its underlying assumption is that communications is no longer a support function operating at the edge of decision-making; it is increasingly central to risk management, stakeholder navigation and executive judgement.

A second assumption is that the environment is not becoming simpler or more controllable. Instead, the report assumes fragmentation, unpredictability and cross-border complexity will intensify. This is visible in how it treats politics, geopolitics, misinformation, data fragmentation and AI not as isolated topics, but as overlapping forces that reshape the communicator’s role.

A third assumption is that organisations need clearer frameworks rather than louder messaging. The report repeatedly emphasises preparation: values frameworks, issue-assessment models, broader intelligence gathering, better geopolitical literacy, more nuanced data interpretation and structured AI adoption. That reveals a distinctly managerial and advisory lens. The purpose is less to predict headlines than to encourage more disciplined organisational readiness.

4. What practical capabilities does the report say organisations need to build now?

On values and politics, the report recommends reviewing the organisation’s values statement so it genuinely reflects shared principles, then using those values as a test for whether a political issue warrants engagement. It explicitly advises leaning strongly against engagement where an issue does not connect directly to a core business value or commercial need. That suggests restraint, not performative commentary, as the preferred operating model.

On geopolitics, it argues for broader information gathering, deeper historical understanding, better assessment of tensions across key markets and supply chains, and more diplomatic skill sets such as negotiation and war-gaming. This implies that corporate affairs teams need to widen both their input sources and their strategic repertoire.

On misinformation, the report says teams need methods for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic content, frameworks for deciding when to intervene, and readiness to communicate directly with audiences rather than relying solely on media or fact-checkers. It also stresses that countering misinformation may require behavioural science techniques and emotional engagement, not just rational rebuttal.

On data, the recommendation is to push partners to improve coverage across podcasts and video, interpret reactions across multiple platforms rather than assuming one channel represents the whole picture, and strengthen human intelligence networks to compensate for what tools cannot see inside walled gardens such as WhatsApp.

On AI, the report urges organisations to expand trials, identify tasks where GenAI should make the first attempt, and reposition employees from pure production roles toward advisory roles that guide AI strategically and improve output quality. The practical message is that AI adoption should be systematic and role-shaping, not ad hoc.

5. What are the main implications of the report for corporate affairs leaders in 2025?

The clearest implication is that corporate affairs leaders will need broader mandates and stronger judgement. The function is being asked to interpret political risk, geopolitical change, data ambiguity, misinformation threats and AI-enabled disruption all at once. That means success will depend less on excellence in any single channel and more on the ability to synthesise complex inputs into sound advice for senior leadership.

A second implication is that old playbooks are becoming less reliable. Traditional media relations, basic social listening and fact-based rebuttal are still relevant, but they are no longer enough on their own. The report suggests that influence now depends on audience-led, channel-agnostic and emotionally intelligent engagement, supported by better frameworks and more diverse intelligence.

A third implication is organisational: communications teams must evolve structurally, not just tactically. Values need to be operationalised, geopolitical awareness mainstreamed, misinformation preparedness embedded, data practices modernised and AI integrated into workflows. In that sense, the report presents 2025 as a capability-building year. The leaders who thrive will be those who treat communications as a strategic discipline for navigating uncertainty, not simply a function for message delivery.

16 December 2024
Future of Professionals Report 2024 by Thomson Reuters
About the paper

Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report 2024 examines how AI and GenAI are reshaping professional work across legal, tax, accounting, global trade, risk, fraud, compliance, government, and corporate C-suite roles.

It is original survey research based on 2,205 responses collected through 15–20 minute surveys, with respondents across the United States, UK, Canada, Mainland Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East/North Africa.

The report is heavily AI-focused because respondents identify AI as the dominant force currently driving change in professional services.

Length: 37 pages

More information / download:
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/technology/future-of-professionals-2024/

Core Insights

1. What is the central argument of the report?

The report argues that AI and GenAI are now the dominant forces reshaping professional work, not as distant possibilities but as practical technologies already influencing strategy, workflows, value creation, pricing models, and career expectations.

The strongest evidence is that 77% of respondents believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work over the next five years, up from 67% in the 2023 report. The report presents this as a shift from speculative concern to more concrete expectation: professionals are no longer merely wondering whether AI matters; they are beginning to understand where and how it will affect their daily work.

The report’s tone is notably optimistic. Thomson Reuters concludes that AI can make professional work more efficient, productive, and fulfilling. It repeatedly frames AI as a way to release professionals from routine or labour-intensive tasks so they can focus on judgement-based, strategic, client-facing, and higher-value work.

However, the report does not argue that AI adoption will be automatic or risk-free. Its central argument is conditional: AI can be a force for good, but only if organisations combine adoption with responsible use, human oversight, data security, transparency, training, and new business models.

2. How are professionals currently using AI, and what does this reveal about adoption maturity?

Current AI use appears practical but still relatively early-stage. Respondents most commonly use AI-powered technologies for drafting documents, summarising information, conducting basic research, preparing communications, reviewing documents, and generating first drafts.

The report says 50% of respondents who have used AI as a starting point describe its output as “a basic starting point” where they still need to do most of the work. Another 28% say it provides “a strong starting point” that mainly requires editing. This suggests that AI is already useful, but professionals still see it primarily as an assistant rather than an autonomous producer of reliable final work.

The main barriers among non-users are also revealing. Concerns centre on accuracy, data security, ethics, uncertainty about what AI can be used for, and uncertainty about how to access it. The report notes generational differences too: Gen Z professionals have tried AI at higher rates, while baby boomers show lower current usage but surprisingly ambitious expectations for future AI assistance.

The adoption picture is therefore mixed: AI is already embedded in common professional tasks, but many users still regard it as a productivity aid that requires significant human review. The report’s own interpretation is that trust will depend on transparency, benchmarking, responsible innovation, and better user education.

3. What productivity and value gains does the report expect from AI?

The report’s most concrete productivity claim is that AI could free up four hours per professional per week within one year, eight hours within three years, and twelve hours within five years. Based on an assumption of 48 working weeks per year, that would equal roughly 200, 400, and 600 hours respectively.

This is one of the report’s most important findings because it connects AI adoption to organisational strategy. Freed-up time is not presented simply as a cost-saving mechanism. Respondents say they would use additional time for work-life balance, client work, long-term projects, business development, process improvement, strategic planning, research, training, and better workload management.

The report also distinguishes between efficiency and value. More than half of professionals are excited about AI because of time savings and productivity improvements, but 39% are most excited about AI’s ability to add new value to their work. Examples include handling large volumes of data more effectively, improving client response times, reducing human error, enabling advanced analytics, and supporting better decision-making.

This distinction is crucial. The report does not merely say AI will help professionals do the same work faster. It argues that AI may allow professional services to change what kind of work is done, what quality of service is delivered, and where professionals focus their expertise.

4. What risks, ethical concerns, and governance needs does the report identify?

The report identifies several persistent concerns:
- accuracy of outputs
- data security
- ethical use
- overreliance on AI
- inadequate human judgement
- and unclear accountability.
These concerns are especially important because the professions covered in the report often involve legal, regulatory, financial, compliance, or high-stakes advisory work.

Professionals draw a clear ethical boundary around full AI autonomy in high-stakes professional judgement. More than 95% of legal and tax respondents say it would be a step too far for AI to represent clients in court or make final decisions on complex professional matters. Legal professionals are particularly resistant to AI providing legal advice, while respondents in tax, risk, fraud, and compliance appear somewhat less opposed to AI involvement in strategic advice.

The report finds no single consensus on responsible AI use, but several principles recur. Almost two-thirds of respondents see data security as vital, both for prompts and outputs. A similar share see compulsory human review as critical. Other important elements include transparency about data sources, clarity on which tasks AI may be used for, bias mitigation, deletion of personal data, and standards for training data.

On enforcement, respondents favour certification processes for AI systems and standards developed by professional or industry bodies. Government regulation, company guidelines, whistleblowing, and algorithm audits are also mentioned, but the report presents certification and professional standards as the leading options.

5. What are the broader implications for professional careers, leadership, and business models?

The report’s broader implication is that AI will shift the nature of professional work rather than simply eliminate it. Fear of widespread job loss appears less prominent than in the previous year’s report. Instead, 85% of respondents believe new or additional roles will be created to manage broader AI use.

The human skills expected to become more important include problem-solving, creativity, judgement, strategic thinking, and the ability to manage AI responsibly. The report therefore frames the future professional not as someone replaced by AI, but as someone who must become better at using AI while preserving human expertise.

For leaders, the report implies that AI adoption is not just an IT project. It affects talent strategy, operating models, pricing, client value, workflow design, risk management, and organisational culture. Leaders are advised to assess skills, invest in training, create responsible AI principles, run pilot projects, scale successful use cases, and explore how AI can open new sources of stakeholder value.

The pricing implication is especially significant for professional services firms. Many respondents expect hourly-rate pricing to decline over the next five years. As AI makes routine work faster, firms will need to explain why clients should still pay premium fees for work completed more efficiently. The report argues that firms must move towards value-based pricing and become better at articulating the value AI adds beyond speed.

The conclusion is optimistic but demanding: AI can make professional careers more fulfilling and organisations more competitive, but only for those that actively embrace the technology, redesign work around it, and take responsibility for its limits.
9 July 2024