Corporate affairs has a vantage point no other function has. This is the opportunity in it.
My last two pieces were about what is at risk. This one is about what is possible.
I wrote about the divide opening up in corporate affairs, and then about the AI visibility cost of getting it wrong. Both named a fear that peers were already facing. But the response also surfaced something I had underweighted. For every leader worried about being downgraded, there was another asking a more useful question: what is the function actually for now, and what is the version of it worth fighting to build?
I want to make the optimistic case. Not the reassuring one. The genuinely exciting one.
The scarcest thing in a fragmented business
Finance sees the numbers. Each business unit sees its own lane. Legal sees risk through one lens, HR through another. The CEO sees a lot, but through a filter of everyone reporting upward with their own case to make.
Corporate affairs sees across all of it. Regulator and investor. Employee and community. Media, customer, government, activist. It is one of the few functions positioned to hold the external and internal picture in the same frame, at the same time, and notice where they connect.
That vantage point used to be a nice-to-have. In a stable world with slower information flows, you could run a business as a set of vertical silos and stitch the picture together at the quarterly review. That world has gone. In a fragmented, volatile, fast-moving environment, the ability to see the whole board at once is not a soft asset. It is one of the most valuable capabilities in the enterprise.
Demand for it is already here. The best current read on this is Deloitte’s fourth Corporate Affairs Report, The Road to 2030, based on interviews with communications leaders through late 2025 and early 2026. Its central finding is that the function is being pulled upstream into management work: the share of corporate affairs leaders describing themselves as growth drivers has more than doubled to 43% since 2024, and almost seven in ten believe their CEO shares that view.
What those CEOs say they want is the telling part. In the report’s words, they want the function to “bring the outside world into our decision making before it becomes a problem,” and to act as “a thought partner in change.” That is not a request for more output. It is a request for that vantage point.
The move from broadcasting to sensemaking
The trap is to hear “growth driver” and reach for more campaigns, content and channels. That is still vertical thinking. It answers the demand with volume.
The real opportunity is to become the function that makes sense of the whole picture and turns it into better decisions. The one that connects a shift in the regulatory mood, a change in customer demand, a swing in employee sentiment, an investor question and a competitor’s move into a single coherent read of what it means for the business, and what to do about it, before any of it becomes an issue.
This is a shift from broadcasting to sensemaking. From being the function that communicates the decision to being the function whose vantage point shapes the decision.
A handful of teams already work this way and the pattern behind them is consistent: capabilities matched to the mandate, a team right-sized to think rather than only execute, a genuine seat at the table, real cross-functional trust, a clear mandate they can point to and the evidence to prove its impact. Underneath all of it, a CEO who wants the outside world in the decision. The conditions are replicable, which is precisely why the ground is still open.
The partnership that makes it work
If your organisation has a chief of staff, this is where the two of you become formidable together.
The chief of staff is best understood as the connective tissue between strategy and delivery. Their vantage point is inward: across functions, priorities, the executive agenda, the mechanics of getting things done. Corporate affairs holds the mirror image. Its vantage point is outward: across stakeholders, reputation, the external environment, the signals that never show up in an internal status report.
Put those two views together and you close a loop almost nothing else in the business can close. External signal becomes executive decision becomes coherent internal and external action, and the feedback from that action flows back into the next read. Outside-in meets inside-out. It is a rare and powerful pairing, and building it deliberately with a standing rhythm is one of the highest leverage moves a corporate affairs leader can make.
And if your organisation does not have a chief of staff? In its absence, corporate affairs leaders are often the ones quietly holding the enterprise view together – briefing the CEO, joining the dots across functions, absorbing the coordination no one else owns. That instinct is precisely the point of this piece, but serving as a proxy chief of staff on top of the day job is neither sustainable nor ideal. If that is you, the higher-leverage move is to make the case for the role itself rather than keep being one by default.
Where reputation meets revenue
There is a version of this that is squarely a marketing and performance story, and it is the one I find most exciting.
Brand and reputation are the same asset seen from two angles – how a company is known and whether it is chosen. Corporate affairs and marketing are the two functions that build it. Run as separate empires, they compete for budget and tell slightly different stories to the same audiences. Held in a single frame, they become one system: reputation feeding demand, brand equity compounding into pricing power, earned coverage doing work that paid media cannot buy, and a narrative that shapes the market rather than merely describing the product.
This is where the vantage point pays off commercially. The same outside-in view that reads the regulator and the investor also reads the customer and the category: where attention is moving, what the market believes, who is winning share of voice, share of search and, increasingly, share of the AI answer. That is a marketing intelligence advantage as much as a reputational one. The leader who can point brand and demand spend at the moments and messages the whole environment says matter will out-perform the one optimising channels in isolation.
That is what the growth-driver mandate asks for. The most advanced functions already measure themselves in economic terms – revenue, share price, market access – not reach and sentiment. The leader who can hold brand and reputation, earned, owned and paid, trust and performance in the same view is the one who turns all of it into growth. Increasingly, the corporate affairs job and the marketing job are the same job.
What leaders need to enable
The vantage point does not convert into influence on its own. A few things have to be true.
The function has to be in the room upstream, where strategic choices are made, not briefed after the fact to announce them. The M&A conversation, the market-access question, the capital project, the equity story. These are the moments where the outside-in view changes the answer, not just the wording.
It must prove its impact in the language of the business. Deloitte found the seat at the executive committee has become less certain, with formal membership slipping from 73% to 64%, even as demand rises. The counter is not proximity, it is evidence. Measurement still leans heavily on reputation, with strategic and economic indicators trailing well behind. The functions that will hold their ground are the ones that can show impact in strategic and economic terms, not reach and sentiment alone.
And it needs a strategy statement that names this mandate. It is striking that only around a third of functions have a clearly defined strategy, and more than a quarter have none at all. A single page that says this is the view we hold, this is what we do with it, this is how we know it worked is, on the evidence, the highest-value thing many leaders could write this year.
The capabilities this asks for
The vantage point rewards a particular set of muscles and they are learnable.
Commercial and marketing fluency, so you can read the outside world in the language of the P&L and the growth funnel and have it land with the board. Systems thinking, the core skill of connecting signals across silos into one picture. Foresight and sensemaking, turning ambiguity into a clear “so what for us.” Orchestration and influence without authority, because the whole game is coordinating people who do not report to you. Narrative craft, to turn the enterprise view into a story that aligns audiences inside and out, which the research rightly calls a professional superpower that AI cannot replicate. And the measurement rigour to evidence all of it.
Notice what AI does here. Pointed at horizon scanning, signal synthesis and scenario modelling, it does not replace the vantage point. It widens the aperture. It lets a small team hold a bigger picture than ever before. The judgement about what the picture means stays human. The reach of it does not have to.
Where to start: five moves
If you take nothing else from this, take these.
Write the one-page mandate. State the view you hold, what you do with it, and how you will know it worked - then get it signed off.
Get into decisions upstream. Secure a standing place in strategy, M&A and planning while the choices are still open, not after they close.
Build the operating rhythm. Set a regular forum with the chief of staff and marketing, so outside-in and inside-out meet by design.
Measure in the language of the business. Tie your work to revenue, share price and market access, and retire reach and sentiment as headline metrics.
Run reputation and marketing as one system. Connect brand, earned, owned and paid, and align on shared growth metrics, so trust compounds into demand and performance.
The question worth sitting with
Here is a diagnostic worth running on yourself, not on AI this time.
Look at the last three significant decisions your executive team made. How many of these decisions were you in the room for? Did your view of the outside world change the decision, or just describe it?
That is not a judgement on your worth. It is a map of the opportunity. The view is already yours, and almost no other function has it. The question is whether you build the partnership, the evidence and the capability to turn it into the most valuable seat at the table.
I think it is the most exciting time to be doing this work in twenty years. The view has never mattered more. We just have to claim it.
