CommsCon catchup: Want to survive the AI revolution? Make sure you’re in the ‘trust’ business

Session

The New Power Seat: CRO Over CMO

Date

25 March 2026, Crown Sydney

On stage

Peter Wilkinson – co-founder, Wilkinson Group

Communications crisis expert Peter Wilkinson opened Mumbrella’s 2026 CommsCon conference in Sydney with a rather dire prediction for marketers.

“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 the modern media world, a company’s ability to foresee reputational risk and act becomes the defining factor in its success.

“The core of my argument is what is for sale is trust. We still all have to sell, of course, that’s not going anywhere … but the pathway to sales is shifting.”

Wilkinson said that AI is already being used by the lay person to research the pros and cons of different products and services without marketing spin.

“Good corporate affairs practice gives us good governance, good policies, good knowledge of risk, strong culture, good ethics, good behaviour, real news, not fake news, all of which build reputation and trust, which ultimately sells products.”

Wilkinson said in the near future he believes “there will be a massively reduced role for marketing”.

He explained: “There’s nothing an advertisement or tactless influencer can do to beat AI when it comes to your choice of vitamins, your choice of telephone company, or your choice of bank … My belief is that in an AI world, there is way less room left for marketing. We must all be in the trust business. That’s how we survive the AI revolution.”

Listen to the entire session in the player below.

AI summary of session transcript in 400 words

Peter Wilkinson, a veteran journalist and corporate affairs specialist, argues that by 2030, the Chief Reputation/Corporate Affairs Officer will outrank the CMO as AI fundamentally reshapes the communications industry.

Wilkinson opens by predicting dramatic workforce compression — a team of 20 will shrink to six or eight, and an internal team of five will become one or two. Juniors will be replaced by AI, leaving only senior specialists who can blend corporate affairs, marketing, consumer PR, and research into one role.

His central thesis: what is for sale is trust. As consumers increasingly use AI to make purchasing decisions — comparing phone plans, choosing banks, evaluating vitamins — brand advertising and emotional marketing become less influential. AI cuts straight to hard data: reviews, pricing, ethics, governance, and reliability. Wilkinson argues that corporate affairs professionals — trained in truth, facts, risk, governance, and crisis management — are best positioned to shape the reputation signals that AI will surface and act upon.

He illustrates this with Optus’s Triple Zero crisis, where a failure of governance and risk management (corporate affairs’ domain) led to deaths — something, he contends, a well-functioning corporate affairs function might have prevented. By contrast, marketing-led organizations that prioritize sales over governance are repeatedly caught in crises: Optus, PwC’s tax office scandal, Nine’s sexual harassment case, and the tobacco industry all share the same pattern — revenue pressure crowding out ethical oversight.

Wilkinson also challenges the idea that AI can’t replace empathy and creativity. He believes AI, trained on thousands of human experiences, can actually guide empathetic communication better than most individuals can. The one thing AI cannot replicate, he says, is genuine personal relationships built on trust.

He introduces a three-part survival framework for the AI age: Truth, Trust, and Transparency — with truth and transparency as the foundations that build trust. These, he argues, are inherently corporate affairs skills, not marketing ones.

Wilkinson closes with a call to action for everyone in communications — regardless of discipline — to place trust at the center of their work. His personal AI survival guide rests on five behaviors (excellence, nimbleness, creativity, honest conversations, and constant learning) and those three core pursuits. The question, he concludes, isn’t whether this shift is happening — it’s whether communicators will position themselves to ride the wave or be left behind.