- Leadership
Disclaimer: Member posts reflect personal views, not necessarily those of the Page Society.
This blog is part three of a three-part series based on Bob Pearson’s book, “The Compass: How to Navigate AI for the Non-Technologist.”
For years, communications leaders prepared for familiar executive questions.
How are we managing reputation? What is our media strategy? How are employees responding? What is the risk profile around this issue? How do stakeholders perceive the company?
Those questions still matter.
But artificial intelligence is changing the executive agenda — and changing it quickly.
Boards and CEOs are now asking a fundamentally different set of questions, many of which extend far beyond technology itself. Increasingly, they are asking about competitiveness, governance, workforce implications, trust, speed, and organizational readiness.
The communications function will be expected to help answer them.
This is a major shift.
AI is no longer viewed solely as an operational or IT issue. It is rapidly becoming an enterprise-wide strategic issue that touches every aspect of the organization: reputation, policy, regulation, workforce dynamics, stakeholder trust, investor expectations, cybersecurity, and long-term business viability.
As a result, the questions communications leaders hear in the boardroom are becoming more complex and more urgent.
Consider the kinds of questions that are emerging:
Notice something important about these questions.
Most are not technical.
They are strategic, reputational, ethical, organizational, and human questions. They sit squarely within the traditional strengths of communications and corporate affairs leaders.
Yet many organizations are not fully prepared.
One reason is that AI compresses decision timelines. Boards and CEOs are confronting issues evolving at extraordinary speed, often without historical precedent. Leaders are expected to make high-impact decisions amid uncertainty, incomplete information, and rapidly changing stakeholder expectations.
That changes the role of communications.
Our responsibility increasingly includes helping leadership interpret ambiguity, frame emerging risks, anticipate stakeholder reactions, and guide organizational understanding.
Preparation therefore becomes critical.
Communications leaders must build greater AI fluency across their teams and themselves. We do not need to become engineers. But we do need to understand enough to ask intelligent questions, identify reputational implications, recognize governance gaps, and connect technological change to human consequences.
Scenario planning becomes increasingly important.
What happens if an employee leaks sensitive information into a public AI system? What if synthetic media impersonates an executive? What if AI-generated misinformation targets the company? What if regulators demand disclosure standards we are not prepared for? What if investors begin evaluating AI readiness as a core measure of enterprise competitiveness?
The future communications agenda is becoming more proactive, integrated, and strategic.
In The Compass: How to Navigate AI for the Non-Technologist, we emphasize that AI is not simply another technology cycle. It represents a leadership challenge requiring new forms of organizational thinking.
Boards and CEOs understand this instinctively.
That is why the next questions they ask will look very different from the last generation of executive conversations.
The organizations that thrive will be those whose communications leaders are prepared not only to answer those questions — but to anticipate them before they are asked.
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