Insights.
Notes on leadership communications, executive voice, and where audiences actually pay attention.
The year the CEO trusted comms, and the year that trust gets tested.
The latest edition of The Briefing, our research note on leadership communications: the studies worth trusting, what they mean in practice, and who moved. 17 August 2026.
Precision beats confidence when leaders talk about AI.
64% of technology professionals think the public would worry more about AI if it understood it fully. The audience for an executive AI statement is already sceptical.
CEO confidence in comms is at a record high.
Only 2% of Fortune 1000 comms leaders report falling chief executive confidence, down from 13%. The next test is the AI claim made in a leader’s name.
The EU AI Act’s label for AI-written comms.
Article 50 applies from 2 August. The exemption for human-reviewed text is narrower than most teams hope.
Follower count barely matters to AI answers.
Half the people AI assistants quote have under 10,000 followers. Expertise, not reach, decides who gets cited.
Where the reach actually lives.
Personal profiles run at 4.7% engagement; company pages at 1 to 2%. The gap is decided by whose name is on the post.
LinkedIn company pages are declining.
Company-page reach has fallen around 64% since 2024. The reach has moved to people, and that changes where communications work sits.
AI answers quote people, not pages.
75% of the LinkedIn content AI assistants cite comes from individual profiles. Being quotable is the job now.
Manage the floor, not the ceiling.
The hardest piece of executive content to get right is never the first one.
Going quiet is not going silent.
Support for corporate stance-taking has fallen from 89% to 55% in three years. Presence is a different question.
One clear voice beats volume.
AI made making more content easy. It did nothing for whether your leader sounds like the same person everywhere.
Nobody owns AI visibility yet.
73% of PR professionals call visibility in AI answers important. 29% say nobody in their organisation owns it.
Most comms teams measure the wrong thing.
69% of corporate affairs functions still report on reputation, not results. Boards fund what they can read in business terms.