A recent Boston Consulting Group study suggests many corporate communications leaders may be viewing AI from the wrong perspective.
BCG found that 54% of Corporate Affairs and Communications leaders focus on short-term productivity gains from GenAI, while only 22% are working on building future strategic capabilities.
This makes sense. Communications teams have immediate tasks, and AI can help them work faster. It can draft press releases, create social media posts, summarize research, and help teams produce more content with fewer resources.
But if communications teams focus only on how AI helps them internally, they might miss a bigger change happening outside their department.
Their Target Audiences Are Also Using AI
And they’re using it to find companies, investigate their capabilities, compare alternatives, and decide which organizations appear to possess genuine expertise. That perspective changes the communications challenge.
As AI makes it easier for any organization to appear knowledgeable, the real advantage is no longer about producing more content. Instead, it is about making your organization’s real expertise visible, credible, and easy to judge.
Many companies already possess this raw material. It lies in their unique methods, collected data, diagnostic tools, decision-making processes, research, repeated patterns, and the judgment their experienced people have built over years of work.
Many of these assets have never been seen as valuable for communications or business development.
This is the bigger AI opportunity that communications leaders are missing.
The Real Shortage is Unique Expertise That’s Worth Sharing
This means communications leaders can do much more than just decide how AI fits into their daily work.
They can help their organizations find valuable knowledge within the business, turn it into credible and visible assets, and use those assets to build reputation and support growth.
This process starts with collecting what the organization really knows, turning the best ideas into useful, unique assets, sharing them with prospects, referral sources, journalists, and AI systems, and making them part of business development.
Is Corporate Communications Missing the Bigger AI Opportunity?
It is not wrong for corporate communications to use AI to make content production more efficient. The real mistake is thinking that content production is the main communications challenge AI has created.
The bigger change is what’s happening outside the communications department.
AI now helps people find companies, check what they can do, compare them to competitors, and decide which ones are worth a closer look.
This shifts the main question communications leaders need to ask.
Not simply:
How can we use AI to communicate more efficiently?
But rather:
Now that AI helps the market decide who has real expertise, have we made our organization’s unique strengths visible enough for AI and potential clients to find?
Bridging this gap is not just an AI issue or a communications issue. It is becoming essential for business development.
For professional services firms in particular, this creates what I call an Expertise Visibility Gap — the distance between what a firm genuinely knows and the amount of that expertise the market can actually see, understand, and evaluate. I’ve written more on my website about why that gap is becoming a business development issue, and what firms can do about it.
