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| Tom Coombes |
The PR and communications function has never mattered more to an organization. Running one well has never been harder.
The technology and media landscape is more fragmented and more powerful than at any point in my career advising financial services and technology companies.
Stories, issues and markets move faster. Social media accelerates it even further. At the same time, channels have multiplied, which means there are more opportunities to build reputation and more places it can be damaged.
The conversations that will define industry trends and sentiment about your organization in the next year are happening today.
While many PR strategies prioritize mainstream outlets such as Tier 1 media, you won’t find these emerging narratives there. They occur in niche forums, specialist media, social networks and industry communities among people who influence your stakeholders.
Historically, these conversations, and those having them, were hard to find. They were also impossible to analyze at scale and mostly disconnected from strategic decision-making.
That’s changing. Advances in AI, network science and data analytics mean these signals are now identifiable, understandable and actionable earlier than ever before. For the first time, in-house teams and agencies have the opportunity not just to monitor narratives as they emerge, but to understand how they are forming.
The Evolution of Communications Leadership
For decades, communications leaders and agencies have helped organizations manage reputations and engage stakeholders. As organizations face growing complexity, they are increasingly expected to do something more: help firms navigate uncertainty. At the same time, CEOs and boards are asking them to support sustainable, long-term growth and demonstrate greater business impact.
The challenge is particularly acute because the environment around organizations is becoming more complex. The questions you have to answer are getting harder. Meanwhile, you have to plan and execute in a noisier, faster-moving world, and you have to do it while staying ahead of what might be coming next.
The Opportunity Is Here
With communications teams facing so many challenges, AI and analytics give you an opportunity to transform the function. Technology can help you understand and anticipate market sentiment, reputational perception and the key influencers on your audience and stakeholders – as well as surfacing the insights that can help your business achieve its broader goals.
Yet Gartner found that only 14% of communications leaders intend to invest in narrative intelligence platforms by February 2027. That leaves a huge opportunity for the companies that see the value in understanding not just past performance, but what will happen in the future.
| This article is featured in O'Dwyer's September '26 Financial PR/Investor Relations & Professional Services PR Magazine |
Gartner defines narrative intelligence as “tools that help organizations pre-emptively detect and monitor narratives using a broad range of data from various sources. Narrative intelligence tools analyze the evolution of narratives, adversarial intent, and influence operations. These tools enable organizations to detect early signals and track the spread of disinformation over time with deep context to safeguard their organization’s brand and reputation.”
At Cognito, we call this “predictive intelligence” – because ultimately, it allows you to foresee what’s coming and enable your organization to react ahead of time.
In a world where reputation is a board-level issue, misinformation can spread like wildfire, and a specialist Substack can reach a greater share of your audience than a global newspaper, predictive intelligence isn’t a luxury. It’s a strategic necessity.
The Power of Predictive Intelligence
Predictive intelligence changes the equation. By analyzing patterns in specialist commentary, analyst output and emerging voices, it’s possible to identify where narratives are heading, often weeks before they appear in mainstream conversations. With the insight to understand what the data means, you can respond more effectively to what is happening now and shape what happens next.
Predictive intelligence operates across three distinct but connected dimensions:
- Reputation intelligence: tracking narrative and sentiment in real time and before it hits the mainstream.
- Market intelligence: identifying themes and conversations within stakeholder communities ahead of public signals.
- Influencer intelligence: understanding who is driving narratives and where.
Reputation Intelligence
Only 37% of organizations know where negative sentiment around their brand is most concentrated. (WCW, Managing Growing Reputational Risks in 2026)
Reputational risk can affect regulatory relationships, client relationships, investor confidence and employee engagement. However, most organizations only see reputational issues after a narrative has formed and gone mainstream. What if you could track this in real time and predict when sentiment about your company or client is about to go in the wrong direction?
Market Intelligence
The global AI market in marketing will rocket from $15.84 billion in 2022 to $107.5 billion by 2028. (Statista, Market Value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing Worldwide from 2020 to 2028)
Volatility is now the normal operating environment. So, the most effective teams are using predictive market intelligence to identify the themes that are gaining momentum before they reach mainstream saturation and develop a pre-emptive position that addresses them. Can you do the same?
Influencer Intelligence
87% of B2B buyers prefer content from trusted industry influencers over branded sales messages. (LinkedIn, How to Effectively Leverage Influencers in B2B Marketing)
The stories that institutional investors, analysts and mainstream media will tell in 12 months’ time are being published today, but at sub-scale. Predictive intelligence enables you to identify these emerging narratives so that you can understand where debate is heading and who your audience is listening to.
The Future of Communications
We are moving away from siloed, reactive PR towards integrated, data-driven advisory. Narratives are being formed in new places, upstream of the traditional influencer groups. If you’re not in those conversations – let alone being able to form and drive those narratives – then you’re out of the game.
The speed and complexity of change is a huge challenge. Strategies can no longer be based solely on reacting to a story or broadcasting your message only to mainstream platforms.
Predictive intelligence gives you the ability to transform your function for this new reality. You can develop an integrated, real-time approach to reputation management that allows you to shape reputational sentiment as it forms. You can understand which topics are gaining momentum and address them while they’re still nascent. And you can identify the influencers who matter for a more effective program that delivers real results.
With predictive intelligence, you can strengthen organizational readiness and turn your team into one that provides measurable value to your stakeholders. And with many firms poised to increase their investment in data and analytics, it also provides your business or client with a competitive edge.
How Do You Measure Up?
Take a moment to ask yourself these questions:
- What issues will matter to our audience six months from now?
- Who is influencing opinion within our ecosystem?
- How effectively do our spokespeople shape the conversation?
- What risks are emerging beneath the surface?
- What are policymakers thinking about our sector?
- What value is my function providing to the board, senior leadership and strategy teams?
Now ask yourself, how confident are you about your answers?
Intelligence for a Competitive Advantage
The goal isn’t to predict the future with certainty. It’s to give in-house teams and agencies sharper visibility into where opinion, reputation, markets and regulation may be heading so they can get ahead of it rather than respond to it. In an environment of constant change, that becomes a meaningful competitive advantage.
Learn more about predictive intelligence in The Signal Before the Noise, our new report with DeepSeer, an AI and data science company. Download your copy today.
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Tom Coombes is Founder & CEO of Cognito.
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