The CCO’s moment is here. The narrative around it isn’t.

Monica Molesag:

This week, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the rise of communications professionals in the C-suite. The article shares that a large share of Chief Communication Officers (CCOs) now report directly to the CEO and salaries at Fortune 500 companies have reached a median base of $400,000–$450,000. Furthermore, companies that never had a chief communications officer are newly creating the role.

Having spent 15 years in both global communications and marketing positions based in Europe, three questions immediately came to mind. Is this shift representative of the wider communications picture? What is truly driving it? And is the casual conflation of communications with marketing, however common and well-intentioned, doing either function any favours?

The rise of the CCO

The CCO’s ascent marks a structural shift for organizations worldwide. In Clipbook’s 2026 Enterprise Playbook for Chief Communications Officers, CCOs are described as helping CEOs navigate geopolitical risk, make hard calls about when to speak publicly, and sustain credibility with governments, markets, and communities. This doesn’t come as a surprise when you look at the environment those roles are operating in. Stakeholder activism has intensified, and geopolitical volatility has made corporate positioning genuinely consequential. Regulatory scrutiny, on everything from climate commitments to AI governance and labour practices, has raised the cost of saying the wrong thing, or the right thing without the evidence to support it. In that context, having someone whose specific job is to protect and build institutional credibility is not a luxury, despite how it’s been framed in the past. 

AI is adding another layer to this. Both functions are being reshaped by AI, but in different ways and to different ends. For marketing, AI is sharpening capabilities around producing content at scale, personalised messaging, and rapid iteration, and doing so with genuine effect. On the communications side, AI is equally present in activities like media monitoring, stakeholder analysis, content drafting, and scenario planning. 

The more AI-assisted content permeating our channels, the higher the risk of inconsistent, unverifiable, or indefensible claims. That is a communications problem, much like the newer challenge of how organisations appear inside the answers AI models give about them, a concern already driving investment in sentiment and narrative analysis tools across channels. 

A tale of two disciplines

By framing the CCO’s value in marketing’s language and treating the two disciplines as points on the same spectrum, the article obscures the very thing that makes the CCO’s rise significant: communications is not an amplifier of what an organisation wants to say. It is a guardrail on whether it should.

Marketing serves customers. Its job is persuasion: build desire, reduce friction, drive behaviour. You measure it in conversions and growth, and when it doesn’t work, you test a different version.

Communications serves investors, regulators, journalists, employees, and governments. These are audiences who are not being asked to buy anything, but to believe something: that an organisation means what it says, that its commitments have substance, that when something goes wrong, they will hear about it honestly.

Both disciplines ask questions that matter. Marketing asks: how do we make this as compelling as possible? Communications asks: is this something we are genuinely ready to be held to? Each requires different instincts, internal relationships, and definitions of a good outcome.

Effective communications leadership means being present before decisions are made, and being connected to legal, finance, and the board. It means asking whether the claim is proportionate to the evidence, whether the commitment has a delivery plan behind it, and whether the organisation is genuinely prepared for the scrutiny that follows.

One story, not the only one

The data underpinning this narrative is drawn almost entirely from Fortune 500 companies in the United States. For communications leaders based in Europe, this might feel remote. In most large European companies, senior communications director roles tend to fall well below US Fortune 500 CCO levels, often in the low- to mid‑six‑figure range in euros and pounds. Recent analyses of large European listed companies suggest that a noticeable share still operate without a dedicated CCO role.

The operating pressures driving this shift include polarised audiences, AI-amplified reputational risk, and the speed at which institutional trust can be lost. These are very much global features and not distinct to the American market alone. Yet the structures that allow communications to respond to those pressures, like seniority, budget, mandate, and a direct line to the CEO, are not yet global. That gap is worth naming. And even in the US, where the role appears most entrenched, the 2026 The Conference Board’s CMO+CCO Meter shows that a smaller share of CCOs than CMOs feel adequately resourced by their budgets to drive business impact over the next six months.

A real seat

Communications professionals are gaining influence, and the recognition is long overdue. But there is a difference between being invited to the table and having a genuine seat at it. A genuine seat means access before decisions are made, the mandate to push back, and accountability for institutional credibility, which is not the same accountability as campaign performance.

The risk of getting this wrong goes far beyond optics. As PR Week has documented budget pressures are driving more companies to blend communications leadership into hybrid roles like CMCO, CGO, or CMO positions with heavy PR remits, effectively treating the disciplines as interchangeable at the top. That approach does not elevate communications.

Celebrating the CCO’s rise by framing it as marketing is akin to elevating a Chief Financial Officer and framing it as accounting finally getting its due. The work was always consequential. The only difference is an organisation finally structuring itself to reflect that.

For any company that has recently created a CCO role, or is considering it, the title is just the first step. The real elevation lies in giving communications the access and the mandate to do what it is actually there to do.

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Monica Molesag is Global Head of Sustainability Communications, SAP