Last year, I designed a communications company built for 2030. I believed back then that we would get smashed by AI.
This included all professional services, including corporate affairs, marketing, journalism, publicists, and research and analysis.

Back then, people said, my new company wouldn’t be needed that soon. Now, I am transitioning to it.

This is my thinking.

Shape of things to come

That 2030 consultancy or in-house team will not be pure corporate affairs, marketing, publicist, or research/analysis. It will be a blend of all, grappling with editorial, advertising, sales, reputation, and more.

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And the person at the top won’t carry the title of CMO or Communications Director. She/he will be Chief Information and Data Officer – a new skill (CIDO).

Organisations won’t want scores of people learning the ropes: they want bright people with irreplaceable human qualities, who can step in at a very high level, very quickly.

When a law firm or a publisher or a communications company can save all of its content – stories, notes, research, contracts, editing rules, etc – and use Claude to produce new work from its own templates, in seconds, what is the use of having scores of middle-ranking people, or people operating on cruise-control?

The New Gold is not the fancy degree or immaculate CV: it might be a work ethic, imagination, excellent people skills, leadership potential or noticeable critical thinking skills.

The new “blended” company I am transitioning to will have a kite-shaped structure. A person at the top, then some senior practitioners, all with excellent high-level skills, nimble, and creative. Some of them will have a senior understudy, also skilled.

They will be supported by AI agents and templates, able to produce in seconds what now takes hours, including most of the scheduling and admin.

For instance, need a campaign strategy on a new initiative? Sure, let’s have five versions, with varying risk tolerance, creative, budgets and outcomes. The drafts will take less than a minute, to be reviewed/edited by our senior practitioner. Redrafts might take another minute. What took weeks, costing tens of thousands of dollars, now takes a day, costing a days’ work for one person.

Need a press release? Why not have eight versions instead, from tabloid to academic, each tailored to a specific journalist’s pet likes? Easy, in just 30 seconds, on letterhead, perfect grammar and layout, ready for final approval. And eight happy journalists.

The company might have one junior, a bit like a medical graduate doing a hospital residency, prepared to undergo intense and highly structured learning to get to expertise in one area as quickly as possible.

Now consider the ramifications on a consultancy or internal team of say 20. A company that size requires quite a complex structure: a CEO, maybe a COO or COS, a couple of people in finance, and perhaps three teams doing the work. A lot of time is necessarily spent on internal meetings.

In the new world it comes down to six or seven practitioners, one boss (our CIDO), and with the reduced size and simpler structure, one part-time admin (accounts, IT, HR/legal). Two-thirds of the jobs have vanished, and far less internal comms.

You could almost do this now. And yes, it raises a host of scary issues, briefly addressed below.

What we actually sell

But, first, I think there is more. Consider how this blend of corporate affairs, marketing, publicity and research/analysis integrates. To do that consider what we are selling.

My core argument is that what is for sale is trust.

Yes, we all still have to sell products — that’s not going away. After all, at its simplest, all organisations have a skill or product to sell, and a communicator’s job is to communicate that.

But the pathway to sales is shifting. It won’t run through marketing. It will run through corporate affairs, the craft responsible for trust.

Think about our own behaviour right now, in 2026. When we want to optimise our phone bill at home, we ask AI for the best deal (or we should 😅 ) — on price, reliability, green credentials, on reviews.

We don’t even need to know the companies, so building brand identity is unimportant.

At Optus, “Yes” means nothing to me. The failure of the 000 emergency call system or a rude person in a call centre who can’t solve a problem — that matters enormously.

By 2030, or sooner, this will be even more true. When our mobile monthly invoice comes around, our agent may recommend changing provider, or simply make the decision for us, without asking, having already assessed trustworthiness.

Good corporate affairs practice gives us strong governance, policies, culture, ethics, and behaviour, and real news not fake news — all of which build reputation and trust, ultimately selling products.

So our new “blended” company will be vastly different from the creative agencies we have grown up with. It will be lean, nimble, and more focused on hard deliverables than elegant and beautiful concepts.

What about that host of scary issues? Well, perhaps there is an upside. As a lawyer colleague of mine mused on a similar future for law firms, “Can AI, which threatens to erode the very foundations of professional services, prove a blessing in disguise?”

“Perhaps the minds once captured by professional services might be freed.”

“Freed not to polish another clause in another contract, but to invent, to create, to take risks that expand creativity and the productive frontier rather than optimise those things within current limits.”

This column originally appeared, in a different form, as a Linkedin post. Peter Wilkinson is chair of Wilkinson Butler and a crisis communications expert.