CollectivNews
Welcome to a monthly round-up of information relevant
to comms professionals and everyone interested in the fractional model.
February 2026
The Besanceney Brief: Trend or Blip?
Three January Signals for Corporate Communications in 2026
January has come and gone, and once again the communications and corporate affairs role is front and center as organizations navigate an increasingly complex environment. But are some of the things we witnessed part of a yearlong trend, or just a blip on the radar screen?
CEOs Speaking Out – With Precision
Events in Minneapolis sparked a collective response from the local business community. More than 60 CEOs from Minnesota-based companies – including leaders from 3M, Best Buy, General Mills, Medtronic, Target, and UnitedHealth Group – signed an open letter calling for deescalation after federal immigration operations led to two fatal shootings. The letter was carefully calibrated, avoiding direct criticism of federal policy while urging cooperation among officials.
We also saw employee activism surge in Silicon Valley, where tech workers signed petitions demanding their CEOs cancel ICE contracts and speak out publicly.
Golin’s CEO Impact Index for the first half of 2025 demonstrated a “cone of retreat”- a sharp pullback in CEO engagement following the arrival of the second Trump administration. Is Minnesota a turning point? I don’t think so. Companies will remain cautious and precise when engaging publicly, with tactical exemptions for specific circumstances. Minneapolis may represent a unique situation given what happened there in 2020. How many companies would be speaking out if this was happening in Tulsa instead?
Can We Trust Our Data?
Over the past 15 years, we’ve built increasingly sophisticated metrics to measure brand reputation and content performance. But what we measure and the way we measure it are fundamentally changing.
In September, Alethea researchers uncovered a network of bot accounts using AI to target pharmaceutical companies with coordinated narrative manipulation. These accounts were part of a broader network that has repeatedly used political inflection points to amplify false or misleading narratives about businesses, governments, and public figures. This particular campaigns portrayed pharmaceutical brands as profiteering, careless, or politically compromised – manufacturing negative sentiment at scale around actual policy announcements.
The challenge extends beyond commercial threats. In January, the New York Times reported on Alethea research into Russian propaganda networks that ramped up coordinated campaigns following the U.S. raid in Venezuela, promoting narratives designed to undermine American credibility and military hardware sales globally, with the clear underlying motive of painting the U.S. as an unreliable ally.
AI tools have exciting possibilities for innovation in our profession, but they are also giving greater voice to inauthentic actors at scale. Corporate communicators now face a critical challenge: separating genuine stakeholder sentiment from manufactured outrage. This isn’t a temporary phenomenon – it’s an accelerating trend that requires new detection capabilities and more sophisticated analytical frameworks. To be able to properly separate risk from noise, communicators must understand that it’s not just about what is happening (bots, “trolls,” coordinated attacks), but who is behind it and why.
The Function’s Contradictory Moment
January brought significant attention to the rising importance of communications and corporate affairs, particularly coming out of Davos. Coverage across industry outlets highlighted how essential the function has become, with multiple observers noting that navigating geopolitical complexity now requires dedicated communications and corporate affairs expertise.
Yet simultaneously, we continue seeing Chief Communications Officer roles layered into organizational structures in unusual ways – rather than directly to the CEO.
My take: The trend toward CCO and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer roles reporting directly to CEOs still holds. Multiple studies over the past two years show more than 50% of these roles now have that direct reporting relationship. But boards are also telling CEOs to shrink direct reports, creating organizational tension.
So I expect two steps forward, one step back. The strategic importance is undeniable, but the structural path forward remains messy.
From the boardroom perspective, it’s encouraging to see communications and corporate affairs expertise increasingly considered when boards build their skills matrices – recognition that this expertise matters at the highest levels of governance.
The Bottom Line
January 2026 revealed a profession simultaneously under siege and indispensable. CEOs are more cautious about public engagement, measurement tools face existential challenges from coordinated inauthentic behavior, yet the strategic value of sophisticated communications and corporate affairs counsel has never been clearer.
Whether these are blips or trends, one thing is certain: 2026 will be another year for agility and adaptability in our profession. And the organizations best positioned to navigate the complexity ahead will be investing in experienced in-house talent or adopting the fractional leadership model to fill in talent gaps.
When Silence is a Strategy and When It’s a Liability
Why Communications Leaders, Not CEOS, Are Now the Real Decision-Makers on Social Issues
If you work in communications long enough, you will eventually hear this question:
“Can’t we just stay out of it?”
It is a reasonable instinct. But in today’s environment, staying out of it is rarely perceived as neutral. Silence gets interpreted. Statements get dissected. And communications leaders are often asked to manage expectations without a clear strategy to anchor decisions.
What’s changed?
The Communications Role is Fundamentally Different
Communications leaders are no longer just message crafters or brand guardians. They are now risk assessors, internal translators, and early warning systems for leadership.
A decade ago, many social issues were treated as peripheral to corporate strategy. Today, they can surface overnight and land directly on a company’s reputation, culture, recruiting, customer trust, and even market value. The speed of amplification has collapsed the timeline for decision-making.
CEOs may be the public face of a company’s position, but communications leaders are the ones evaluating exposure, testing credibility, anticipating backlash, and asking the uncomfortable questions before a single word is drafted.
In many organizations, comms leaders are now the first to spot the early signals:
- Employee sentiment before it becomes internal unrest
- Customer expectations before they become reputational pressure
- Social media momentum before it becomes a headline
- Inconsistencies between stated values and actual operations
Communications leaders also understand something that is often underestimated at the executive level: once a company speaks, it is no longer just communicating. It is making a commitment. And commitments create expectations, scrutiny, and accountability.
This is not about being reactive. It is about being prepared.
It is less about crafting the perfect language and more about helping leadership answer hard questions long before a statement is written:
- Do we have standing on this issue?
- Are we prepared to act, not just speak?
- Will this hold up a week from now? A year from now?
- What happens if employees disagree? If customers do?
- Are we ready for the second and third questions that follow the first statement?
The value is sounding polished. It is in helping leaders make defensible, consistent, and credible choices before a message ever goes out.
Because in a polarized environment, communication is no longer just messaging.
It’s strategy.
It’s risk management.
It’s leadership.
Why AI Risk Hits Communications Hardest
More and more communications leaders are noticing something unsettling.
A voice note that sounds like an executive. Content that moves faster than anyone can verify.
Nothing overtly malicious. Nothing that triggers an immediate alert. But enough to raise questions.
AI risk rarely originates in communications, but it often lands there.
Communicators are responsible for trust, clarity, and credibility in an organization’s most visible moments. When AI enters unevenly, through approved platforms, unsanctioned tools, or external misuse, the consequences show up as communications problems.
Employees increasingly supplement approved systems with personal or public AI tools to move faster or fill gaps. Gartner estimates that nearly 70% of organizations either know or strongly suspect this is happening, because expectations move faster than guidance.
There are also external threats.
AI has lowered the barrier for impersonation, misinformation, and social engineering. Voice cloning can replicate executives. AI-generated avatars can simulate leadership presence. A cloned CEO voice urging employees to take urgent action is no longer theoretical. Neither is AI-generated messaging designed to manipulate employees, partners, or markets.
Messages that appear to come from trusted internal sources can be fabricated and distributed at speed, and when these incidents occur, they are treated as communications crises.
Yet many communications leaders are expected to manage this risk without visibility into how AI is being used across the organization.
That mismatch is not just a problem. It is a governance gap.
What Effective AI Governance Actually Looks Like
Effective AI governance is not about banning tools or slowing innovation. It is about stability, consistency, and preparedness. It is about reskilling employees, not policing them. It is about transparency in strategy, not quiet experimentation. It is about bringing teams along, instead of leaving them to infer boundaries on their own.
Organizations that do this well make AI use visible rather than implicit. They establish shared expectations around disclosure, validation, and accountability. They treat AI literacy as a core professional capability, especially for leaders shaping messages and decisions.
As Gartner has noted, one obstacle to adoption is difficulty estimating and demonstrating value. You cannot manage what you cannot see, and that is especially true for communications.
One Practical Place to Start
One of the hardest parts of managing AI risk is knowing where to focus.
Communications leaders are often asked to manage consequences without a clear picture of where AI is influencing decisions, messages, or authority.
That is why the first step is situational awareness.
The free AI Communications Risk Assessment developed by CommsCollectiv can help teams see where things currently stand. It is designed to surface blind spots across workflows, governance, and decision-making, and create a shared starting point for better conversations.
This is not a scorecard or a compliance exercise. It is a tool to help identify risks before they become public.
The Choice Ahead
The AI productivity paradox is not a mystery. Organizations that make AI use intentional, transparent, and accountable will compound advantage. Those that allow ambiguity to persist will widen internal divides and increase risk, often without realizing it until the consequences are visible.
For communications leaders, the stakes are clear. AI is already shaping how messages are written, how decisions are justified, and how trust is maintained.
The question is not whether AI will be used.It is whether its influence will be understood and guided, or left to develop unevenly in the background.
That choice is becoming one of the defining leadership decisions of this decade.