Organizations know them as strategy and integration, enablement, or operations leaders — and they’re incredibly important.
Ben Kalevitch is managing director of United Minds.
Communications functions have spent years talking about integration. What they haven’t done is invest in the people responsible for making it happen. Across Fortune 500 organizations, a new class of leaders is emerging, part chief of staff, part strategist, part futurist, part transformation executive.
They don’t typically own media relations, employee communications or crisis response. Instead, they own the connective tissue between them. We call them “chief integrators,” though most organizations know them as strategy and integration, enablement, or operations leaders. They represent the most significant lever for organizational transformation, but only if we can solve their most pressing problems.
The authority and resource bind
Despite their growing importance, many chief integrators are asked to drive transformation without the authority to make it stick. They report to the CCO, but the actual work flows through fiefdoms (business units, functional teams, regional leaders) who have no direct reporting relationship to them. This creates a fundamental misalignment: the strategy leader is accountable for integration, while others control the inputs and relationships.
One strategy leader spent months designing a unified metrics framework, only to face resistance from teams convinced their work didn’t fit the model. Another discovered most requests never reached her because teams continued routing work through trusted relationships.
Compounding this is the resource problem. Strategy and integration teams are consistently under-resourced relative to their mandate. Crisis management will always be a line item. Customer communications will always receive resources. But strategy and integration? It’s often positioned as overhead.
Navigating this environment also requires exceptional stakeholder alignment, along with deep listening, political savvy and trust-building. The challenge many face: explaining their mandate in terms that resonate across the function. Without that clarity, their work can easily be perceived as process overhead rather than strategic necessity.
The future: The nerve center
As communications functions mature in their evolution from silos to workflows, the integration function becomes more important, not less.
For example, AI adoption requires cross-functional coordination at scale. It requires deep understanding of crisis, content, media and employee communications workflows in order to automate them. Strategy leaders are the natural owners of this work. And as AI matures, it will commoditize much of what we currently think of as communications execution: content drafting, social adaptation, initial media outreach. The roles that will shrink are those focused on volume. The roles that will grow are the ones that orchestrate: strategy, integration, measurement, relationship.
That’s the nerve center. Chief integrators will manage agentic workflows, coordinate cross-functional teams, prioritize organizational risk and ensure the enterprise speaks with one voice even as AI personalizes communication. Their role will be to automate what can be automated while protecting what remains uniquely human: judgment, relationships and trust.
Risks, recommendations and how to win
Without a strong chief integrator, AI investments will stall. Resource allocation will become increasingly political. Measurement will remain fragmented and disconnected from business outcomes. Crisis response will slow as teams struggle to coordinate across functions. And enterprise narratives will become harder to sustain as communications workflows splinter across channels, teams and technologies.
Our prediction? Within five years, the highest-performing communications organizations will increasingly resemble operating systems rather than departments. Their advantage will not come from producing more content. It will come from coordinating people, processes, data and AI more effectively than their peers.
In that environment, the leaders who design workflows, governance structures, measurement frameworks and AI coordination layers will hold outsized influence. They may not always have the biggest teams or the most visible mandates. But they will increasingly determine how effectively the communications function operates.
For CCOs: Invest in your chief integrator. Give them authority that matches their accountability and position the role as a driver of transformation, not administration. In the years ahead, competitive advantage will come from workflow coordination and AI operationalization. Your chief integrator is your best lever for both.
For aspiring and current chief integrators: Trust is the currency of integration. Remember that your job isn’t to impose process. It’s to create alignment. The fastest way to fail in this role is to show up with a new framework before you’ve earned trust. Spend your first months listening, learning and building relationships across the organization. If you’re being asked to drive enterprise-wide change, make sure your CCO has publicly empowered you to do it.
The communications function is evolving from a collection of specialized teams into an interconnected operating system. And the leader who may matter most is the one sitting at the center of it all, aligning strategy, operations, data, governance and AI to ensure the enterprise moves as one.
Ben Kalevitch and Ellyn Michelak are managing director and senior principal, respectively, at United Minds, an organizational change consultancy that works with communications leaders to transform their functions.
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