WEBINAR: Ipsos Reputation Council 2026 - Life after predictability

What does it take to lead Corporate Affairs and Communications when uncertainty is no longer the exception, but the operating environment?

The communications environment has fundamentally changed. Geopolitical uncertainty, stakeholder fragmentation, regulatory change and the rapid development of AI are reshaping how organisations build trust and manage reputation.

At the same time, the role of Corporate Affairs and Communications is evolving. Leaders are increasingly expected not simply to communicate business decisions, but to bring the outside world in - interpreting stakeholder expectations, identifying emerging risks and opportunities, and helping senior leadership navigate increasingly complex choices.

For the nineteenth sitting of the Ipsos Reputation Council, Ipsos spoke with 200 senior communications and corporate affairs leaders from some of the world’s largest and most influential organisations about how their roles, teams and priorities are changing.

Join Nick G. Adams, Chief Client Director & Reputation Ambassador at Ipsos, in conversation with Ed Whitehead, Advisory Director at Ipsos Corporate Reputation and Editor of the Reputation Council Report 2026, for a 45-minute discussion of the key findings from this year’s report, Life After Predictability.

Using the report’s key findings as the backbone of the conversation, Nick and Ed will explore what sits behind the research, what stood out from the conversations with communications leaders around the world, and what the findings mean in practice for Corporate Affairs and Communications leaders today.

We will explore:

• The changing role of Corporate Affairs and Communications - and why the function is moving closer to business decision-making
• Stakeholder fragmentation and trade-offs - what happens when different audiences increasingly expect different things
• Listening, intelligence and channels - how organisations are understanding and responding to an increasingly complex stakeholder environment
• AI and the future of the function - how AI is changing teams, skills and the way stakeholders discover and interpret information about organisations
• Reputation measurement - what organisations are measuring, how they are measuring it, and how insight can better support business decisions
• The capabilities leaders will need next - from judgement and stakeholder understanding to data literacy, commercial awareness and resilience

The conversation will also explore the report’s five implications for communications leaders: invest in judgement, turn Communications into an intelligence capability, get comfortable with trade-offs, re-skill for the next era of communications, and earn a seat in decision-making rather than simply message-making.

This webinar will be relevant to leaders and professionals working across Corporate Affairs, Corporate Communications, Public Affairs, Reputation, Brand and Sustainability, as well as senior business leaders interested in the changing stakeholder and communications landscape.