Ragan’s Communications Week board of advisors gather for a roundtable conversation on managing change, adapting to AI and predictions for the year ahead.
Next month Ragan Communications hosts Communications Week, a worldwide celebration of the PR and communications industry featuring more than 60 industry partners and 10 academic mentoring programs including Georgetown, NYU and Pepperdine, all anchored by Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference in Austin on Nov. 12-14.
In preparation, we’ve asked our Communications Week Board of Advisors, composed of internal and external comms leaders at some of the biggest brands and agencies in the industry, to step out from behind the scenes for a roundtable discussion sharing their perspective on some of their biggest wins this year, how they’re overcoming their biggest challenges and what they think the biggest storylines will be in 2026.
Roundtable participants included:
Christina Furtado, Director of Global Revenue Operations Communications, Dell Technologies
Laura Brusca, Chief Communications Officer, Forbes
Stacie Barrett, former Director of Internal Communications at Domino’s
Amanda Coffee, founder and CEO, Coffee Communications
Jacqueline Kolek, Co-President, Peppercom
Brandi Boatner, Global Influence Marketing, IBM
Christina Frantom, Internal Communications Lead, Mercedes-Benz U.S. International
Moderator: Matt Kinsman, Chief Content Officer, Ragan Communications
Matt Kinsman, chief content officer, Ragan Communications: If you had to come up with a theme or a slogan for this crazy year that’s 2025 what would it be and why?
Stacie Barrett, former director of internal communications at Domino’s: I would call it the anxiety and uncertainty roller coaster. It’s, ‘Yes, this is happening. No, this isn’t happening. Yes, the world’s ending. No, the world isn’t ending,’ and it’s gone back and forth. People are having difficulty with planning. People are freezing budgets. People are pausing, waiting for the answer. And the answer is, is that we’re in a time of change, right? And so it’s figuring out how to adapt to change and continue to move forward in a time of uncertainty.
Laura Brusca, chief communications officer, Forbes: My slogan is embrace change. We are always are changing, but this year has been like whiplash. To your point, people are like, are we putting out a message on this? Are we not putting out a message on this? Are we doing this? Are we not doing that? Also, adapting to AI and technology. The media industry has been upended by AI and technology this year like a lot of industries. We’re all going to just have to buckle up and take the ride. But we are the change makers. We’re the ones who have to lead our organizations alongside the C-suite through the change that we’re seeing. So we all play an enormous role in really advocating and problem solving through change.
Christina Furtado, director of global revenue operations Communications, Dell Technologies: So, there are a couple themes that run through my mind. One is to be agile and a key to being agile is thinking less about roles and responsibilities and more about the end goal, right? Sometimes we get so mired in thinking, ‘this is my responsibility versus this is marketing’s responsibility, versus this is internal comms, this is executive comms.’ In reality, we are starting with the goal and those other items will fall into place pretty naturally. If we don’t know what the goal is, then, Lord, help us, right?
Matt: Christina, is there a specific example you’re comfortable sharing with us, just a quick overview of how that worked out at Dell?
Christina Furtado: Every company is essentially trying to tell their AI story. And when that started with Dell, we needed somebody to pull the disparate pieces together and look at the overarching message and how it is delivered. Now that’s evolved, right? AI is embedded throughout all of the comms function and it’s embedded in every story that we tell. And so again, we started with the goal of, we need to get our corporate AI story out there. We achieved that goal. Now, the focus is what that looks like in terms of maintenance.
Amanda Coffee, founder and CEO, Coffee Communications: We’re at an inflection point with AI. Thinking back to Communications Week last year, there was still a lot of hype cycle around AI, where today it’s not optional. The C-suite are looking to communications to show measurable ways that AI can track a brand’s reputation. I’ve issued more press releases in the last three months than I have in the last three years. And I’m implementing strategies that are AI-first. We organized a photo shoot with one of my clients at NASDAQ recently just to get the AI search optimized imagery. I think a lot of firms are realizing that in the age of AI, they’re in communications debt–they don’t have good owned content about their brand. And when you type into ChatGPT or Perplexity, it’s pulling sites that aren’t your own.
Look to some of the brands that are coming onsite for Future of Communications, like muck rack which just had this amazing what is AI reading? report that i keep telling people about. profound and notified announced a partnership where you can track AI on your press releases. i’m excited about it because i feel as communications professionals, we’ve always struggled compared to some of our peers to measure and now with AI and earned media and owned content, we’re really in the driver’s seat. Weber Shandwick signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Google for a custom AI platform, with commstech partners including PeakMetrics. I had a recruiter tell me that comms people now are like HR people were in 2020 when human resources was thrown into the forefront with the pandemic. Now with AI, comms is in the forefront.
Matt: What’s had the biggest impact on you and your teams this year and how have you responded to that?
Jacqueline Kolek, co-president, Peppercom: The constant state of change. From AI adoption to economic uncertainty to the political climate, it feels like the hits just keep on coming. Helping our teams to adapt to a new mindset that enables them to see change not as a challenge, but as an opportunity has been a key focus for us. We’ve done a lot of work to help them see where they can “level up” and take on new roles and responsibilities that support their professional growth.
Brandi Boatner, Global Influence Marketing, IBM: I remember when we would shy away from polarizing topics and polarizing figures, anything that even smelled like it could turn folks off. And now I feel like as a community, we’re running towards that because we have to deal with it. The second part that’s impacting our social media team directly are influencers. Influencers have always been around but this year there’s such a shift in their role, their voice and how brands are utilizing them. This feels very different than it did two years ago. Brands are going after micro, macro, nano, academic, you name it, they want influencers. The NFL went from having 30 influencers at the 2024 Super Bowl to having 150 influencers.
I was at New York Fashion Week this year and I was surrounded by influencers. One of them said to me, ‘do you want me to hold your phone and record while you’re capturing content?’ and I said to her, ‘I’m not here to capture content. I just wanted to see the show.’ And she looked at me, like, ‘what do you mean? We’re all here capturing content.’ Prominent influencers are becoming the new gatekeepers. Former journalists are starting Substacks or Reddit mega threads, whatever it may be. I think we’ve gone from the experience economy to the voice economy. Whoever is the most conversational in the room is who people want to partner with.
Laura: Creators and brands are such a big thing. I just came from our Sustainability Summit where Jane Goodall and Harrison Ford were on stage speaking about change and the need for activism. And I think Harrison Ford said it, but we need less noise and more music. A lot of them were talking about the need to get off of those social networks, be tuned into the moment, and be tuned into, how we can create powerful change. Because I do think that there’s been such a shift in how we consume content. The big question out there for all of us as communicators right now is how do you tap into creators and influencers to create change and impact? I wouldn’t have had the same feeling and the goosebumps if I wasn’t there in person. I think human connection is going to help us overcome all these challenges.
Christina Frantom, internal Communications lead, Mercedes-Benz U.S. International: The uncool part what you guys are saying is readjusting our KPIs to make sure that we’re measuring against these new trends, which is not sexy and not fun, but all of our numbers are looking strange because we’re not measuring the right things. And a lot of times the way we measure those things hasn’t even really been invented yet. I had to go back in my past Christina brain to remember, how do I measure KPIs for a snail mail campaign? Because we did one, and I’m like, I don’t even remember, what was it based on, per mailbox or was it response or was it all through a website or a QR code? There is that back to the basics but also adjusting all of our KPIs for that.
An article I read was basically talking about how PR is dead and BR, or ‘brand relations’ is now what we’re doing, because there’s no controlling the story. There’s no one press release that works because with all the influencers and with all the conversations going on, you have to be living your brand so that no matter who speaks about it, they’re speaking the right thing, versus sending out a very controlled message. It’s about living your brand and broadcasting who you are. Your brand relations, the comms folks and PR folks and media relations folks need to be making sure that they’re living their brand across their entire corporation.
I’ve seen a lot of C-suite comms roles popping up recently that are specifically to manage and organize the C-suite. It could have been because of the Coldplay thing or the rise of AI. Comms professionals are seeing executives jumping into ChatGPT on their own, and then you’re like, who wrote this? This sounds intelligent but it’s all wrong. So, I think the brand relations piece is really important. Are executives creating content like you were saying, Brandi, about Fashion Week? Are they going to events on the weekends? Are they participating in these different talks or conferences or lunches that are all opportunities to create content?
Brandi: Absolutely, I love that. I just feel like there wouldn’t be BR without PR. And we are having this exercise right at IBM right now. We just moved the brand team into PR, into our corporate affairs team. When it goes off the tracks and you hit crisis mode–that’s PR. You have to have PR to do that to be uniquely positioned to handle the BR. It’s like having the creator versus influencer debate.
Christina Frantom: You’re not wrong, but I don’t think it’s about content. I think it’s about control. It’s the Wild, Wild West right now. There’s really no way to operate in a traditional PR function where you’re controlling a narrative, because you could have all this beautifully polished, organized PR out there, and then you have a kid on their cell phone who recorded your faculty member in a classroom saying something. So, I think the idea is that control is gone and PR isn’t about trying to calm crisis, it’s the way that we’re living our brand. As communicators, loop us in early. We’ll help talk you through it. Let’s plan two and three years out and get a rhythm going so that when all this crisis comes forward, we’re prepared for it.
Matt: What were some of the wins that you’ve had this year?
Laura: It’s kind of a victory in progress, but leaning in and listening has been a win for me and my team this year. We’re spending the time to listen to people from across the organization and try to break down silos. And an example of that is we’re working very hard on putting together an AI foundational framework that’s really the philosophical principles of how we look at AI from five different viewpoints across the company, not just in the newsroom or editorial. It’s taken us a bit of time to put it all together and condense it into the things that are most meaningful for our brand.
Christina Frantom: We had a big win that is maybe slightly less sexy. We spent so much time in our organization on customer data and figuring out what the customers are interested in, just down to their thoughts and feelings on absolutely everything, not just about our products, but about everything else. And we launched a pretty intensive deep dive on search behavior on internal platforms–really looking at what employees are asking and team members are asking about our products and things that are important to them. Obviously the topics that you would expect came up like payroll, vacation and benefits, but also really taking their temperature on an insider’s view on what they thought of the product.
Managing the search data of the on internal platforms, not just our social internet, but also our employees on our social media pages and different things like that, has really made a huge change and how we manage content and the things that we pitch, and how we’re making decisions about both internal and external issues.
Jacqueline: Our team has embraced AI in unexpected ways. We all just got ChatGPT 5 and I think there was a concern that we were going to see people just using it to write press releases and not really leveraging it for its real power. And we’ve seen our team members take data and turn it into a graphic that might be shown on the Today Show and then using that to pitch a Today Show producer or write a headline for the Wall Street Journal and using that to pitch a particular reporter at the Journal to show how this story could come to life. It has been really interesting to see that they’ve applied critical thinking skills in the way they’re adopting AI and leveraging it to be smarter, faster, more efficient and innovative in the way they’re doing their work, versus using it as a cheat.
Matt: We obviously want to talk about AI and what that’s meant for your teams. How’s this really affected your teams to this point?
Jacqueline: What’s interesting in the agency world is the very different client expectations around use of AI. We have many clients who are truly innovating in their application of AI, while there are few that are mandating more to check a box without a real strategy behind the use case.
Christina Furtado: Regardless of whether you’re on board now with AI tools, you will have to be on board in the future. Everybody is still feeling their way out, but if you’re not prompting, if you’re not opening up the tools that are afforded to you, then I wish you the best because everybody else is figuring it out. Maybe last year, you could be a first adopter. Now, everybody should be an adopter. Those levels vary, but everybody needs to be adopting AI for their job.
With that said, we on the comm side have heard from reporters that can smell an AI-generated pitch from a mile away. Thank you, M-dash, for being that giveaway. So there’s a difference between using the AI tools as a first draft and running with them verbatim. We should not be doing the latter. The former is really where the focus needs to be as a tool in your creation, a tool in editing, but ultimately not going to publish, not going to hit send, until you have really evaluated it from a human lens, because those AI fakes are getting easy to spot for editors. In general, the public is very skeptical about almost anything that you see or you read nowadays. And so, humanity becomes infinitely more important. But still using those tools is also very critical.
Christina Frantom: The coolest analogy that I’ve heard so far and forgive me for this is going to be a car analogy, is that if you give someone who just got their driver’s license a Ferrari, they’re really not going to be able to drive it the same way that someone who’s been driving for 20 years. And AI is definitely a Ferrari. In the hands of a comms professional who’s been using all the other different tools, it’s going to be a very different output than a young person who is trying to meet quotas and just throwing content out there. Not everybody can drive a Ferrari. And I think that that is what we’re seeing as these different pitches are coming up, and the different content is being presented that maybe is all AI-based.
But we’re also the ones building AI, we’re the ones who are putting content out there that AI is dragging from. And so it’s really interesting when I write something, I get asked, did AI write this? And I’m like, No, it just sounds like it did, because I’m an expert level contributor and content creator who’s been doing this in the industry for 20 years. We make the Internet and AI as communicators.
Stacie: It’s interesting to see also how large companies versus small organizations are adopting and pushing forward with AI. Currently, I’m a team of one, and I can use it for a lot of things. When I was helping to launch AI within an organization, there were so many more rules and guidelines protecting intellectual property but we all know if we don’t use it, you’re going to be left behind. And I love some of the very smart and thoughtful ways it fills in the gaps of the strengths that you don’t have and helps automate processes and tasks.
But it requires a human. It is not a replacement for a human. And as communicators, we’re helping to tell that story within an organization, to teach people what it means to write a thoughtful prompt, how to apply some of these tools and I think that’s another place where we can help an organization move forward with the right ways to use it within whatever guardrails your organization has.
Amanda: AI helps my content work a lot harder. If I’m hosting an in-person panel, it’s really easy to record it on your phone and turn into a LinkedIn article or short form video clips. If you just have one good piece of content, you can easily adjust it across platforms.
Matt: We started off talking about the themes of this year. What will be the dominant themes for communicators in 2026?
Stacie: Companies are thinking about structure and how we are going to work with this new technology, and then they’re also wanting to create the structure around their organizations as well.
Christina Frantom: AI as part of your product deliverable is going to be really important, whether it means that you know you’re having to add to your tagline that your team is optimized by AI, or that your products are using AI, but basically having it as a real part of your deliverable, since your customers are all going to be using it. How are you meeting them where they are and incorporating your product or your process into their daily lives? Are you offering them prompts? What other service are you offering to help your customers get what they need as they’re integrating AI into their own lives as well?
Amanda: I think there’s going to be a big increase in B2B creator content. The B2C space, especially fashion and retail and beauty, has shifted so much to influencer content and LinkedIn has been great for us but I think we’ll start seeing more content creation with a business-to-business audience. I think that’s going to be something that will be on the agenda for the next Communications Week. Plus, how tools such as Stacker are redefining the earned media landscape.
Brandi: Culture is the new currency, and we as communicators have got to create it. Everything we do should have culture in some way, shape or form. That’s how people are now consuming content.
Laura: I personally hope that journalism remains a trusted source of information and that media companies are more fairly compensated for what we do. And I say that because I think we’re at this moment in time right now where the entire industry is affected by change — we’re seeing two to three local newspapers closing every week, so we’re seeing information and voices being taken away. What we do as storytellers and journalists is essential. We’re trusted authorities and journalism is critical for our society. It’s critical for democracy. If the stories and the facts aren’t captured by us and by the media, then who will? So, I hope in 2026 we continue to see more people getting behind the incredible work that we do in journalism and in media companies. Because we need people to stand up and speak up for us too.
Christina Furtado: I’d say tear down the marketing walls. It’s about time that we break down those silos between paid, earned and media and events. We know that our audiences seek authentic, consistent messages, regardless of who is behind what they’re engaging with. And in this era of data-fed large language models, we’re all kind of marching towards the same metrics. I’d really love to see us reach across the aisle and work collaboratively with all aspects of marketing to make sure that there really is no opportunity that’s left unexplored, that we’re fostering those deeper connections, and again, we’re working with the goal in mind and not mired in the how or the roles and responsibilities.
Be sure to check the main Communications Week hub for more updates on additional #CommsWeek events in the weeks ahead and join us for the Future of Communications Conference in Austin on Nov. 12-14.
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