AI: The Reputation Signal · Issue 13
There are two rooms. Comms is missing from one
Elif Güvençer ·
The first room is where the company decides what it does and how it tells the world about it. This is where all of the “seat at the table” discussion has been had over the years. And Communications seems to have accessed that room.
Edelman’s Future of Corporate Affairs report, out this week, says 78% are involved at the earliest stages of decisions related to external issues.
The second room is the internal affairs, if you will, of the organisation. And I am looking at it from an AI perspective, for the sake of argument. It means what gets automated and why, which tools are sanctioned, and what governance process is in place before anything that AI touched gets to the outside world.
Communications’ involvement in that room is still not great.
CIPR’s State of The Profession 2026 Report released a couple of weeks ago says 46% of in-house practitioners say their team was involved in the development or socialisation of their organisation’s AI policy.
That 46% is a generous reading because it combines the people who were involved and the people who socialised it. We don’t know if they were actually involved or if they were handed down a policy and asked to communicate it.
Not being seen as a professional discipline is back among the top five concerns on the report for the first time since 2020. This means communications has access to the board but still is not convinced of how that access is perceived.
AI made the function faster, not necessarily upstream
On the CIPR report, seven in ten say they feel confident about adapting to AI-related changes. Eight in ten believe the skills that make PR professionals valuable cannot be replicated by AI. So there is stated positivity around AI. But I don’t see the proof in the value generated in the function.
86% say AI has improved the speed of completing tasks. So the function is faster but is faster better?
Let’s look at what the data says. Three-quarters say AI has freed them to focus on higher-value, more strategic work.
When looking at how the function spends its time, copywriting and editing maintains its top position: 52% name it among the activities they spend the most time on. Strategic planning is next at 41% and has climbed since 2024 (the last time the study was conducted). But this year’s sample is more senior than in 2024, and these are the people most likely to say they do strategic work yet copywriting is still at the top of the list…
Put together, the data suggests a gap between how the function describes what AI has given it and where its time is actually going.
AI did not create the measurement gap, but it can help bridge it
73% of leaders tell Edelman their current measurement approach does not reflect the full scope of the function. Half say it is hard to link what Corporate Affairs does to business performance.
This is not new.
Here is what is new…with AI
For the first time, the technology that is disrupting communications is also able to help it bridge the measurement gap.
First, on measuring the impact of what happened. The attribution infrastructure: the causal proof that this piece of communication moved that particular business outcome. It is not there yet but for the first time with AI, it is buildable. If I were leading comms, this is the first area I would invest in.
Second, on measuring the impact of what did not happen. The crisis you prevented. Modelling the potential impact of that crisis on the business, if it had happened.
Both of these change massively what communications can bring as ‘result’ of its work to the boardroom.
Edelman’s report also talks about how a lot of the issues are cutting across multiple departments.
This is not new. What is new is how AI can help.
AI is very good at connecting teams and data that have never shared the same “rules of engagement”. Different systems, different criteria for what counts as a signal worth raising. Joining that up used to be really expensive and, most of the time, not really possible. It is not anymore.
This means teams can expand horizon scanning, predict issues faster and have the plumbing internally to act on them. If I were running comms, this would be another priority area I would invest in.
These types of strategic uses of AI are where the focus should be. Not to do the same thing faster. This requires the function, and how it functions, to be reviewed.
I am conscious that is harder than it sounds. One of the main reasons for that is communications does not look the same in any two companies, because it grew piece by piece, one new responsibility at a time, rather than designed. And that means there is no standard operating model underneath the function to redesign around.
The other reason is, two clocks are running for communications yet most teams only manage one.
The clock nobody is watching
That day-to-day work in front of you, which I call the immediate clock, is urgent, is loud, and it is taking every waking hour of the function, including the ones AI gives back by automating tasks.
The structural clock, defining what communications needs to become to meet the requirements of the AI era, is very silent, and it is often ignored. But ignoring that clock has a consequence.
I call it structural demotion. And it is already showing up. An AI paper reaches the board with no communications input because nobody thought to ask. A meeting on AI governance happens, and the CCO finds out after it happened. In both of these cases, nobody is deciding against communications. They are deciding without it.
Deloitte’s road to 2030 has a bitter description. It says the function will either be an indispensable adviser, or it will become a communications utility and get absorbed into adjacent disciplines.
If you’d like to avoid the latter destination, I would leave you with three questions to start thinking about your structural clock:
- Can you prove to your board that something you did changed a business outcome? Or quantify the impact of something that did not happen?
- Who wrote your organisation’s AI policy, assuming there is one, and were you involved in drafting it or called in to roll it out?
- The time and bandwidth AI gave back by automating tasks: where did it really go?
The other side of the table
If you are on the agency side, both clocks are running faster because AI automates the work that has been traditionally billed by the hour. Every AI conversation is a fee negotiation waiting to happen. So the first question is what are clients willing to pay an agency for when AI does the first pass? And redesign your offering based on that answer.
For leaders ready to run both clocks
I have just launched a practice. It is called The Two Clocks.
I am working internationally with communication leaders on the in-house and agency side on what AI is changing, and often breaking, in the work, and how they need to reposition before it gets defined by someone else’s logic.
I have been the agency pitching the communications work and the client buying it, so I know what the work needs to be and how it gets valued and bought.
I start where most AI advice doesn’t: what the AI is for. The work then carries through to implementation, and where it goes depends on what you’re facing. For one team it’s a board narrative, because the CEO asked what their AI answer was and there wasn’t one. For another it’s an AI risk register they can run. On the agency side it might be the offer repositioned based on what the clients buy now and how to frame it account by account because one answer won’t fit your whole portfolio.
If you’d like to think any of this through together, get in touch here.