Communication Management Radar

Corporate communications practice is shaped by seen and unseen forces – every day, every week, every year. The Communication Management Radar is the attempt to observe these influences, trace what is emerging or underexplored, and offer a perspective on what may shape the future of corporate communications.

This year, five interdisciplinary phenomena were identified.

Hidden influence on opinion building through bots and GenAI

Public communication online is being reshaped by two powerful trends: the rapid growth of automated bot activity and the increasing reliance on generative AI systems for information. Together, they blur the line between human interaction and machine-generated communication.

More of what we read and see online is now created, curated, or amplified by automated systems. Communication is increasingly optimized for reach and engagement rather than dialogue and authenticity. This puts pressure on trusted sources and alters how public opinion is formed.

At the same time, information-seeking behavior is shifting. Instead of browsing websites, users receive direct answers from AI systems. As platforms move toward “zero-click” experiences, organizations face declining visibility and reduced direct engagement with audiences.

What are bots?

Bots are automated software programs that perform tasks on the internet. They range from benign applications, such as search engine crawlers that index websites, to malicious systems used for activities like data scraping and spamming.

These developments go beyond traffic metrics. AI systems can produce inconsistent or personalized responses, while automated accounts amplify narratives at scale. Influence becomes harder to trace, consensus easier to manufacture, and trust more fragile. The result is a digital environment in which communication is increasingly simulated rather than shared.

What simulated communication means for corporate communications

The rise of simulated communication results in challenges and opportunities for communication leaders and their teams:

Communication planning: Declining data reliability makes strategic decisions and budget allocation more difficult.
Risk and crisis management: Algorithm-driven debates require new approaches to identifying and managing communicative risks.
Stakeholder communication: Nuanced messaging and dialogue become harder in environments where original content can be easily bypassed.
Advising top and middle management: Greater opacity in public communication increases the need for expert guidance to navigate shifting opinion dynamics and maintain stakeholder alignment.

How to navigate simulated communication

Optimize for generative visibility: Expand classic SEO toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO/AEO). Structure content so it can be reliably surfaced by AI systems and answer engines.
Invest in formats that build engagement and human interaction: Prioritize formats that foster direct interaction and sustained attention. Video, audio, and live formats strengthen reach while reducing dependence on high-volume text production. Reinforce human-mediated dialogue internally and externally.
Protect authenticity as a strategic asset:
Prioritize credibility, traceability, and visible human authorship. Avoid optimizing solely for AI-driven engagement mechanics or content farming. Authentic communication becomes a key differentiator.
Redesign media and social media monitoring:
Adapt media monitoring to an AI-mediated information environment. Move beyond aggregation toward active curation and contextualization to prevent decisions based on incomplete or misleading AI outputs.

Autonomous systems limited by real-world requirements

AI agents are gaining traction and gradually transitioning from experimental concepts to real-world applications in various fields, such as customer support, workflow automation, and autonomous research. In call centers, for instance, early chatbots based on scripted decision trees are being replaced by systems capable of understanding intent, maintaining context and dynamically escalating decisions.

AI agents

An AI agent is an autonomous software system that uses AI to pursue defined goals by independently deciding and executing actions within its environment. AI agents offer several advantages that may explain their growing adoption (IBM AI Ethics Board, 2025).

The field is increasingly shifting from single-agent setups to multi-agent systems, in which multiple specialized agents collaborate within a shared environment. These systems exhibit new capabilities and emergent behaviors that surpass the potential of individual agents. However, they also introduce greater complexity and governance requirements.

What AI agents mean for corporate communications

Multiple challenges and opportunities for communication leaders and their teams are linked to the availability and spread of AI agents:

Reputation management: Misaligned or flawed actions of AI agents heighten reputational risk; this requires additional efforts for preparation and reaction.
Transformation of communication functions: The growing use of CommTech and AI applications calls for a holistic assessment of both potential benefits and risks. When approached thoughtfully, it creates opportunities to innovate, improve efficiency, and make well-informed, responsible decisions.
Leadership and team culture: Complex and opaque processes can disengage team members and encourage organized irresponsibility within communication departments. However, they also offer opportunities to establish a new culture of engagement and self-responsibility.
Internal standing: Automating communication processes may reduce the prestige and expert power of communicators within an organization and lead to budget cuts. Developing a future-proof business model for communication departments can empower them.

Managing AI agents

Critically evaluate before adopting: Critically assess the purpose, operating context, and potential impact of AI agents before experimentation or deployment. .
Ensure human oversight: Deploy AI agents only in settings where humans remain responsible for critical decisions.
Align with long-term strategy: Use AI agents as part of a broader digital transformation, not as permanent workarounds for legacy systems.
Stay informed on regulation and impact: Keep track of evolving legal and societal frameworks, such as the EU AI Act, and discussions even if agents are not directly deployed in communication functions, as regulatory gaps or misuse elsewhere can affect organizational trust and reputation.

Diminishing higher-order skills in the age of GenAI

The rapid diffusion of GenAI across educational, professional, and everyday contexts has intensified concerns that it is changing how people learn, think, and make decisions. Although GenAI systems promise increased efficiency and productivity gains, a growing body of empirical research suggests that sustained reliance on them may weaken higher-order cognitive skills, including critical thinking, deep information processing, memory consolidation, and autonomous judgment.

What Cognitive Drift means for corporate communications?

There are multiple implications for communication leaders
and their teams related to the impact of GenAI on
cognitive skills:

Team competencies and operations: Implementing advanced AI systems requires a mix of new competencies and experience to judge results. Overreliance on agentic output can lead to deskilling.
Communication services and products: If communication departments rely heavily on AI, the output may be too uniform and of poor quality.
Leadership load: Communication leaders may face an increased burden if they need to close competence and quality gaps within their teams and among external supplieres.
Stakeholder communication: Declining cognitive abilities can enhance the effectiveness of persuasive attempts. However, argumentative approaches will be more difficult.

Dealing with Cognitive Drift

Prioritize coherence with core stakeholders: Evaluate communication strategies primarily against the expectations, information needs, and cognitive frames of your core stakeholders, not against perceived shifts in mass attention or generalized preferences.
Critically review crisis communication readiness: Crisis communication plans should be reassessed in light of growing uncertainty about information credibility and information processing.
Strengthen the media and AI literacy: These skills are more important than ever. Early-career professionals, in particular, benefit from strengthening their foundational knowledge of media systems, platform dynamics, and AI-generated content.
Use AI to strengthen, not replace, cognitive capabilities: Integrate AI as a tool that enhances learning, analysis, and scenario thinking while preserving core cognitive skills.

Changing networks of influence through socio-technological trends

Relationship management has long been a core objective
of communication departments. It is one of the ways they
contribute value to organizations. However, contemporary
networks of influence are undergoing a structural
reconfiguration, with direct implications for how relationships
are initiated, maintained, and strategically
managed. Changes in media consumption practices, platform
governance, and work organization are overlapping
and reshaping how influence is produced, distributed,
and exercised in digital societies.

» Even if it sounds simplistic, this brings us back to the fundamentals of stakeholder management. This means engaging in conversation, seeking explanations, exchanging perspectives, and being willing to enter difficult conversations. If these things are not done through direct, personal dialogue, it simply will not work. «
Dr. Matthias Krämer, Head of Corporate Communications, Siemens Healthineers

On the organizational side, internal influence structures are being reconfigured by the combined effects of hybrid work, digital technologies, and changing employee expectations. Research points to the growing relevance of relational power, understood as the capacity to influence others through trust, recognition, access to information, and social exchange (Soga et al., 2022). However, the expansion of digital monitoring and surveillance tools introduces new power imbalances, demonstrating that influence is not only redistributed, but also contested (Burbridge, 2025).

Power Flux is important for corporate communications

Changes in power distribution create challenges and opportunities for communication leaders and their teams:

Conceptual leaps: Communication professionals must constantly review and rethink established ideas about information processing, media use, and opinion building.
Relationship management: Shifting power networks alter the relevance of actors and institutions, requiring communicators to continuously map and engage with stakeholders in ways that strengthen collaboration and influence.
Communication strategies and activities: Depending on how power is distributed, some communication approaches may become more effective while others may encounter greater challenges.
Internal communication and leadership: Communication leaders need to establish processes and formats that both support and channel informal networks and digital relationships within their organizations.

What corporate communications should do

Invest in relational power: Building relational power involves establishing trust, granting access to information, recognizing contributions, and encouraging social interaction across teams and departments.
Identify and support facilitators in your team: Influence often gravitates toward individuals who connect people, align contributions, and enable collaboration, regardless of their formal role. Facilitators play a critical role in generating collective intelligence by integrating diverse expertise and fostering trust within teams.
Critically reevaluate and map stakeholder networks: Communication leaders should regularly map and reassess their stakeholder networks to maintain situational awareness.
Foster adaptability and relational resilience: In contemporary organizations, power is increasingly situational, fluctuating across projects, networks, and technological contexts. Therefore, communication teams should invest in adaptability to respond to shifting priorities, workflows, and external pressures.

Increasing value by deliberate removal and simplification

Organizations may underperform relative to their competitors for a variety of reasons, one of which is excessive internal complexity. Especially in organizations that have grown organically over time, layers of processes, roles, technologies, and governance mechanisms tend to accumulate. This complexity puts a strain on an organization’s attention and decision-making capacity. As complexity increases, organizational energy is often dispersed across a growing number of low-impact activities rather than concentrated on initiatives that generate strategic value.

Digital transformation further intensifies this complexity. While digital technologies enable new ways of working and collaborating, organizations often approach transformation by adding new tools, platforms, and routines without removing outdated technologies or practices.

Strategic Subtraction

Strategic subtraction is a deliberate managerial practice. As early as 1996, Michael Porter argued that strategy is about choosing what not to do. It goes beyond removing distractions, requiring firms to end processes and eliminate products, features, or services that no longer create value.

Why is Strategic Subtraction important for corporate communications?

Strategic subtraction presents multiple opportunities and possibilities for communication leaders and their teams:

Mandate and portfolio: Communication departments face a growing need to review and renegotiate their responsibilities and deliverables, ensuring that priorities are aligned with corporate goals.
Operating model: The adjustment of planning policies, success criteria, incentives, processes, and platforms is a prerequisite for focusing on less rather than more.
Communication activities: There is an increasing demand to measure and evaluate communication output, outcomes, and impact using frameworks designed around strategic subtraction, ensuring that every activity adds meaningful value.

Recommendations for communication leaders and professionals

Foster a culture of subtraction: Treat the decision to stop, pause, or reprioritize communication initiatives as a positive strategic action, not a failure. Leaders should recognize and celebrate these choices to signal that reducing low-impact activities creates value.
Embed subtraction into core processes: Instead of making a one-time decision, incorporate strategic subtraction into planning and prioritization. Always make continuation a conscious choice to prevent unnecessary projects from cluttering portfolios and diluting focus.
Align stratgic priorities with daily work: Use agile frameworks, such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), to connect high-level communication strategy with everyday team activities. This helps to maintain a clear focus on impactful activities and strengthens the strategic position of corporate communications within the organization.

About the study

The Communication Management Radar 2026 is a research project at Leipzig University led by Dr. Michelle Wloka and Prof. Ansgar Zerfass. It identifies five interdisciplinary phenomena in management, technology, psychology, and media that are currently emerging and are likely to present both challenges and opportunities for corporate communication in the near future. The report addresses not only new developments but also issues that have previously been overlooked.

The full report available here.

Report: Communication Management Radar 2026