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Why Reputation Now Belongs to the Geopolitical Age

Every flight begins the same way: buckle in, expect turbulence, ride it out. For decades, corporate communicators could tell themselves the same story. Crises came and went. The sky smoothed eventually.

Not anymore.

The Ipsos Reputation Council 2025 makes it clear: the seatbelt sign is on, permanently. What’s changed isn’t just the scale of disruption — it’s the role of those charged with explaining it. The Chief Communications Officer is no longer a custodian of the message. They are a geopolitical analyst, a crisis forecaster, a strategist in the war room.

One member said it plainly: “If it’s my top three, it’s geopolitics, geopolitics, geopolitics.”

This is the new reality: communicators are foreign ministers of their companies. Every tariff, every election, every war is not just news — it’s a direct variable in the business equation. The CCO is the one asked to translate it into strategy.

The Age of Strategic Silence

The old corporate playbook said: speak out, show purpose, take a stand. After George Floyd, after Ukraine, the chorus was almost unanimous. Today? Only one in five CCOs still prefer that route.

Silence has become a strategy. Not cowardice, but calculation. Because in a world of fractured politics, what wins you applause in one country sparks boycotts in another.

Here lies the paradox: the more dangerous the external world becomes, the more valuable internal authenticity is. Employees still want to know what their company believes. If silence reigns outside, the voice must echo inside.

ESG Without the Acronym

Three letters once carried moral weight: ESG. Today, they’re as likely to trigger cynicism or political firestorms as applause. Only a third of leaders even think the acronym describes what they actually do.

And yet — beneath the fading label — the principles are embedding deeper into corporate DNA. Climate risk is a financial risk. Workforce equity is a resilience strategy. Supply chain responsibility is survival.

The smart shift is from proclamation to proof. Don’t tell the world how green you are; show the numbers, the actions, the resilience.

AI: From Hype to Risk

Fifty-seven percent of communicators now use AI daily. But fewer than half think they use it meaningfully. Confidence is slipping, not rising.

Why? Because the risks are no longer theoretical. Deepfakes. Hallucinated facts. Ethical guardrails that don’t hold. One CCO captured the threat in a single line: “AI is not coming to take your job. A person who knows how to use AI well is coming to take your job.”

The challenge isn’t adoption. It’s integration. The winners won’t be the fastest. They’ll be the most thoughtful — those who pair human intelligence with machine efficiency, and demand transparency from tools built in black boxes.

The Intimacy of Turbulence

Here’s the most radical finding: 91% of CCOs now have direct access to their CEO. What was once a seat on the side is now a place at the center. In turbulence, intimacy is necessity.

The communicator has become the strategist. The one who doesn’t just deliver the message but shapes the decision. In some companies, the CEO-CCO bond is now the most critical partnership in the business.

The Future Belongs to the Sense-Makers

This is the throughline of the Ipsos report: in a polycrisis, the role of the communicator is not to calm the noise. It is to make sense of it. To decide when to speak, when to stay silent, when to turn jargon into plain speech, when to demand AI explain itself.

The most dangerous mistake would be to treat turbulence as temporary. It isn’t. The seatbelt sign will not turn off. The question isn’t how to wait it out — it’s how to lead while strapped in.

Picture this: a father, miles away from his daughter, sits down to write her an email. He wants to tell her he’s proud, that he misses her, that no matter how far apart they are, she’s never far from his thoughts. But instead of his own words, he clicks on an AI-generated suggestion. The email is polished, efficient, and friendly—but it’s missing something. It’s missing him.

This is the promise and the peril of AI in our communication as the Guardian article suggests. It can make our words smoother, more refined, and even more effective. But in the process, it might also make them less personal, less honest, less human. And that’s not just a personal loss—it’s a societal one.

The Power and Peril of Polished Words

Language is more than just a tool. It’s how we connect. It’s how we say, “I’m here for you,” or, “I understand.” It’s how we challenge the status quo, how we imagine a better future. But when we hand over the reins of our words to AI, we risk losing the very soul of what makes communication powerful.

AI tools that shift tone, suggest phrasing, or rewrite entire sentences promise to make communication easier. And for some, they do. They help people navigate tricky professional emails or find the right words in difficult conversations. But let’s be honest: what they give in convenience, they often take away in authenticity.

Think about it: when everyone’s tone is smoothed out, when every email sounds like it came from the same polite template, what happens to the quirks and the character that make each of us unique? What happens to the emotion that gives our words their weight?

A World of Diminished Nuance

AI doesn’t just change how we communicate—it changes how we think about communication itself. It encourages us to value efficiency over effort, perfection over personality. And over time, it can create a kind of linguistic monotony, where every email, every text, every post starts to sound the same.

This isn’t just about tone. It’s about trust. If we can no longer tell when someone’s words are truly their own, how can we believe in the sincerity of their message? How can we feel the warmth of their intentions or the depth of their emotions?

The Larger Picture: What We Risk Losing

The stakes are bigger than a few emails. They’re about culture. They’re about community. AI tools often reflect the biases of their creators, favoring certain ways of speaking while sidelining others. They flatten out the richness of regional dialects, the poetry of cultural idioms, the cadence of a story told just right.

And let’s not ignore the generational impact. For young people growing up with these tools, writing isn’t just a skill—it’s a way to discover who you are. It’s a way to wrestle with ideas, to find your voice, to stumble and grow and try again. If AI takes over that process, what kind of thinkers, what kind of communicators, are we raising?

Reclaiming Our Voice

Now, let me be clear: I’m not here to demonize AI. These tools have their place. They can help people find the confidence to express themselves, and they can bridge gaps in understanding. But we cannot let convenience replace connection. We cannot let technology, as remarkable as it is, rob us of what makes us human.

We need to ask ourselves tough questions: How do we use these tools wisely? How do we ensure they amplify our voices rather than replace them? How do we preserve the messy, beautiful, complicated ways we connect with one another?

Because at the end of the day, what we say—and how we say it—matters. It matters in our relationships. It matters in our communities. It matters in how we move the world forward.

So, let’s not settle for a future where our words are smooth but soulless, polished but hollow

Let’s insist on a future where AI serves our humanity, not the other way around. Let’s fight for a world where every email, every text, every conversation carries with it the full weight of our sincerity, our individuality, our hope.

And let’s remember: the most powerful thing about communication isn’t how perfect it is. It’s how real it is. It’s the imperfections, the pauses, the heartfelt effort, that remind us we’re not just speaking—we’re connecting. And that’s something no AI can ever replace.