Structural shifts in communication departments as a result of AI adoption are currently ‘hardly observable’, according to a new study.
The report from the European Communication Monitor team, published in Corporate Communications: An International Journal, has found that comms teams are only using AI-tools for low-risk tasks such as transcriptions, first-draft copy and content summaries; and that is largely being driven by individuals.
Furthermore, it is being used to ‘enhance not replace’ jobs, helping with repetitive assignments like summarising and translating. This means that many of the people actually using AI are merely evaluating the output of the machine rather than adopting it in a meaningful way.
The report, titled ‘“We're right in the foothills”: the adoption of artificial intelligence in corporate communication departments’, gathered the thoughts of 30 chief comms officers from some of Europe’s biggest companies, including the likes of IKEA and Santander.
The research also found that the most advanced uses of AI remain “strategically limited to experimentation”, which is often carried out from the bottom up.
Writing about the research on Substack, Stephen Waddington, director of Wadds Inc and a PhD researcher at Leeds Business School, said: “AI is helpful, but hardly transformative. Many teams are still in what one CCO called the ‘sandbox stage’, dabbling without disrupting. A few tech-forward companies are further along but for most, adoption is patchy, uneven, and not yet underpinned by a clear strategy. This is a reality check.”
So-called ‘super-users’ are spending time testing tools and sharing their findings with colleagues. This means that AI innovation is not being driven by leaders in many comms departments.
Those leading comms teams must change their mindset, suggests the report, and embrace AI rather than expecting it to replace them. It stated that upskilling is immediately necessary as prompting, evaluating and fact-checking are becoming core tenets of a communications role.
“Too many senior leaders are standing on the sidelines,” said Waddington. “They’re watching the change unfold, not guiding it. In an era where AI raises real questions around ethics, governance and reputation, that’s a strategic risk and a missed opportunity.”
As a result, the report believes that leaders taking responsibility for AI development should be a priority for companies, as individual experimentation could lead to clashes with ethics or compliance. Top-down guidance would offer guardrails that could ensure that AI innovation is done in the right way.
“AI shows up as a shiny new tool but it is fundamentally a cultural issue. It won’t transform comms unless comms leaders start taking ownership of the skills, the systems and the ethics that come with it. There’s no shortcut, you have to lead the climb,” Waddington concluded.