Owning Our Centrality: Today’s Opportunity for Comms Pros – and Are We Up For It?

28 September 2026

Mike Klein:

What makes communication professionals central right now?

Not “important.”

Central.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality. In late 2026, for a growing number of organizations, the most defensible source of advantage isn’t the product. It’s whether customers, employees and stakeholders believe the story about the product – and whether the organization’s behavior backs that story up.

In other words, communication is no longer a “support function.” It’s where the real value is created or lost.

A lot of us bristle at that, some of us violently:

“We’re here to support the business.” “We’re here to help leaders express their thoughts, their words, their ideas.”

Some of that resistance is honest. We’ve all watched colleagues overclaim and get burned. And comms can’t rescue a bad product.

But our apologetic humility has become a hiding place.

Three things about the world our organizations operate in are increasingly obvious, even if they make some practitioners uncomfortable:

• Organizations are operating largely in defense mode.
• They’re trying to offload as much work, thinking and execution to AI as they can.
• Their products and services are becoming less and less distinctive.

Start with the last one. When offerings stop being intrinsically distinctive, differentiation moves somewhere else: to the narrative, to whether people see your behavior and hear your language, and to whether customers and stakeholders believe either to be true.

That puts us at the core of the price premium – the gap between what a company can charge and what the most basic alternative in its space charges.

If you doubt how much of a company’s value now sits in its story, look at Bud Light in 2023. It lost its long-held crown as America’s best-selling beer, and its parent company took a hit of more than a billion dollars in US revenue in a single year.

The beer didn’t change. Not the recipe, not the price, not the can.

What set it off was a single influencer partnership. What made it lasting was that the company never decided what its story was – so everyone else decided for it. The story became the arbiter of the brand’s financial value.

The second force, AI, is a communication problem before it’s a technology problem.

The organizational adaptation to AI is itself a communication challenge of the first order – and there’s no such thing as an internal memo anymore.

In the spring of 2025, Shopify and Duolingo both released “AI-first” memos to their people. Shopify’s was largely read as a strategic statement. Duolingo’s sparked a public backlash, and the company went quiet on its own social channels for a stretch. Same idea, same season, very different outcomes. The difference wasn’t the strategy. It was how the change was framed and landed.

Then there’s defense mode, amplified by volatility on every side.

Our countries often have capricious political leadership whose actions change market conditions on a whim or a reflex. When sweeping US tariffs were announced in April 2025 and largely paused a week later, companies across sectors pulled their earnings guidance because nobody could say what the rules would be next quarter.

Our communication ecosystem is driven from multiple directions and operates at lightning speed. Bad actors can create catastrophic “facts” instantaneously, while the refutation of falsehoods takes weeks and months – and the corrections and retractions never appear on the front page, if they appear at all. In 2022, a fake “verified” Eli Lilly account announced that insulin was now free, and the company’s stock fell sharply the next day.

These are not problems organizations can fix through better engineering, tighter financial controls, or higher employee engagement scores. Silicon Valley Bank had real balance-sheet problems in 2023. But what finished it off was a narrative moving faster than any treasury team could respond: depositors, spurred on by investor group chats and social media, pulled roughly $42 billion in a single day.

Moments like that require communication leadership. That means helping organizations navigate the negativity and volatility that challenge their leaders’ and brands’ credibility. It also means building compelling and verifiable narratives that attract customers, reassure stakeholders, and pull people inside and outside the organization in the same winning direction.

So are we up to it?

Right now, in too many places, no.

We’re reporting engagement scores to executives who are losing sleep over margin. We’re treating participation in AI governance committees and finger-wagging about “responsible AI” as our big strategic contribution while the business reorganizes around AI without us.

We’re absent from the rooms where pricing and positioning get decided, then asked to “land the message” afterward. We measure what we send, not what changes. And we still describe ourselves as support functions, then wonder why we’re treated like servants, stenographers and shipping clerks.

Owning our centrality means the opposite: being in the room where pricing and positioning are set, measuring what the business actually values, and leading the organization’s adaptation to AI and volatility rather than policing it.

Whether communication leaders can do that right now is the most important question our profession has faced in a generation.

It’s the question that should be keeping us all up at night.

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And it’s also the driving question at the Communication Leadership Summit in Washington, DC on Friday, October 16.

Thanks to our partnership with IABC and strong sponsorship from Agency X, we’re gathering communication leaders from different disciplines, geographies and generations.

And we’re doing it as an unconference: no panels, no PowerPoint, no keynotes.

The agenda gets built by the people in the room, around the problems they’re actually facing, with the aim of leaving with real strategies for owning the opportunity the current crises present.

Join us in Washington – and let’s make this our focus as the year comes to a close.

Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/communication-leadership-summit-tickets-1990588605103?aff=oddtdtcreator

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Mike Klein is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine.