session
New power seats: CRO over CMO
date
25 March 2026, Crown Sydney
on stage
Peter Wilkinson – Co-founder of Wilkinson Group
Telecommunications crisis expert Peter Wilkinson opened Mumbrella’s 2026 CommsCon conference in Sydney with a rather dire prediction for marketers.
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“Corporate leadership in 2030 will not be about marketing, advertising, or research. It will be about corporate operations,” he declared before a packed room of communications experts.
Wilkinson’s main argument was that in today’s media world, a company’s ability to anticipate and act on reputational risk is a determining factor in its success.
“The core of my argument is that what sells is trust. We all still have to sell. Of course, that doesn’t get us anywhere…but the path to selling is changing.”
Wilkinson said AI is already being used by ordinary people to research the pros and cons of different products and services without changing their marketing.
“Good corporate business practices result in good governance, good policies, good knowledge of risks, strong culture, good ethics, good conduct, and real news, not fake news. All of these things build reputation and trust, and ultimately lead to product sales.”
Wilkinson said he believes “the role of marketing will be significantly reduced” in the near future.
“When it comes to choosing your vitamins, choosing your phone company, choosing your bank, there’s nothing that advertising or ignorant influencers can do to beat AI… It’s my belief that in an AI world, there’s far less room for marketing. We all have to be in the trust business. That’s how we survive the AI revolution.”
Listen to the entire session in the player below.
400-word AI-powered summary of session recordings
Peter Wilkinson, a veteran journalist and corporate affairs expert, argues that the position of chief reputation and corporate affairs officer will surpass that of a CMO by 2030 as AI fundamentally reshapes the communications industry.
Wilkinson begins by predicting a dramatic reduction in headcount. A team of 20 people will shrink to 6 or 8 people, and an in-house team of 5 people will become 1 or 2 people. Juniors will be replaced by AI, leaving only senior specialists who can blend corporate operations, marketing, consumer PR, and research into one role.
His central theme is that what sells is trust. As consumers increasingly rely on AI to make purchasing decisions, such as comparing phone plans, choosing banks, and evaluating vitamins, brand advertising and emotional marketing are becoming less influential. AI directly analyzes hard data such as reviews, pricing, ethics, governance, and trustworthiness. Wilkinson argues that corporate affairs professionals trained in truth, facts, risk, governance and crisis management are best placed to shape the reputational signals that AI will surface and act on.
He exemplifies this with the Triple Zero crisis at Optus, where failures in governance and risk management (an area of corporate affairs) led to deaths, but he argues that something could have been prevented if the corporate affairs department had functioned properly. In contrast, marketing-driven organizations that prioritize sales over governance are repeatedly hit by crisis. Optus, the PwC tax office scandal, the Nine sexual harassment scandal and the tobacco industry all share the same pattern: profit pressure crowds out ethical oversight.
Wilkinson also challenges the idea that AI cannot replace empathy or creativity. He believes that AI, trained on the experience of thousands of humans, can actually guide empathetic communication better than most individuals. What AI cannot replicate, he says, is a true personal relationship built on trust.
He introduces a three-part survival framework for the AI era: Truth, Trust, and Transparency, where truth and transparency are the foundation on which trust is built. He argues that these are essentially business skills, not marketing skills.
Wilkinson concludes with a call to action for all those involved in communications, regardless of their field, to put trust at the heart of their work. His personal AI survival guide is based on five behaviors (excellence, agility, creativity, honest conversation, and continuous learning) and these three core pursuits. The question, he concludes, is not whether this change is occurring, but whether communicators will ride the wave or be left behind.
