With more and more senior communications and corporate affairs professionals supporting their CEOs and leadership teams at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the event has become an important venue for critical conversations around the issues facing both corporate and those responsible for managing reputations.

This year was no exception, with geopolitical issues, the re-valuation of DEI and ESG, and the impact of AI all generating plenty of discussion. So once again PRovoke Media—in partnership with IBM and Weber Shandwick—brought together leading communications and corporate affairs professionals to talk about the lessons they had learned over three or four days in the Alps.

Participants were:

  • Jonathan Adashek, SVP, marketing and communications at IBM
  • Rochelle Ford, CEO, Page
  • Abhinav Kumar, global CMO of TCS
  • Jane Lawrie, global head of corporate affairs, KPMG
  • Brian Lott, chief communications officer, Mubadala
  • Greg Prager, head of EMEA corporate practice, Weber Shandwick
  • Ramiro Prudencio, partner, global director of communications, McKinsey & Company
  • Nidhi Sinha, executive director, public relations and public sector communications, BCG
  • Charlotte West, vice president, global corporate communications at Lenovo

 Key takeaways:

  • “It's our job to make sure the business keeps its license to operate. That can be terrifying right now.”—Charlotte West.
  • Communications leaders need to train their people, their teams, their technology to be adaptable.
  • Corporate character is as important as ever. Communicators need to ask: “What are we here for? What's our mission? What do we really value?”
  • The challenges CEOs are facing today do not revolve around issues they are familiar with. “These aren't things they learned in business school.”
  • “We shouldn't be frightened of, and our team shouldn't be frightened of, the practical examples of how AI can help.”—Jane Lawrie

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Holmes: I want to start, if I may, by referring back to last year's roundtable. I know that seems like a lifetime ago. But I think it was Sarah Campbell Donia of Randstad who said she had never felt such a heavy burden as a CCO, and I wondered how we all feel now. I'm assuming nobody feels like the burden has gotten lighter, but what has changed for you in terms of the issues that you're being asked to deal with.

Charlotte West: You're right, the burden is great and probably greater than ever. There's a burden because increasingly every single person in the organization is looking for comms to make a decision, advise, give a perspective on something. I think that there's an anxiety in business now of people not wanting to make a mistake or say the wrong thing or not toe the corporate line. So I think that anxiety across functions is then bottled through us.

And they come to us with things they would never have come to comms with years ago, so suddenly there's a sort of surge of work that's coming our way because we're expected to be the advisors. That's great on the one hand, but sort of unmanageable on the other. So, it's trying to get that balance right, making sure you can give a direction: this is what you should say top line, this is the key message.

And then, I think we have to ask why are we here, why are we in the jobs that we do, what is our role and purpose? The way that I look at it is, is it's our job to make sure the business keeps its license to operate. That can be terrifying right now. You look at the headlines this morning, what's happened overnight, what’s changed in the business environment, the political environment. It often feels like I spend more time talking to my peer in government relations than I do anyone else in my life.

Brian Lott: More and more I feel less of a fireman and more of a weatherman because of the unpredictability week by week, and the business is looking to comms to help them navigate all of these issues. 2024 was astonishing in how many events business people had to prepare for. You know, we’re going to the US, what do I say, what can’t I say, who can I get a photo with, who can I take a photo with, who can I not?

Abhinav Kumar: Can I offer a slightly more positive and optimistic take? The burden is heavier and heavier. But you know what happens when you get a burden on you, is you build muscles. I think comms teams are more powerful than they've ever been after facing a decade of permanent crises, dealing with issues, deciding whether to weigh in on an issue or not, supporting their CEOs, supporting the C-suite, getting into sustainability, getting into technology change, you name it, right?

On of the big themes we’re talking about at Davos this year is the perpetually adaptive enterprise. What it means in simple terms is that the only strategy a company can have— you can't forget about AI strategy or this strategy or that—but you have to be able to adapt quickly at any point of time.

You need to prepare your system, your teams, your talent, your technology to be ready to do that because as Charlotte was saying, you don't know when 200 executive orders are going to drop overnight, and change the landscape for your business, so you need to be able to deal with it.

As a result, we come out stronger as a profession.

Jane Lawrie: I was going to echo your optimism because I was thinking the same. I actually feel quite optimistic. Because honestly, now is our moment as a function, and I think that's really exciting.

But I think our role is not just to message, which is really important, but also to provide the insights and the context so that the business makes the right decisions and doesn't move away from things that maybe three years ago we thought were so important. Three years ago in Davos, everything was ESG. You couldn't move, for people talking about ESG. You look now, and it’s a lot quieter.

Now we're all moving towards AI, and I think AI is something that we really need to think about as a function. But our role in AI is how do we make sure that the businesses are doing it in a way that's responsible, trusted. So I think it's a really exciting time.

Ramiro Prudencio: Without a doubt, this is our moment in the sense that what we do becomes increasingly important. On the question of adaptability, I think, let me put a layer on that, which is, the business needs to be adaptable. How do you stay true to values? Because a lot of the questions we deal with are not necessarily about the business.

There’s adaptability to market change, but we're thinking about, talking about adaptability to cultural change, political change, right? There are contrasts between what our customers or clients may feel and our own people, who we have taught to believe that the organization's values are so important. And so how do you adapt without undermining your values?

And obviously, how do you work across leadership—because I don't think this is solely something that comms can address—to be able to drive consensus. And how do you do it quickly because so many of these decisions you can't take two three weeks to make a decision. So ow do you stay true to values yet adapt to these changes?

PH: Let me ask you a question about that, because we've alluded to the fact that we’ve stopped talking about ESG. Certainly DEI is being treated as toxic by a whole bunch of companies. Nd I think we might have to take some of the blame for that, But you mentioned values. And I'm interested in that because I've heard people say, we don't want to talk about ESG or DEI or purpose anymore. Are we getting to the point where we don't want to talk about values anymore?

BL: If values are tied to the business and if they're not culturally adaptive values, but if they're things that have always been the foundation of the business and that underline how we go to market, I think that’s a safe harbor.

Rochelle Ford: Well, we have the Page model and we call it corporate character, which I think is more important now than ever. Your mission, your values, your purpose, who you are at the core, will determine how you communicate and how to be an authentic enterprise.

If you look at the organizations that have dropped their DEI statements, and you look to their values, they say we care about our people. So if you care about your people, then you're going to be inclusive.

We have to focus on that center. What are we here for? What's our mission? What's our purpose? What do we really value? What do we really believe? And then how do we align those beliefs with business practices?

AK: On that point about taking care of your people, Brand Finance launched their Brand Guardianship Index yesterday in which they rate how CEOs are seen as custodians of their brands. This is how CEOs are seen by the markets. Investors, market analysts do this rating. Last year, the number one factor was sustainability. That's dropped down to number five. The number one this year is does this CEO care for their people.

What I would say is, values don't change no matter what happens. We fight for values in the company, but we also have to contextualize them, their relevance to a new generation. We did a values campaign in which we did a survey of our employees, particularly the young ones, to see what do they feel about the values. Do they feel the organization lives up to its values? Do they feel their supervisor lives up to the values? We’re playing the findings back to the leadership team, so we're definitely playing a role in that front.

JL: You said something about how we might have to carry some of the blame for the demise of ESG?

PH: I think the corporate embrace of ESG and DEI was really about business imperative, business necessity, but a lot of companies made it sound like they were taking sides in a political argument, supporting liberal ideas, and I think when the backlash to that came along, a lot of communicators weren’t prepared for it. It was our job to see that coming, and a lot of us didn’t, and I think that hurt us. Greg has some research…

Greg Prager: The research shows a decline in the confidence that CEOs have in their communications leaders, although it doesn't give the reason. And I don't think it relates to all corporate affairs or cons leaders, but yes, there's a perceived disconnect from the business.

It comes back to your question about values. The job of corporate affairs leaders, is to bring reputation into the overall decision-making process, into business decisions. It's not to drive business decisions solely based on reputation, solely based on values. When you over-index on this stuff, it can become detrimental from a business perspective. So you can’t lose perspective that risk and reputation are just one factor in business continuity.

I think maybe the second piece is that the challenges that CEOs are facing today are not traditional topics or roles for CEOs. These aren't things they learned in business school. They grew up learning about strategy and finance. Geopolitics is something that's incredibly difficult and is a lot of times out of their control. Misinformation, out of their control. And so that lack of comfort on their side, I think translates throughout the organization to nervousness and lack of trust.

Jonathan Adashek: I’ve noticed since I took responsibility for marketing as well, I think comms teams are usually not as close to the business in terms of the actual monetary outcomes that we all need to drive. It goes both ways. Marketing does not understand how you protect the reputation but comms doesn’t always understand the nuances of what drives a pipeline, what drives revenue. And therefore, comms doesn’t have that lens as top of mind as somebody who lives in the dollars day by day.

I think that is an issue we have as a profession.

Nidhi Sinha: A couple of observations. One is, when CEOs are losing confidence in their comms teams, many times at the core of it was that you have a strategy problem and you're trying to solve it with a communications solution. When people say, let's put out a press release you have to say well, sure, but are you willing to do the thing that you want that the press to write about?

When you look at effective leadership teams, you will find a pattern of opinions being sought out at the right moments, and then that collective counsel informing the strategy.

Second, what’s your culture day-to-day? This is important when you consider the pressures of societal issues. When you remove the wrappings and trappings of planned talking points, do you have leaders who are emotionally intelligent enough to give an answer that is informed and empathetic, and also sounds like how people normally talk authentically in your organization?

PH: So we’re here talking about the political and the geopolitical issues, but for me, the geopolitical conversation has been more muted here than I had expected it to be.

JL: Somebody said to me yesterday, which I thought was quite interesting, that there have been two different types of conversation. The organized events, at least on the Promenade are very much about AI. But the bilaterals also focused on the economy and political landscape.  For example, what is the pressure on the EU right now,? So I think those conversations have been taking place, but not so much on panels.[JL1] 

AK: I think in every bilateral meeting we’ve been having, every reception, people are talking about the geopolitics, the economic sentiment, all of that. But they’re not necessarily talking about it in the media interviews or the public sessions.

CW: It's part of every conversation, even if it’s just an undertone. You can't come here and not have conversations about politics and geopolitics because that's the whole point of this event in a sense, that's why it's here, it's to bring the world together, business and government and NGOs.

JL: But I think everybody's sort of keeping their powder dry, thinking carefully about the right actions to take, and I think rightly so.

GP: A CEO once told me the whale who comes up for air first gets harpooned, right? And I think that's where we are now.

The counsel that many gave CEOs in recent years, which was go out there, speak about this, that was very different than what we said for a long time, which is keep your company out of controversy.

PH: We've already agreed, I think, that we've over-indexed on purpose and some other things a little bit as a profession—maybe in the consumer space in particular, which is not the people in this room, maybe. But do you think that we at the same time failed to speak about the things that really matter to our people, like economic inequality and opportunity and how AI is almost going to impact their lives in a big way.

JL: The people sitting around this table, we are slightly more B-to-B corporate, but I do think there's something different for the consumer brands, they have to speak to their consumer and think about what's relevant for their consumer.

We maybe got to the point that CEOs were going out and speaking about more topics than in the past. And I think where they stepped into the political arena they did get pushed back.

But I think consumer brands could have a more challenging role, because they have to speak to the consumer about what the consumer cares about. And I think that could be challenging or even divisive.

CW: Lenovo is a B-to-B brand and a consumer brand, so we have both. But I think in those pure consumer companies, maybe marketing is leading that push to do a lot of that stuff versus comms. So when you talk about the backlash on ESG, I think a lot of it has come because it's the wrong people driving the decision. It's not the people that have got the kind of outside-in perspective that can bring some balance to it, like comms people, versus marketers. That then creates a problem for the organisation.

PH: in a rational world, corporate communications would have a veto power on every single marketing campaign.

AK: I don't think there's a single company where comms has that kind of veto.

PH: No, but it should be true.

CW: In some instances you can catch it before it happens. If you've got the right checks and balances in place, and the right people in teams and meetings and that can happen. But usually you're tidying up the mess after. But if you’re big global organization, you can’t see everything that’s being done everywhere.

PH: We’ve been doing some reporting on crises in 2024 and so many of them were international subsidiaries, in far flung places, saying and doing things that were not what the global company would have said.

But we have to talk about AI, before this conversation comes to an end. It’s been two-thirds of the program, I think, had AI in the title. You walk down the Promenade and all the shop fronts are AI messaging. Do we all feel smarter about AI than we were before we arrived?

BL: I think it's gone in a year from the ether to a much more grounded discussion on what is AI, how is it going to improve business performance? What are the foundational elements you see on the infrastructure of AI? What are the various applications? How long is this going to take? What is the real impact of jobs? Is it something that's intimidating or is it something that more and more companies are welcoming and being a little more steely-eyed about? I feel like it's a more grounded and realistic discussion than it was a year ago.

And I've heard ten different flavors of AI instead of the one harmonious unifying element that's going to save us all or destroy us all.

JL: I would agree. I wouldn't say I feel more educated but Davos has prompted a couple of thoughts about how you help the business navigate using AI to bring everybody along? That's the number one issue, getting those responsible guardrails in place, making sure it's trusted, sustainablebut making sure it’s sustainable

And then I think the other side of it is, thinking about the comms function, I think there's a lot more we can do there. We shouldn't be frightened of, and our team shouldn't be frightened of, the practical examples of how AI can help. There's a great panel where the speaker was saying that coming to Davos, all of their briefing materials, the first draft was generated by AI. That doesn’t take the role away from our teams, but it gives them more time to add real value and think more strategically where they have time.

And I thought, of course. It makes sense.

GP: One of the more interesting things I've seen on AI this week, I went to the Anthropic CEO's talk, and his view of the future of work really opened my eyes to many of the challenges we will face beyond the technology itself.

But for me, the big challenge is the internal change management component. How do you integrate people into it? For comms people, how are you going to train and develop your teams to grow into senior leaders in the future when a lot of the tasks that they traditionally did are being taken over. And more broadly, when you look at the organizations beyond comms, how are you upskilling people?

And then, on a political and economic and social scale, how do we prepare for this next disruption and this next piece of greater inequity between those who have and those who will be left behind? That, to me, that human piece was the eye-opening piece this week.

AK: Physically and optically you still see AI every five meters you walk down the Promenade. But I think if you compare it to last year, both the exuberance and the fear around AI, that's all dialed down. And it's a lot more grounded and practical about what does it mean for my industry? What does it mean for skill and talent?

And of course in our case, in some of the CMO and CCO gatherings, we're exchanging ideas on what's being utilized, what's really worked, what's not worked. I think it's a more grounded conversation.

JA: This skill endpoint is crucial. We all have to be upskilling our people, not just to use it, but to operate in an organization that has it. It changes the process, it changes the way you interact, it changes the expectations of people. And you need to have everybody, you can't have some part of the team opt in and some part of the team opt out because then you've got a bifurcated work process and it just doesn't work.

RP: You need to look across the organization and ask how many processes do you have. And if you find you've got, just for argument's sake, 100 processes, and then you start to dig in and you see only five people out of 100 use one particular process. Like on any team some people are on iMessage and some are on What’s App and someone uses Slack and there are geographic differences, and a generational divide too.

You have to make it the fundamental on which everybody is trained.

RF: I do think it's an important point when it comes to AI, that we have to be able to create understanding about what we mean. We're not trying to replace you, we want to upskill you. We want all of us to embrace the AI so we can increase our efficiency. Not to replace humans but it's a different skill set that may be needed.

And going back to the values and the purpose of the organization and what our role is, we have to be part of that change management with the appropriate language that leads to understanding of how AI is going to help us to deliver on the promise of better product.

NS: I think what's been really fascinating this year uniquely is media interviews. Ten percent is on the record AI stuff, 40% is on background in politics, and then 50% of it is anxiety from the journalist about losing his or her job…

JL: I think we all saw the Edelman Trust Barometer and another decline in trust in the media. But, you know, as an industry, when we think about communications, we actually do need the media to be fact-based, accurate, you know, trustworthy.

PH: That's another 45-minute discussion, right? But the media are dynamic, and while some traditional media are losing readers, there are all kinds of interesting alternatives, independent media.

Unfortunately, we don’t have time to talk about what’s happening with the media, but I do want to thank everybody for a lively discussion about the communications function. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.