About the paper
The report ‘The Era of Relationship Capital – Consultancy Views of the Path Ahead’ examines the state and future direction of the global PR consultancy industry, combining original survey research with industry expert commentary.
Its core research is an online survey conducted from September 2025 to March 2026 among 244 PR professionals across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, North America, Latin America and the Middle East.
Country-level coverage, recruitment method and weighting are not clearly specified, and the UK, North America, Latin America and Middle East each have fewer than 30 respondents. There is also a methodological inconsistency: at least one chart gives a base of 291 respondents rather than the stated 244, so detailed figures and regional comparisons should be treated with some caution.
Length: 61 pages
More information/download: https://www.iccoglobal.com/icco-world-pr-report/
Core Insights
1. What overall picture does the report paint of the global PR industry in 2025–2026?
The report depicts a profession that remains broadly confident about its future but is operating under significantly greater pressure. The global optimism score for PR market growth is 6.2 out of 10, down from 6.6 the previous year, while 63 percent of respondents say they are optimistic about growth in their market. The result is not a story of contraction so much as one of more cautious confidence.
More importantly, the report argues that the nature of PR is changing. Traditional execution is becoming less central to where agencies expect value and growth to come from. Strategic consulting was the leading growth area over the previous year, cited by 37 percent of respondents, followed by corporate reputation at 35 percent. Looking ahead, corporate reputation is expected to be the largest growth area at 41 percent, followed by strategic consulting at 39 percent. Strategic consulting also leads expected investment at 39 percent.
Technology, healthcare and financial and professional services are the strongest client sectors. Technology is particularly prominent, reflecting both the wider AI boom and organisations’ need to communicate technological change.
The report therefore presents PR as moving further “upstream” into advisory work. Its authors and contributors repeatedly describe a shift away from communications as primarily an execution or amplification function and towards judgement, interpretation, risk management, reputation and organisational decision-making.
However, that development is taking place amid substantial economic and organisational pressure. The leading challenges include effectively integrating AI, cited by 34 percent; clients unwilling to commit sufficient funds, 31 percent; economic conditions, 29 percent; and pressure to achieve profit and margin targets, 25 percent.
The central tension is consequently clear: PR agencies see growing demand for higher-value strategic advice at the same time that budgets, business models, technology and talent are all under pressure.
2. How is AI changing PR practice, skills and professional expectations?
AI is the report’s most powerful technological theme. It has moved from experimentation towards normal professional infrastructure.
Eighty-nine percent of respondents say their organisations have integrated AI tools into everyday processes, up from 74 percent the previous year. Ninety-one percent identify AI as the technology most likely to be relevant to PR practitioners over the next five years, far ahead of cybersecurity at 38 percent and data science at 37 percent.
The skills agenda reflects that transformation. Mastery of AI tools is identified by 45 percent as one of the most important skill sets for the coming decade, narrowly ahead of strategic consulting at 43 percent. Another 32 percent highlight the ability to critically assess and ethically deploy AI-generated content.
The report does not, however, portray technological capability as sufficient by itself. Its contributors consistently argue that AI increases rather than eliminates the importance of human judgement. AI can accelerate research, pattern recognition, content creation and analysis, but the professional still has to provide context, interpretation, cultural understanding and strategic judgement.
This creates a second dimension to AI adoption: governance and ethics. Eighty-four percent believe ethical adoption and use of AI is important for the PR industry, and 78 percent regard cultural intelligence as important as AI becomes embedded in communications.
There is consequently a gap between adoption and maturity. AI is already widespread, yet effectively integrating it remains the single most frequently cited business challenge. The report suggests that the next competitive divide will not simply be between agencies that use AI and those that do not. It will be between organisations that combine AI with strong data, governance, professional judgement and strategic capability and those that merely use it to accelerate existing production.
3. How are client demand and agency value shifting, and what does this mean for the traditional PR business model?
The report provides considerable evidence that clients increasingly expect PR agencies to contribute at a more strategic level.
Strategic consulting, corporate reputation and public affairs are all significant growth areas, while influencer communications, measurement and analytics and ESG also attract investment. Expected investment is led by strategic consulting at 39 percent and influencer communications at 38 percent, with measurement and analytics at 27 percent and ESG at 23 percent.
Corporate reputation is especially important to the report’s argument. Sixty-three percent identify proactively improving corporate reputation as an important client objective, considerably ahead of issues and crisis management at 41 percent and increasing sales at 38 percent. Corporate reputation is also the service area most widely expected to grow during the coming year.
At the same time, AI is reducing the scarcity value of routine production. Several contributors argue that content creation and other executional activities will increasingly become commoditised as technology lowers their cost. This makes expertise, interpretation, evidence and trusted counsel relatively more valuable.
Yet there is an important contradiction in the data. Although the industry aspires to become more strategic, client measurement requests remain heavily oriented towards traditional communications outputs. Media clippings are the most commonly requested item, cited by 56 percent, while 36 percent still report client requests for Advertising Value Equivalency and another 36 percent for sentiment metrics.
The industry’s own use of measurement also remains disproportionately focused on reporting. Eighty-two percent say measurement and evaluation metrics are used for reporting, compared with 52 percent for planning, 50 percent for justifying fees and budgets, 44 percent for decision-making and 40 percent for advising.
The report therefore describes an industry caught between two models. Its growth ambitions centre on advisory work, reputation and strategic influence, but important parts of its measurement and client relationship practices remain rooted in traditional reporting and communications outputs.
4. What structural challenges could prevent PR firms from making this transition successfully?
Talent is one of the most persistent constraints. Retaining key talent is the most commonly identified talent challenge at 41 percent, followed by developing junior and mid-level staff at 35 percent and motivating younger executives at 34 percent.
The industry’s recruitment patterns may reinforce the problem. Rival agencies remain the leading expected source of talent at 61 percent, followed by journalism at 54 percent and graduate programmes at 49 percent. Several expert contributors argue that this is poorly aligned with the industry’s emerging needs for expertise in data, technology, regulation, policy and specialised industries.
Their interpretation is that communications firms need more multidisciplinary recruitment from areas such as analytics, law, science, public policy and professional services rather than repeatedly competing for the same conventional PR talent.
Measurement creates another structural challenge. Twenty percent identify the inability to measure PR impact effectively as a major business challenge. The report’s measurement commentary argues that AI makes rigorous evaluation more important because technology can scale poor assumptions and weak analysis just as efficiently as it can scale good analysis.
Ethics is similarly becoming more consequential. Misinformation and disinformation are consistently identified among the profession’s leading ethical challenges. Eighty-six percent believe agencies should advise clients against behaviour they regard as unethical, and 73 percent say they have turned down a client or assignment for ethical reasons. However, only 44 percent believe PR is more ethical than other industries, indicating a considerable gap between professional aspirations and perceptions of industry-wide behaviour.
Workforce sustainability presents an additional problem. Thirty-four percent of respondents report experiencing mental health problems during the previous 12 months, while formal organisational support is far from universal.
Taken together, the findings suggest that PR’s move towards strategic advisory work requires more than adding new technologies or services. Agencies need deeper talent pools, stronger measurement capability, credible ethics and governance, and organisational models capable of retaining and developing professionals with increasingly complex skill sets.
5. What does the report mean by “relationship capital”, and why does it see this as the profession’s central strategic opportunity?
“Relationship capital” is the organising idea used by ICCO to connect many of the report’s otherwise separate findings. It describes the accumulated trust, goodwill, credibility and access that allow an organisation to be heard and believed by important stakeholders, particularly during uncertainty or crisis.
The concept reflects the report’s view of the environment in which organisations now operate. Geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, social polarisation, fragmented media, misinformation and AI-generated content have all made reputation and trust more difficult to establish and maintain.
ICCO’s argument is that attention alone therefore becomes less strategically valuable. Attention can be purchased or generated quickly, whereas relationships and credibility have to be accumulated through consistent behaviour and engagement over time.
This helps explain why corporate reputation, strategic consulting, crisis counsel, public affairs, insight and evaluation feature so prominently throughout the report. They all contribute to an advisory model in which communications professionals help organisations understand stakeholders, anticipate risk, make decisions and maintain legitimacy rather than simply generate visibility.
It also reveals the report’s underlying perspective. As an organisation representing PR consultancies, ICCO clearly has an interest in presenting communications as a strategically important management discipline rather than a commodity service. The survey findings provide some support for that interpretation, particularly the growth of strategic consulting and corporate reputation. However, other findings, including continued budget pressure, traditional measurement practices and strong demand for executional services such as influencer communications, show that the transition is incomplete.
The report’s broader conclusion is therefore not that traditional PR activities are disappearing. It is that their relative value is changing. As AI makes communications production cheaper and information environments more fragmented, the report expects competitive advantage to shift towards the capabilities that are harder to automate: trusted relationships, judgement, strategic interpretation, ethical counsel and evidence-based advice.