Many chief marketing officers regard their communications leaders and teams as a cost centre or service agency. What if there's much more value in the comms teams? What if the comms team is now in prime position to help CMOs quantum leap?

With AI, the landscape has shifted. Leads now arrive via LLMs and CMOs are asking the same question: how do we show up in AI search?

We’ve learned how to work search engines, and SEO, keywords, and rankings are part of a now familiar toolkit. AI search is a different animal. Some searches don't return links at all. Others do. The rules are constantly changing and being written in real time.

AI search from a comms perspective.

Take the traditional PESO model and look at the "E" which stands for earned coverage. Earned is what's rising in AI search visibility. More weight, more reliability, more signal. That's because earned coverage has been through someone else's filter. A journalist, an editor, a credible third party has vetted the story and chosen to publish it. AI models are, quite sensibly, weighting that differently from a piece of owned content you wrote about yourself.

If earned media is becoming a primary driver of AI visibility, comms isn't a downstream activity you tag onto the end of a campaign. It's core to whether anyone finds you at all. The comms team delivers your earned coverage.

Storytelling as a quantum leap skill.

A recent Wall Street Journal piece flagged storytelling as the number one skill leaders are hiring for. That's music to the ears of any seasoned comms professional, because storytelling is what we've always done.

When everyone can generate content at infinite scale, the differentiator isn't volume. It's quality, narrative, and judgement. Humans write goosebumps and capture emotions, something AI hasn’t quite learned yet. The question for CMOs is whether you're using your comms leader's storytelling skills strategically, or asking them to churn out collateral?

AI as opportunity, not threat.

Marketing has moved faster than comms in turning AI into a productivity hack. The use cases across customer journeys, workflows, personalisation and pipeline acceleration are well-developed.

Comms is catching up, and in some ways has a harder brief. Comms tends to sit at the ethical edge of AI adoption, advising on how the organisation uses AI, what it tells  

customers and employees about that use, and what the guardrails look like. At the same time, Comms has to work out how to use AI for its own benefit.

One use case I keep coming back to is the internal knowledge bank. When you're drafting a message to employees, being able to pull up what the organisation said on the same topic a year ago, or three years ago, is a quiet form of magic. It builds consistency. It holds the narrative. It stops an organisation contradicting itself. And it makes comms teams’ lives much easier.

That's not a productivity hack. It's a strategic asset.

Quality and validation as the antidote to sludge.

There is a clear tension. AI makes it easy to produce content at scale. Easy, and tempting. The result is a flood of mediocre copy filling every channel, a deluge of AI sludge nobody wants to read.

Comms has a vital role to play on the other side of that equation. Validating sources. Cross-checking facts. Making sure what goes out is actually true, and not a polished hallucination. That discipline doesn't come naturally to a speed-first marketing culture, but it's exactly what comms leaders have been trained to do.

Content is king, always has been. The basics still apply. We must think critically and ask the questions: does this meet the objective, does it land with the audience, is it relevant enough to be worth someone's time? AI doesn't change those questions. It just makes it easier to answer them badly and doing so at pace.

Trust as the golden thread.

When I interviewed more than 20 chief communications officers for the ‘Chief Communications Officers at Work’ book, one theme surfaced in every single conversation. Trust.

Trust with the CEO. Trust with the executive team. Trust with employees, customers, regulators, journalists, investors, etc. Trust built consistently and patiently over years.

Why does this matter to CMOs? Because trust is the currency that makes everything else work. A comms leader who has built trust internally can walk into a crisis room and move straight to action, straight to what we say, how we say it, what we do. No time wasted establishing credibility. The trust is already banked.

In a world of misinformation, geopolitical instability, and AI-generated noise, a trust capital is more valuable than ever and it is built largely through the comms function.

CMO, CCO, or CMCO? Where does comms sit?

There's no one right answer. Some organisations have a chief communications officer reporting directly to the CEO. Others fold comms under the CMO. A growing number are appointing a chief marketing and communications officer with one seat and two remits.

What matters more than the line on the org chart is the outcome. A CMO who understands what comms can do will bring the comms lead into the room early on transformations, crises, M&A, reputational risk, organisational change, and more. They will bring in comms before the decisions have been made, not afterwards. That's when comms becomes a strategic partner rather than a service function.

If you pull in your comms leader to write the press release after the decision's been made, you're leaving enormous value on the table.

Using comms as a gear shifter.

Your comms leader has skills you may not be making the most of. Across the CCO interviews, three kept coming up: critical thinking, curiosity, and courage. The ability to see around corners, to ask the uncomfortable question, and to discuss the multiple consequences and outcomes of messaging around decisions.

Most CMOs under pressure to hit number don't necessarily instinctively reach for those skills which is understandable. In the moment you may need more demand generation, better conversions, improved messaging or content, but that’s an incomplete picture.

The CMOs who will navigate this next phase well are the ones who treat their comms leader as a strategic peer. Not a cost centre or service agency. A partner with a different lens, different instincts, and a skillset that grows more valuable the more turbulent things get.

Pull them into the strategy conversations early. Use their judgement on what to say, what not to say, and when to stay quiet. Let their storytelling shape the narrative, not just the press release.

CMOs under siege have a secret weapon sitting in the team. The question is whether they're using it to its fullest potential.

About the CCO book:

Chief Communications Officers at Work: Trusted Advisors That Build, Influence, and Protect Organizational Reputations

Featuring interviews with 23 top Chief Communications Officers, the stories in this book provide clarity and insight into their paths to success as well as strategies for ensuring their work contributes to business performance and the bottom line. It provides a compass for driven communications professionals interested in progressing in their communications career and ideas for senior communications and marketing executives who want to build, influence and protect their company’s reputation in an ever-increasingly volatile world.

Bio:

About Tabita Andersson

Author of ‘Chief Communications Officers at Work’ Tabita Andersson is a senior communications, brand, and marketing leader in the B2B industry. For over 25 years, she has worked in-house, with agencies, and as a freelancer to provide communications support, advice, and leadership to build and protect company brand and reputation. She is passionate about the role communications play in helping a business thrive and how it can help C-level executives connect the dots inside and outside their organisation.

To read her book grab a copy on Amazon or Apress.