‘A massively reduced role for marketing’: Peter Wilkinson on the brave new comms world
Peter Wilkinson opened CommsCon with a divisive argument on the future of communications
Communications crisis expert Peter Wilkinson has opened Mumbrella’s 2026 CommsCon conference in Sydney by fortelling a massively reduced role for marketing in the new world.
In a provocative opening presentation, Wilkinson argued that — because of AI — the role of corporate affairs and reputation management will soon matter a lot more to companies than marketing and advertising.
“The leader of the 2030 company won’t be marketing, advertising or research. It will be corporate affairs,” he declared to a packed room of communications professionals.
Wilkinson’s main argument was that in a world where journalism is driven by traffic and not truth, and where advertising claims can easily be debunked by AI, a company’s ability to foresee reputational risk and act becomes the defining factor in success. To help illustrate his point, he noted a number of corporate communications nightmares he believes could have been avoided with this new structure.
Corporate affairs is marketing. It falls under “Promotion” in the four Ps. Having said that, I agree AI will prompt brands to switch budget from programmatic to PR . But the brief will be “get my content on AI apps”. A good contact book will not be enough to capture this business. PR agencies will need to convince clients they have the technical skill to “pitch” to LLMs.
Except that PR is not corporate affairs…
Spot on Peter Wilkinson, your focus on the importance of building consumers’ trust as they increasingly resort to an AI driven search function makes it much harder to influence buying decisions with marketing’s traditional tool box.
As head of a corporate affairs function for 15 years, at one of the Big Four professional services organisations, my corporate affairs role with its focus on risk and reputation management, was much more closely aligned in the executive team with leadership, legal and risk management than sales and marketing.
Peter’s warning is prescient and will definitely influence how leadership uses our expertise in an AI dominated future.