The Leadership Vacuum: Communication’s Case to Lead on Responsible AI

Adrian Cropley OAM:

Reimagining Tomorrow 2026 shows a profession stepping forward on AI but rarely stepping up to lead. The case for communication leadership, on responsible AI and on responsible communication more broadly, has never been clearer. That road runs through Abuja.

Here’s a thought to sit with. By the time this article reaches you, the AI landscape will have shifted again. A new model, a new capability, a fresh headline about something going wrong. That’s the era we’re working in now, and it doesn’t pause for us to catch up. So the question I want to put to our profession isn’t whether we can keep pace with the technology. It’s whether we’re ready to lead in a world that refuses to stand still.

For the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of co-leading the Responsible AI in PR and Communication Management Survey with my colleague Bonnie Caver, as part of the Global Alliance’s Reimagining Tomorrow research. This year’s report drew on 536 communication professionals across six regions, and for the first time, we can compare two consecutive years of global data. The headline? The needle is moving, and mostly in the right direction.

Adoption is now close to universal, with 95.9% of organizations permitting AI. Responsible AI frameworks have grown from 39.4% to 47.0%. The share of us who feel very confident evaluating AI’s ethical implications has jumped from 26.2% to 38.8%. Almost two-thirds, 64.5%, now communicate their organization’s responsible AI approach to stakeholders. That’s real progress, and we should own it.

The number underneath the good news

But I’d be doing you a disservice if I stopped there, because underneath the encouraging figures sits a stubborn one. Involvement in shaping responsible AI guidelines has climbed to 57.3%, yet only 8.6% of us report leading formal responsible AI structures. Just 10.4% of organizations have handed primary responsibility for responsible AI to the communication function. We are increasingly in the room. We are rarely at the head of the table.

Now hold that against another finding. When we asked who owns responsible AI in organizations, the most common answer was the IT function, at 25.6%. The second most common answer, at 20.3%, was no one at all. Read that again. In one in five organizations, nobody formally owns the ethical and responsible use of AI.

That’s not just a governance gap. It’s a leadership vacuum. Here’s the truth about vacuums: something always fills them.

The only real question is what fills the space, and who. Left alone, it will be filled by whoever moves first, by technology teams optimizing for efficiency, by legal teams managing liability, or by no one, which is worse. None of those instincts is wrong. None of them, on its own, protects the thing our profession exists to protect: trust.

Why this leadership should be ours

So why should communication step into that space? Let me make the case plainly. Responsible AI, at its core, is not a technology problem. It’s a trust problem. It’s about transparency, disclosure, accountability, and the relationship between an organization and the people it serves. Those are our disciplines. They always have been.

Consider disclosure. A quarter of organizations, 25.4%, tell no one about their AI use, not their employees, not their clients, not the public. Who in the business is better placed to close that gap than the people whose whole craft is honest, clear communication with stakeholders? Now consider agentic AI, already in use or being piloted in 30.9% of organizations. These are systems that can act, publish and engage on an organization’s behalf. As those agents begin to speak for the organization, every reputational and ethical instinct we’ve spent our careers developing becomes mission-critical, not optional.

Picture the moment it goes wrong. An AI agent publishes something misleading, or a campaign is quietly built on synthetic content nobody disclosed, and the story breaks. When the trust is on the line and the public is asking hard questions, who does the organization turn to? It turns to us. My argument is simple: if we’re the ones called on to defend trust when it fractures, we should be the ones leading to protect it in the first place.

This is our moment. Not to seize the whole of AI governance, which would be neither realistic nor wise, but to lead decisively on the dimensions that are unmistakably ours: trust, transparency, disclosure, reputation and ethical communication.

The reputation piece deserves a moment on its own, because this year we measured it directly for the first time. Communication professionals see AI as a reputational opportunity, with 60.3% naming it as such, while 56.1% say it has increased their organization’s exposure to reputational risk. Sit with that duality. AI is, at once, our biggest opportunity to build reputation and one of our sharpest new sources of risk to it. That’s not a side issue for the communication function. It’s the center of the fairway. If we don’t lead where opportunity and risk collide most directly, we’re leaving our own territory undefended.

What leadership looks like when nothing stands still

What does that leadership actually look like in a fast-moving era? For me it comes down to a shift in posture. We stop asking permission to be involved and start taking responsibility for outcomes. We treat AI governance not as a policy we write once and file away, but as a living practice we steward continuously, because the technology never sits still. We learn to speak the language of the boardroom, connecting transparency and trust to reputation and risk in terms a chief executive acts on. We get comfortable being the person who asks the awkward questions in the room. Have we told people? Who is accountable if this goes wrong? Can we stand behind how this was made?

That last part is the heart of it. Leadership in this era isn’t about having every answer about the technology, because none of us will. It’s about holding the organization to its values while the ground keeps shifting beneath everyone’s feet. The professionals who can do that calmly, credibly and consistently will be indispensable. The ones who wait to be told what their role is may find it has already been assigned to someone else.

Wider than AI: the responsible communication test

Here’s where I want to widen the lens, because responsible AI is really the sharpest edge of something far bigger. It’s a test case for responsible communication as a whole. Misinformation, disclosure, the erosion of public trust, the ethics of how we inform and influence: these challenges predate AI and will outlast this particular wave of it. AI has simply made them urgent, visible and impossible to duck.

Our profession has been here before, and we should take real confidence from that. Time and again we’ve come together to set the standards that define good practice. The Stockholm Accords confirmed the global role for Public Relations and Communication Management in 2010. The Barcelona Principles reshaped how we measure and evaluate the value of what we do, the Melbourne Mandate started the conversation on responsible behaviours and the cultural role our profession has. The Global Capability Framework sets out what capable, credible practice looks like across the world. IABC’s Global Standard gave the profession a shared benchmark to hold itself to. Responsible AI principles are simply the newest entry in that proud lineage, not a departure from it.

Look closely and you’ll see the same instinct at work across our profession right now, well beyond AI. We are advancing our standards on diversity, equity and inclusion with the recent launch of the Global DEI Policy Framework. Also, sustainability communication through the Roman Declaration on Green Communication. Each of these is a strand of the same rope: a profession deciding, deliberately, what it means to communicate responsibly in the world we’re now in.

That’s why the World Public Relations Forum in Abuja, Nigeria, matters so much this year, and why its theme, responsible communication, feels so well chosen. In the lead-up to the Forum and at the event itself, we’ll be working toward an Abuja Declaration, a shared statement of what responsible communication means for our profession and what we commit to as its custodians. I’ll be closely involved in helping to lead that work, and I can tell you it’s one of the most energizing things I’ve been part of. Frameworks and principles like these work best as living documents, and our annual research is one of the evidence sources that help keep them current as the world changes around them.

So look at what’s lining up. A global forum dedicated to responsible communication. Refreshed principles for responsible AI. A declaration in the making. Two years of hard data telling us precisely where the profession stands and where it’s stuck. The infrastructure for a genuine movement is taking shape. What it needs now is people willing to step into it, not as observers of the conversation, but as leaders of it.

Turning insight into capability

Insight alone, though, has never changed anything. People do. At the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence, we’re beginning work on a new playbook to help professionals lead in exactly this way, building on the one we produced in 2025. The aim is straightforward: to turn the evidence in reports like Reimagining Tomorrow into practical capability, the skills, the frameworks and the plain confidence to walk into the room and lead.

So let me leave you with the challenge I’ve been carrying since we launched this year’s findings. The profession has stepped forward, and that’s worth celebrating. But the era we’re in won’t wait for us to step up. So don’t wait for permission. Choose the responsible AI dimension you’re best placed to own, whether that’s disclosure, ethics or stakeholder trust, and start leading on it now. If enough of us do that, we won’t merely keep pace with this fast-moving era. We’ll help shape it. That, to me, is what responsible communication leadership looks like. It starts with us, and it starts now.

Don’t forget to download the Reimagining Tomorrow 2026 Report and look at all the data

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Adrian Cropley is Board Director, Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management; Co-founder, Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence; co-researcher and co-author, Reimagining Tomorrow 2026