Tobi Rasaq Alaka is a Corporate Communications and Marketing Operations Leader who writes about strategic communications, public relations, reputation management, executive visibility, AI-powered discovery, and the future of corporate influence. In this article, she examines why strategic PR is evolving into a true business leadership function, and what this shift means for communications leaders, corporate affairs professionals, CEOs and boards preparing for the next decade.
PR didn’t become more important. Business became more complex.
That distinction matters. For years, the industry told itself a flattering story: that communicators had finally been “let into the room”, that our value had been recognised, that the C-suite had seen the light. It’s a nice narrative. It’s also the wrong one.
What happened is simpler and less sentimental: the operating environment businesses now navigate, geopolitical, regulatory, reputational, technological, became too complex for any single function to manage alone.
Communications didn’t rise. The ground underneath every business shifted, and communications happened to be standing on the part of the map that mattered most.
Here’s why that shift is now structural, not cyclical, and what it means for anyone building a career in this space.
Trust is now a balance-sheet item, not a brand attribute
For most of PR’s history, trust was treated as reputational softness, something nice to have, hard to measure, someone else’s problem when the business made hard decisions. I cannot count how many meetings I have sat in when budget cuts are being made and PR & comms are the first thing to go because it is seen as fluff and just a visibility tool. That framing no longer survives contact with the data.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer describes a world retreating into insularity, with economic anxiety, geopolitical tension and technological disruption pushing people into smaller, more familiar circles of belief. Employers now outperform government, media and NGOs as the institution people trust most to broker that divide, which means the burden of trust-building has quietly shifted onto business and onto whoever inside the business is responsible for how it shows up.
Trust in financial services has climbed to 63% globally, the only sector to post double-digit growth since 2021, not because products improved, but because transparency and institutional behaviour did. Meanwhile, the gap between what people expect of CEOs on trust-building and what they believe CEOs are delivering sits close to 30 points.
That gap is the job. It is not a communications campaign. It is a leadership function with communications expertise sitting inside it.
In African markets specifically (Lagos, Nairobi, South Africa, Accra), this is sharper still. Institutional trust is often thinner, regulatory environments move faster than global playbooks anticipate, and a single misstep with the CBN, the FCCPC or the CBK can undo eighteen months of brand-building in a week. Trust here isn’t a marketing outcome. It’s a licence to operate.
AI doesn’t shrink the communicator’s role. It exposes who was doing the real work
The lazy prediction was that AI would hollow out communications: content generation automated, media monitoring automated, drafting automated, headcount down. Some of that is happening. None of it is the point.
Deloitte’s 2026 Corporate Affairs Report is unambiguous on this: AI is now the single most-cited priority for corporate affairs leaders going into the year, yet only a quarter have an actual AI strategy. The report’s framing is the sharpest part: functions that treat AI merely as a tool will lose strategic relevance; those that treat it as a stakeholder, something to be governed, questioned and factored into decision-making, become indispensable.
That’s the tell. AI doesn’t reduce the need for strategic communicators. It removes the cover that let under-strategic communicators survive by being good at execution. When drafting, monitoring and reporting are commoditised, what’s left is judgement, reading a room before it becomes a crisis, knowing which regulator to call before the story breaks, understanding what a market will tolerate and what it won’t. That was never a content skill. It was always a leadership skill. AI just stopped letting us hide that fact behind deliverables.
Stakeholder management has quietly replaced media management as the core discipline
Media relations used to be the spine of the profession. It no longer is, and Deloitte’s data confirms the shift is deliberate, not accidental: media relations has declined in strategic priority even as owned media and podcasts have grown, while geopolitical advisory and measurement rigour have risen sharply in importance.
This does not mean that media has stopped being important or relevant. It certainly is in countries like Nigeria. What has happened is that media has become one voice among many the business has to manage. Investors reading the equity story for risk signals, regulators reading public statements for compliance intent, employees reading internal comms for whether leadership’s words match its actions, and communities reading corporate behaviour for whether “purpose” was ever real.
Communicators who still define their job as “getting good press” are solving a 2015 problem with 2026 stakes. The job now is orchestrating credibility across constituencies that don’t read from the same script and don’t forgive the same mistakes.
The walls between Communications, Marketing, Corporate Affairs and Public Policy are coming down because the business doesn’t experience them as separate
Deloitte’s report puts a number on what practitioners have felt for a while: 43% of corporate affairs leaders now describe their function as a “growth driver”, a sharp move away from the old purpose-and-reputation framing. That’s not a rebrand. It’s an admission that the business never actually experienced these functions as distinct. A regulatory shift is a policy issue, a reputational issue, a marketing issue and an investor issue in the same breath, and the customer, regulator or investor on the other end doesn’t care which department owns which slice of the message.
This is precisely the terrain called the Intersectional Advantage: the ability to move fluently between brand, communications, product thinking and growth strategy without treating them as separate disciplines requiring separate people in separate meetings. The market is catching up to what that convergence requires. Silos were always an organisational chart problem, never a business reality.
The future communicator is not a spokesperson. They are an executive adviser
Put the three trends together, trust as competitive currency, AI collapsing the value of pure execution, stakeholder complexity replacing media simplicity, and the shape of the future role is obvious. It sits closer to the CEO’s desk than to the press office.
Deloitte’s own five-year projection for the function tracks this: from proactive adviser today, to consistent C-suite engagement by 2027, to a fully embedded human-plus-agent model advising on real-time risk by 2030. The destination isn’t “better PR.” It’s counsel, the kind that shapes decisions before they’re made public, not the kind that explains decisions after they’ve gone wrong.
That’s a different hiring brief than the one most companies still write. It’s not “find someone who can get us coverage.” It’s “find someone who can sit in the room where the decision is being made and tell us, credibly, what it will cost us in trust before we make it.”
The reframe
PR didn’t get promoted. The job got harder, and the profession that was built to manage complexity on the business’s behalf finally has the complexity to justify the seat.
Nobody hands you that seat because you asked nicely or because a report said you deserved it. You earn it by being the person in the room who can hold geopolitics, regulation, culture and commercial reality in the same sentence and still tell the CEO the truth.
That’s not a golden age of PR. It’s the end of PR as a support function and the start of communications as a leadership discipline.
