Five strategic actions that your management team needs from the communications function

27 Apr

The 2026 Communication Management Radar is a useful read of the communications environment. Take it as an invitation to step up.

Michelle Wloka and Ansgar Zerfass have published the 2026 Communication Management Radar through the Academic Society for Management & Communication.

The report identifies five emerging issues that are front of mind for communications and public relations leaders. Each one is an opportunity to assert our management role.

Fake traffic and engagement (simulated communication)
Managing AI organisational risk (constrained AI agents)
Cognitive drift (erosion of cognitive capability in the comms function)
Power flux (shifting stakeholder influence)
Strategic subtraction (managing channel bloat)

The first three issues relate to AI which tells you a lot about where the attention of practice currently sits.

The methodology is solid: a literature review across management, technology, psychology and journalism, and four focus groups of Chief Communication Officers that included Bosch, Sanofi, BP, Siemens Healthineers and Schott.

Simulated communication: raising the stakes on advisory capability

Up to 60% of web traffic is now machine-generated. Search behaviour is shifting from browsing to generative answer engines. Click-through rates are forecast to fall by between 34% and 60%.

The practical consequence is that stakeholder dialogue and engagement is harder than ever before. Platforms are being bypassed. Christof Ehrhart of Bosch is quoted pushing back on the idea of AI as a stakeholder. He calls it a distortion of the stakeholder concept.

This is the section I’d start with in a management discussion, because most management teams haven’t seen the data on how their organisation shows up in generative search.

The action for practice is to audit it. Run your management team, your brand and your top three issues through the leading large language models. Take what you find to the board.

Constrained AI agents: demand for governance and accountability

Constrained AI agents is a sober counterweight to the agentic AI hype. The argument, drawing on the World Economic Forum and IBM, is that autonomous systems are bounded by the social and organisational contexts they operate in.

Oversight is hard and responsibility is blurred. Ben Verinder has written about this issue in our upcoming book, AI for Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management. Miriam Liebelt-Henn of Sanofi picks up the conversation, drawing on the reality of a CEO-mandated agent rolling through a communications team.

The action for practice is to write the governance brief no one else is writing. Set out who is accountable when an AI agent acts on behalf of the organisation, what the escalation path looks like and where the oversight gaps sit. Put it in front of your general counsel and your chief risk officer.

Cognitive drift: judgement becomes a premium asset

Cognitive drift is the chapter I found most provocative. It draws on the MIT study that measured brain patterns during AI-assisted writing and recent literature on cognitive offloading. Sustained reliance on GenAI weakens critical thinking, memory and judgement.

Peter Kretzschmar of BP captures the practical tell. Colleagues submitting polished text that reveals a level of writing expertise they don’t actually have. I wrote about this in last week’s newsletter. Em dash frequency, formulaic transitions and a flat tone of voice.

The action for practice is to protect the judgement of your team. Invest in media and AI literacy for early-career practitioners. Make original thinking, editing and critical reading part of how you recruit, develop and appraise your team.

Power flux rewards teams that can build and sustain trusted relationships

Power flux argues that influence is moving from formal hierarchy to relational power in hybrid organisations. It is shifting from traditional media to platform gatekeepers and individual creators. Matthias Krämer of Siemens Healthineers makes the case for direct, personal dialogue.

The action for practice is to map your stakeholder network as it actually is, beyond what the org chart describes. Identify the relational power holders inside and outside the organisation. Resource the relationships that matter and stop investing in the ones that don’t.

Strategic subtraction: focus and measurable impact

Strategic subtraction is the chapter I’d press on hardest in a team discussion. It argues that organisations are bloated by engagement channels. New ones are frequently added but rarely removed.

The action for practice is to cancel something. Pick one activity, report or channel your team produces out of habit rather than evidence of impact. Stop it. Tell the management team what you stopped and why, and what you will do with the time.

The management opportunity

The five phenomena describe opportunities for the function. Each creates space for communication leaders to have a different conversation with their management team. A conversation about risk, capital and governance. About where communications adds measurable value, what it should stop doing, and what authority it needs to do the rest well.

The Radar names what’s changing. The work of turning that into management influence is ours to do.