The Ipsos Reputation Council report describes how volatility has become the norm for the communication function. Judgement has become a critical skill.
Ipsos has published The Reputation Council Report 2026. The report, Life After Predictability, picks up where last year’s edition, The Eye of the Storm, left off. It’s based on 200 interviews with senior communication and corporate affairs leaders across 21 markets, conducted between March and June this year.
Crises are no longer one-off events. Volatility has become the new operating environment and judgement is a critical strategic management skill.
AI use ahead of governance
The 2026 Reputation Council Report opens with the headline, “before you ask AI to summarise this report.” It’s an in-joke from a research team that has spent a year listening to practitioners describe AI as an intermediary between them and their stakeholders. In effect, the machine has become a stakeholder in its own right.
Use of AI tools on a daily basis among Reputation Council members has climbed from 57% to 76% over the past year. It’s now part of the workflow of almost every communications team.
The report, much like every other data point published this year, says AI use is still running way ahead of outcome and governance.
In 2025, 89% of Reputation Council members believed AI would fundamentally transform business operations; in 2026, 59% say that this is actually the case.
Just one in ten (12%) think existing ethical policies in business are sufficient for AI adoption. That figure hasn’t moved in three years.
The report is critical of the so-called human-in-the-loop narrative. It says that it overlooks the frictionless nature of AI and lack of cognitive engagement by practitioners. This is the same argument that Professor Anne Gregory made at the AI for PR conference in London in June.
Workflow must be redesigned purposefully. This is the governance-first approach that Ben Verinder and I set out in AI for Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management (currently available on a half price deal on Amazon). It’s reassuring to see the Reputation Council land in the same place.
Silence is now the professional norm driven by US politics
Earlier this year I wrote about the USC Annenberg report and its finding that companies have retreated from speaking out on societal issues. I pushed back on the ease with which it led with silence as a strategy.
35% of Reputation Council members say that their organisation has stayed quiet in the last year on an issue it would previously have spoken about. 84% take political factors into account when deciding whether to speak.
The split by geography is stark:
53% of US-based communicators say their organisation has gone quiet, against 28% in Europe.
71% of US respondents would rather stay silent on divisive issues, against 55% in Europe.
Strategic silence is a global phenomenon shaped by the US political context. The retreat is visible in the UK too, but it’s quieter and owes more to caution about geo-politics than to pressure at home.
Judgement is the public relations job
There is more in the report than I have room to cover: a chapter on the transatlantic divide that anyone working internationally should read, a description of why ESG has been reframed as resilience and energy security, and a candid analysis of why the the industry cannot agree a means of valuing reputation.
The red thread running through the report is that AI will not replace communicators, but that it will seperate tactical functions from their strategic counterparts. AI reduces the value of a team focused on content and media. It strengthens the value of a team focused on stakeholders and judgement.
I’m off on holiday this week and so today’s newsletter is landing a day early. Have a good week ahead.
Upcoming AI and management communications training courses
The Reputation Council’s three implications for practitioners are to re-skill, re-architect and re-measure. Our two remaining courses this year are built around these principles.
24 November - AI for public relations one-day online course (with Ben Verinder)
The governance-first approach that Ben and I set out in the book, worked through for your own function: where AI belongs in the workflow, how to design meaningful human review, and build the risk tiers and accountability the Reputation Council says most organisations still lack.
9 December - Communication management and leadership one-day online course
This course covers the management disciplines the Reputation Council says now define the job: strategic counsel, commercial awareness, stakeholder intelligence and demonstrating the value of the function to management. It draws on my PhD research into how communication earns recognition as a management function.
Further reading
This article was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by almost 6,000 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field. We put evidence before opinion, and we say how confident we are in what we publish.
