By Brian Besanceney, Partner, CommsCollectiv
Late Q1 has quietly become one of the most important gathering seasons in corporate communications. Practitioners, senior leaders, and researchers convene at a handful of venues, sharing research, debating ideas, and taking stock of where the profession stands. One of the things I’m genuinely enjoying about my current advisory work is the ability to participate, listen, and synthesize across those rooms without an agenda other than learning.
Starting with the IPR Bridge Conference in mid-March and running through Comms 50 and the Page Spring Seminar in New York, here are three conversations that senior practitioners and researchers in our field are actively having.
The Earned Media Paradox
There is a quiet but serious reassessment underway about the value of earned media, and it’s much more nuanced than the “media is dying” narrative that’s been circulating for years.
By traditional metrics, earned media is less important than it was a decade ago. Consider newsroom consolidation, declining per-capita readership, and the fragmentation of attention, and the math is undeniable. And yet senior communicators aren’t walking away from it. C-suites still want it. Boards still ask about it. Investors still treat major placements as signals of legitimacy.
Part of this is simply demographic reality. Your C-suite and board are disproportionately getting their news the old-fashioned way with the print edition of the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times landing on their doorstep each morning. Don’t underestimate how much that shapes what they think matters most.
But earned media’s staying power goes beyond the reading habits of the corner office. It retains a function as third-party validation that owned and paid channels simply cannot replicate, particularly for enterprise audiences who are skeptical by design.
There’s also a newer dimension that most teams haven’t fully processed: earned media now trains the AI models. When a journalist covers your company in a major outlet, that coverage becomes part of the corpus that large language models learn from. It shapes how AI systems describe, characterize, and contextualize your organization. Fewer people per capita may be reading the piece but that piece is teaching the AI platforms what to say about you when someone asks. That’s a new and underappreciated reason to care deeply about earned media quality, accuracy, and volume.
The strategic implication is clear: stop measuring earned media only by impressions (which has been a questionable way to evaluate success all along). Start measuring it by audience quality, third-party credibility, and its contribution to your AI-facing narrative footprint.
Geopolitics is Now a Core Competency, not a Specialty
The conversations made one thing clear: corporate affairs leaders can no longer treat geopolitical risk as someone else’s lane. It surfaced in discussions about enterprise risk management, global regulatory outlook, supply chain resilience, and the challenge of navigating communications when every message carries consequences across fragmented political environments.
This connects directly to something researchers and executive search professionals are tracking closely: the rise of the “CCO+.” The CCO role has been expanding steadily, absorbing more accountability for enterprise risk, government relations, ESG, and investor-facing communications. But what’s striking is that even “pure play” CCO roles in organizations that haven’t formally blended corporate affairs disciplines under one roof now require a level of geopolitical fluency that simply wasn’t even on the table ten years ago. The world came to the CCO, whether the org chart acknowledged it or not.
This isn’t just a concern for multinationals with operations in contested markets. Tariffs, industrial policy, shifting alliances, and domestic political volatility are reshaping the operating environment for virtually every large organization. The communicators adding the most value right now are the ones who can connect those macro forces to their company’s specific stakeholder landscape and counsel leadership with the same fluency on geopolitical dynamics that they bring to media strategy or employee communications.
If your team isn’t building this muscle, the window to do so on your own terms is narrowing.
AI Is Moving from Philosophy to Org Chart and into the Crisis Room
The profession has been talking about AI for several years now. What’s different now is the specificity of the conversation. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the communications function. It’s how you structure around it, where human judgment remains non-negotiable, and how you train teams to operate effectively alongside it.
Particularly interesting: the emergence of AI-powered crisis simulation as a training tool. Using AI to stress-test teams, playbooks, and decision-making before a real situation hits, is a meaningful evolution beyond drafting assistance and media monitoring.
What hasn’t been resolved, and what honest practitioners will tell you in the hallways, is the tension between efficiency and wisdom. AI makes teams faster. It doesn’t make them wiser. The function that figures out how to use AI to accelerate execution while keeping experienced human judgment at the center of strategy and counsel will have a genuine competitive advantage. Those that outsource judgment to the technology will find out the hard way why that’s a mistake.
The Bottom Line
The reinvention of earned media’s value proposition, geopolitics, and the hard work of actually integrating AI aren’t future challenges. They’re the conversations happening right now, in the rooms where our profession’s direction gets shaped.
Worth paying attention to, sure. Worth acting on, you better believe it.