Top 3 Strategic Priorities for Chief Communications Officers

The rise in misinformation, disinformation and societal polarization, coupled with rapid advancements in AI capabilities, has generated a different-in-kind reputation landscape with intensified business risks. This kind of “truth decay” requires a new playbook. 

In the new risk landscape, CCOs will need to move beyond traditional reputation management approaches and manage and capitalize on new reputation-building opportunities. Social media monitoring and standard crisis preparedness are no longer enough. Use the Gartner PROTECT framework to create a new reputation management playbook that builds and protects reputational capital in the unfolding threat environment.

Transformative change is needed, but poor change adoption is slowing enterprise growth. Healthy change adoption is associated with revenue growth, employee engagement and more. But low adoption inhibits businesses at a time when AI transformation means those who adapt will accelerate growth rapidly and those who don’t will fall behind.

Poor change adoption and employee anxiety over AI-induced transformation will inhibit business transformation success. This fear and uncertainty is the most significant risk to employee engagement, performance and broader business transformation success. Concerns over AI-driven job loss are reducing employees’ intention to stay. At organizations of approximately 10,000 people, this amounts to roughly $47 million per year in combined cost and productivity losses.

The conventional approach for inspiring change confidence and trust often starts with promoting a more positive vision of the future. However, in a low-trust environment, CCOs should instead start at the individual level, routinizing change and building confidence in each employee’s ability to navigate current and future changes.

Communications lags behind all other corporate functions in data fluency. Significant investments in data and analytics capabilities are needed to meet stakeholder expectations for data-driven insights, and CCOs can’t afford to wait any longer. 

Instead of making incremental investments in measurement tools and general digital skills, CCOs should immediately start making step-change investments in data and analytics capabilities like predictive analytics, process automation and data science expertise.

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