The Changing Role of the CCO in the AI Era: Lessons from BCG's CCO Russell Dubner

Hello everybody. Happy Thursday. Welcome to today's webinar discussion hosted by the team here at Clipbook. We're, as always, just very excited for the conversation today. We'll jump right in. Russell, you ready to do this?

Yeah, let's do it.

Awesome. We'll start with some quick introductions. To introduce myself, my name is Adam Joseph. I'll be your host today. I'm the founder and CEO here at Clipbook. At Clipbook, we are the leading AI platform for communications and PR teams. Since our launch a few years ago, we've grown to support over 200 enterprises, firms, government agencies globally. And today's conversation is one I'm personally just very excited about. We're talking about how the CCO, the Chief Communications Officer role, is really changing. And the pressures, the opportunities, what it takes to lead a comms function right now in 2026 in the AI era. And honestly, I don't think there's a better person out there to speak to this than BCG CCO Russell Dubner. Russell is Boston Consulting Group, BCG's inaugural global chief communications officer, which is remarkable on many levels. He is the first person to hold that seat at one of the world's top consulting firms. My very biased opinion, the world's top consulting firm is a BCG alum. But he's been leading BCG's modernization of the communications function from the inside. Making it more integrative, making it more data-driven. Doing this while also working with a number of BCG clients, helping them drive AI adoption across the comms function and more broadly. So Russell is fantastic. I'll also say on a personal note, Russell was my boss at BCG. I met him a few days after he had joined BCG from Edelman. I dropped him a cold email. We had a good period of time really working together and did some fun projects together. So all to say, we're in for a really insightful, engaging conversation with one of the best in the industry. So before we jump in, I'll just remind everybody in the audience, if this is your first webinar joining with Clipbook, drop your questions using the Zoom Q&A function. We'll see those in real time. We'll answer them as we can. So before we get into the topic of the webinar, Russell, I want to just start a little bit with your personal journey as a communications leader globally. You've had such an illustrious, illustrious career in PR and communications. Walk us through a little bit of the path. What drew you to the world of comms initially?

So I first want to just return the compliment favor. So for those of you who don't know Adam well, he's not just a really successful entrepreneur, not just a really talented strategy consultant. He also understands communications, strategic comms, and the whole world of public affairs super well. We use ClickBook, we're one of their clients, and to have someone who is so adept, not just on the technology and on the product, but actually knows what we need to succeed with, with the firm and out into the marketplace. It's awesome. And he and I worked together on a major project and he wasn't just good at driving the strategy, but actually cranking out the real work. He has cred as someone who can put their nose to the grindstone. So my career started, I actually thought I was going to go into management consulting when I got out of college many moons ago. Because my brother did it, my dad did it, my cousin did it. And then I realized you needed to be better at math than I was at that moment. And so I was like, oh, I need to rethink this thing. And ran into somebody who said to me, there's a soft version of management consulting. It's called public relations. I had no idea what it was. They told me what firms to look at. And so I reached out and ended up choosing amongst two firms, but looked at a bunch and the most entrepreneurial was Edelman. So I started my career there and it was phenomenal. My first client was the Mexican Investment Board who was there to help pass NAFTA. So a large-scale national public affairs campaign. It was super, super interesting. It was fully integrated to all the kinds of things that we say PR should include. Like that was my first account and I was lucky enough to go to Edelman's London office for a few years. And when I got back, I went and pursued my MBA at Columbia while working full-time, which was a little crazy. And then realized that I was probably as good at running the business as I was at doing communication strategy and rose up on that track at the same time. I was still doing lots of client work and ultimately I ran the New York office, which was super fun for a number of years. Took it from about 200 people to almost 900 people, and it became the largest agency of any kind in, in New York and then ran the US operations for about 8 years. And at some point you got to look for the next chapter. And when I did, I reached out to people who I thought were real icons, leaders in business, and talked to a handful of them. One of them happened to be my old client, Rich Lesser, who's the chairman of BCG. And Rich and I had a great chat. At the end, he said, but before you do anything, would you consider this? And I said, if I could also still do client work and be in the mix, like, that would be interesting. He introduced me to BCG's CEO, Christoph Schweitzer, and off we went. Here we are.

That's amazing. And you think about, you were the number, basically the number 2 at Edelman, right? Edelman at the time, at least, was the largest, is You know, it might still be the largest PR firm in the world. You were the US CEO, the global vice chair. That's like a huge deal, right? That is, you're like at the top of the mountain in PR world and communications world, certainly, and in global business. Russell, to what do you attribute your success in that world?

I don't know if I was number 2. There's no rankings of who's in what position, but it was a big role. Look, I think the first part is just like anything else. I'm here in Virginia Beach right now with my youngest son who's wrestling in the Freshman Nationals tomorrow and the next day. And like in sports, the first thing you have to have is drive. And I would always start earlier, sometimes work later, but like really crank it out and look for the ways that stamina and just that hustle can get you forward. Not trying to win, not trying to beat anybody, but just trying to get the work done incredibly well. I think the second thing that people have told me, I'm not going to assert this myself, but that like really listening to the team. Someone said to me recently, and part of my 360 is one of the things that I do that's distinct is I ask the question first and then listen to the team. I don't assert the hypothesis out of the gate. I don't tell everyone what to do. I listen and then we set the path and run because otherwise, like, why do you have super smart people around you if you're not going to give them a chance? And ideally you bring people with divergent thinking from different perspectives. And that's where like the magic happens. And then the final part for me is make sure you're clear to your team and to, if it's a whole office, if it's a whole national enterprise, what does winning look like? No one wants to just be like grinding it out. They want to know like, how are they going to come out victorious? And you can do that at a small level, at a client level, like how are you making this a gold standard case study? And then work your way backwards. All those kinds of things, I think, just get people to give a little bit more and it's just more fun.

Yeah, that's great. And how would you— to what do you attribute your success specifically in working with clients? And if you think about, you don't rise to where you have in global communications by being casual about the way you engage with the client, right? Like they, they really trust you. You've helped them navigate through some of the most tough, challenging, high-intensity high salience moments in, in the business. So like in terms of the client engagement in particular, what, what do you attribute your success?

I think part of it is really— this is just my own personal skill for a lot of the early to mid chapters on the agency side— was understanding the cross-section of what's actually really happening in the business and in the industry and studying it as well as you might get from your consulting firm, but then what you're really looking for is what's the narrative that you can draw through across your stakeholders that's going to propel the organization forward. And that's the thing I always found to be the most fun. And so whether it was doing that for clients like Samsung during the Asian financial crisis or Bombardier when they were on a big arc up or a range of others, that's the part that I enjoyed the most. And then the other pieces became more interesting down the line as the industry started evolving is like bringing creative and creativity into the work, bringing more and more analytics to the work, other distribution channels. So always looking at like, how can you win for the client in ways that somebody else can't? Because they can always turn to somebody who's a specialist. So if you're not a specialist, like, what do you do better than them?

So the analytics, so that those math skills had to kick in at some point, Russell, is that—

I didn't get into Columbia without math skills. They were pretty rough on that. I had to go back and like restudy everything. It was actually, the funny part was, first of all, my mom reminded me that my math SAT was way better than my English. And so that gave me a little more confidence. And then I just had to restudy and I ended up taking, I don't know why I did it, but like advanced corporate finance and turnarounds and all sorts of fun stuff in business school, but just because I was interested and I was so surprised that I could do the math. I did it more slowly than all the people who came from PE or from another background, but it was still an important part of the puzzle.

Yeah. It's funny that you, you mentioned some of the things around like really understanding the industry and the client that you're working with. And like one of the big disconnects I've often seen sometimes with our clients, even at Clipbook, is the communications leader isn't really close enough to the core of the business. And you're seeing actually pretty active trends, how comms teams are structured, CCOs reporting to CEOs, Axios, and I think Eleanor Hawkins did a really interesting study of this effect, how CCOs are now increasingly working directly for CEOs as opposed to, say, living under marketing teams or buried in another part of the organization. But one of the things I've always appreciated about you, Russell, is that taking the arts and the tactics and the work of communications and the science of communications and also applying it to What does this mean for the P&L of the business and being able to bridge that gap and speak to the CEO for them to understand, okay, here's what this means. Here's this, how's this impact our, say, our stock price, or here's how this impacts our ability to actually succeed in the P&L and some part of the world or manage our key stakeholders. So I'd love to just hear from you in terms of connecting the comms work to the P&L and to the CEO agenda. How have you navigated those dynamics?

It really does depend. On whether it's like in a protect environment or a promote environment. In some ways, the protect is easier. So let's say you've gone through some sort of breach of trust. Trust in the company is down, stock is down, and you're trying to figure out what to do next. We're able to now understand what has been the value destruction. From the loss in trust, how long it likely will take to regain that value if you take a certain path. And so you can go into the CEO and say, look, this has been the destruction. This is what a normal path, this is what an accelerated path looks like. And here's the well-worn ways of getting there, but it's not going to be easy. Here's how you show your competence and drive that over time. And I think that's a really appealing, because that kind of recovery that you're talking about, very big numbers. And so you get everyone's attention around that. So I think that's probably the most compelling context. And then the other ways are like sometimes merging what you might do more broadly in the marketing suite into the comms space. So whether you're doing it from how you're doing hyper-targeted media buying to make sure that you're getting in front of the right audiences and their networks. Whether it's using Demandbase or Apple Cart, which I think that those guys are doing some clever things and with AI. And I think the other part is making sure, and like most good comms pros do this, but do you really even understand the go-to-market? So where are the new dollars going to be generated from? Not where the money is made, but where are the new dollars coming from? And how can you get in front and accelerate that by understanding where the audience is and not just more media, but all the ways you can be connected with that buyer. So I think that there are ways today that there weren't years ago to be able to deliver on that by pulling the pieces together in a more campaign-like fashion in a very pinpointed way. And I think that's the expectation. You have to run those campaigns in a very directed way and merge some of the measurement with the marketing measurement so they can be side by side.

Yeah. That's fantastic. And to that end, you had started to hint towards this around how the industry has changed in the last, say, 20 years. And I do want to speak about AI in some detail, but maybe even before, before we go into where we're going from here, let's talk about the last 20 years. What are the biggest changes that you've seen across the communications industry broadly? How has that impacted the way you work, the way your clients have engaged? What have been the major tectonic shifts that you've navigated?

Yeah, look, I think the biggest change is the scale of the comms business is so much larger and so much more professionalized. Like people just know what they're doing in a— it was catch-as-catch-can in a way, early days. And I think that with that scale has come specialization. And so now you have people that know whether it's in the healthcare space and financial and financial communications, or just specialists in bankruptcy. And there are specializations within specializations now. And that's needed to be able to run a big complex bankruptcy and the communications around it needs lawyer-like skill sets to be able to get that done. So I think that's the biggest change is the specialization. And then if you look at what are some of the newer special specialties, that's where, as I mentioned before, the emergence of creative so that comms could compete for marketing dollars, that kind of merger with a different mindset around creative. I think you see greater and greater sophistication around the protect side, merging some of those pieces, whether it's relative to public affairs, financial communications, and crisis. And I think that they're quite interrelated. And, and of course the technology has changed and that's the thing we'll talk more about, but that's, I think this is every technology change is like a big parade that you either get in front of or you get trampled. And this is like probably the biggest parade yet.

Yeah. And to that end, let's talk about— I want to get to AI separately, but maybe we can think through some of the non-AI forces that are shaping the communications function today. What are some of those forces? How do you navigate them?

I think one force is just geopolitics and how volatile the world is. And so you see an increase in demand if you talk to recruiters. If you're in the public affairs space and you know what you're doing, you're in high demand right now. And so I think that's, that's an important shift that we were—

we had the Russian sanctions that hit, and then it was like, for big global companies, like, okay, like, what do we do then? And what about our teams in the region? And how do we— what about our clients? And there's a whole kind of question there, I imagine.

Yeah. I think even across in the related, I think the expectations of anticipating risk is higher too. So. That's where some of the intelligence side of things really works. Of course, there's the human intelligence element at the end, but people expect a better sensing ability to see what's coming. It's— people can get caught broadsided on things. I do think that the ability to drive transformation is big. So more and more— so for instance, at BCG, most of our biggest work is around large-scale transformation. And with that comes communications needs, like how are you really going to orient the organization towards that future state? How do you get people past the skepticism? How do you get them to embrace that change? So I think being part of that solution, if you're the head of comms in a major company who's going through that transformation, I think is really important. So I think those are probably the 2 or 3 things that are most prevalent that I've seen. Of course, there's the marketing side of marketing comms and, you know, how that's evolving, but I'll leave that to the side for now.

Yeah. And what does that mean for the CCO specifically? And what makes a good CCO today that may have not necessarily been required or needed in the prior, maybe 10 years ago? You've mentioned some of these, right, on the ability to be part of a big transformation or the ability to navigate. Geopolitics in real time. Any other kind of qualities for a CCO that now are more important than ever?

First of all, you got to make sure you have a team who can deliver on that and that you have agency partners who can deliver on in the ways where you need the human intelligence and some of the access and other things. So if you don't have that set up, then you can't deliver for your company. It doesn't matter how good you are, you know, you need the right winning team around you. And then I think there has to be a comfort taking your board or your executive committee, not just through, look at the placement we got in the Wall Street Journal or whatever, but like really truly understanding how the trends are lining up with or against you and what that means from a risk. There's the commercial risk and the reputation risk. So I think that's increasingly an expectation of on a regular basis from the comms function.

Yeah. And I'm curious to that end, that the, what lands with your board and with your CEO, right? Or with your executive committee, however the business is structured, what are you finding now lands better and more like on the bullseye than ever? I mean, you mentioned, okay, hey, there's the Wall Street Journal piece. Sure. That's like kind of the table stakes, lowest common denominator in many ways, right? Here's the. Piece of earned, there's more textured analysis that oftentimes will resonate with CEOs or otherwise. So what's your, especially for those on the call who are maybe rising CCOs or who are in the role, how do they talk to their board? How do they talk to their leadership?

I'll tell you a little bit, like, so at BCG, there's almost like an unwritten formula of expectation when you come in and talk to the executive committee and you don't follow this, it's go fish until you've figured it out. So the first thing is what's your fact base? What data and data points have you gathered? And how have you— what's the pattern that you have recognized here that's going to inform the recommendations that follow? Then it's what's the framework for the decision that I'm trying to make? And within that, what are the trade-offs? And then a recommendation on the decision. And in that, how is that going to unfold? Over what period of time, and how should it be measured in terms of success? If you don't come in with that sort of approach, no one's really going to listen to you because it's not like rigorous structured thinking. You can move through it fast, doesn't mean it's a long presentation, but if you're missing those pieces or any one of those, no one's really going to take you seriously. So I think that's just like any good problem solving. They expect that comms has the same capability.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny you said it's an unwritten formula, but you actually spelled it out very, very clearly. So for those who are taking notes, the question of the fact base, right? What data points do you have? Then what's your framework for a decision that you're trying to make? What are the trade-offs of that, of each potential path or course of action with that decision? Getting to that bottom line up front with rigorous, structured thinking. I mean, you've actually outlined that fact base, that formula pretty well. Love that. Any other tips? If you're the CCO, You're in your first meeting with your first monthly meeting with your CEO. Like, how do you make sure that meeting goes well? Or maybe I'd also love to hear what's the formula to make sure that meeting just goes absolutely fucking terribly. Like, what is like the recipe for disaster?

Look, I think CEOs are human beings. So they, like everyone else, they want to know what's the strategy for the firm for comms to whatever that goal is to have as much market share voice as your market share or whatever the goal is. Like, how are you going to accomplish that? They want to understand what are you going to do with the function? How are you going to transform the function if it needs to be transformed? And how are you evaluating that? But then they also want to know what are your really clever ideas? What are the things that you're going to do? Like I had a bunch of ideas for BCG early on, like for Christoph, I was like, we should do something. The CEO, he's of course super smart guy, but he's also really dynamic and charming in a Q&A environment in particular, as He's been trained as a client person. So we created a series called Moments of Truth. And, you know, what I hope to do is get him with top CEOs talking through their moment of truth and how they transformed their enterprise or failed in doing so. And that gets millions of views now every time we do an episode. This is in the second year. So it's also what's the couple of ideas for either the CEO or for the firm that are going to capture imagination. So if you just hit the rational side, it's, oh, that's a great strategy, that's a great transformation, but you don't hit the emotional components that are going to resonate in the market and with your buyer, with your employee, you're like, you're not doing your job. So I think like a recipe for failing is like coming in and being really strategic but flat. No CEO wants that. And you have to remember from their perspective, like it's all about their legacy. So what are you doing to advance their legacy at the same time? And it's not about their ego. It's about the impact that they have on the company or the firm.

Yeah. And it's funny. I think you mentioned CEOs are people too, right? Like really understanding the DNA and what's authentic to that leader and what sort of ideas are going to resonate. And you mentioned that Christophe, really good in a Q&A setting, right? There are CEOs out there who you like, they're just going to just completely bomb in a Q&A setting, right? And you have to either train them or coach them or there are other avenues and venues where they're going to really shine through as is principal. So all to say, love, love the suggestions and the recipe for disaster. To kind of shift gears here, we've hinted a little bit about AI transformation, GenAI transformation broadly. I do want to say I had a good time reading some of the recent BCG research on this. Super fascinating, but maybe just if you want to just maybe walk us through some of the top lines of some of the work that you've done at BCG.

Yeah, I'll do it really quickly. The So I was really curious to see what was the size of the prize of GenAI transformation for a comms function. So I was working on a client and there's a team that's able to do analytics once you've mapped workflows to tell you what kind of efficiency you can gain through applying GenAI. And they have this whole sort of dataset and formula and they go in and they give you the answer and then you work from there. So I was like, can you not just do this for a company? Could you do it for a function? So could you look at the comms function relative to customer service, to legal, to whatever, but also show what kind of efficiency gains were possible? And they said, give me enough time and yes. So after some months and a lot of analysis, They came back and showed that comms is the, the second best position for efficiency gains. So if it's on the task basis, it's up to around like 37%. And if you do it on an agentic and change workflow, it's up to 47% efficiency gains, which is pretty massive to be honest. And I know talking to others who are like bleeding edge CCOs who are finding like, like way greater promise of returns. And the change is certainly available and underway. And then we looked at. Cost savings, and in a task basis, it was like 18 to 20%, which isn't huge because just because you're doing things more efficiently doesn't mean you can take out people because only 9% of comms you can automate. And then we looked at that on the agentic and change workflow side, and that got you to about like 25% savings. So that's really the size of the prize are those two. And then we broke it down by sub-function. Because sometimes you want to tackle a problem at a sub-function basis and not overall and then get nowhere. And that, those were the big takeaways for the size of the prize part. And then I wanted to see, okay, that was really interesting, but where are we in the adoption curve? So we polled 200 large company CCOs, and what we found in the end was like 88% of them felt that they were unprepared for a transformation of the comms function to enable GenAI. 88%, and only 30% had advanced a real significant change in their function using GenAI. They're doing a great— that 30% is doing a great job. They're really advancing the ball. But you can see, like, overall, just those two statistics. And then the thing that was really standing in their way—

yeah, what's that? These are like 200 CCOs, big-scale companies. Less than half are like, hey, we're actually— we've already hit the gas on this, right?

And yeah, less than a third.

Less than a third. Yeah. So that's, that's astounding, right? If you actually think about it, you can look at even some of the other industries and categories, right? And if you look at Silicon Valley or top 100 tech company engineers, right, and their adoption of AI tooling in some way, shape, or form, right, is like very high. Over half, 60, 70, 80% are using AI in some pretty meaningful way. Now it's just a question of how aggressive is their implementation, right? Are they managing agents that are doing coding, or are they just using it as a coding assistant? And so it's all to say, comms is just— it is a laggard in AI adoption, right?

And of the CCOs, I think it was like 68% self-identified as a laggard.

Yeah. And we know it too.

Yeah. And look, I think the thing— look, our experience going through our own transformation is like we couldn't really get out of the gate besides doing pilots. And it was getting super frustrating. And, but we have the luxury of being able to occasionally bring in a couple super smart consultants to help us who actually know how to do a transformation. And so we did that for just like 6 weeks and they mapped all the workflows. They helped us in the prioritization and the tool charters and then had the teams really work through that and We create a roadmap and then we're like ready to go. And so in our research, what we found is the thing that most holds the comms functions back is the inability to create an operating plan of the future and starting with just mapping the workflows and where change would have the most impact. So that's like the biggest gating factor now.

Yeah, we have a great question from Brooke on the Zoom Q&A, Russell, asking, Russell, are you referring to GenAI for basic content creation? Are you talking about integrating AI into comms-specific processes? How are you using agentic AI? So maybe if you can maybe speak to Russell, some of the different types of workflows that have been targeted and yeah, and GenAI versus some of the other AI capabilities.

Yes. So the answer is like largely yes. So some of it is around content creation and training up custom GPTs that are able to do an 8 out of 10 job on work that otherwise would have to start from scratch and then be able to scale that globally. Some of it is about helping partners who are writing reports have hit the bullseye and have a screener that enables them to understand where their outline is taking them, whether it's going to be, this is for trade media, this is just a post, this could be major media, but here's what you're missing. And we don't need a human to do that now. We are, have the ability for to do that using GenAI. And then the next part is like, how are you going to take that plus a whole host of other pieces of the puzzle and have an agentic approach? And we're doing that in a major market right now. And once we've proven it out, then we'll look to do it in a more global basis. But it's looking very promising. And because then it's able to hit different databases that we're not hitting today to provide much more customized answers to those questions. Everything always needs like a whole bunch of editing and additional thinking, but I see that as potentially moving us like way faster than the, this first change, which had created about 10 to 12 synthetic FTEs in the external comms function.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, Brooke's question gets to different types of use cases and what AI tools are the most appropriate for what use cases. And then there's a whole other question around what you do internally, what do you build internally versus where do you find partners? Where do you work with vendors and otherwise? Where do you use a consumer tool like a GPT or a Claude or a Perplexity? Where do you use a vertical tool like a Clipbook? Shameless plug. But, but yeah. And so, yeah, all to say, it sounds like it's complex, especially for a big company like BCG. There are multiple use cases. You're doing pilots. You're converting those pilots really quickly across the board.

Yeah. And look, and we tackled, we're tackling this like sub-function by sub-function because then you can look at the workflow from beginning to end and see if there are some things that you never did that you should have been doing. So that's really how we're tackling it and adding new real estate of where we're applying that and then looking for an agentic approach as we prove out our ability to be more and more efficient. And to your point, Adam, like we don't look to do all of this ourselves. We can do a lot of it ourselves, but there's a reason that we picked the right partners to do things. It's just like waste of our time and energy to try and create a way to understand a conversation out in the marketplace, or there, there's some other interesting technologies about how to be discoverable with LLMs and those sorts of things that we're going to, we're going to rent those. We're not going to try and build those.

Yeah. Another question, Russell, from Trish, which is, I'm interested in hearing about how other CCOs are transforming their organizational structure and their roles within their functions. And she's actually saying that she's seen a couple of new roles filled. And a couple of orgs that are migrating to hybrid human slash AI. So I guess like part of the question here is how does the org structure of the comms function evolve with AI native capabilities? I would love to also hear from you, like how does the role charter and the job description and the skills that you hire for change more, more broadly?

I'd say we're in the early innings of that kind of change. I think in the next 6 months to a year, we'll see a lot more of it with people figuring out what their new org is going to look like. There are some companies' large-scale comms and marketing functions that are going to be totally transformed, that they're going to be changing the scale of their team. They just won't need to have the same scale they had before. And then there are others where it's actually really just building capacity because it's a small to mid-sized team who's under-resourced anyway, and this gives them more running room. So I don't think that there— it depends on like where you're coming from into the problem. I think there'll be some interesting learnings from the agency side because they're essentially operating something similar, but at a very large scale. And I know some of the agencies have seen some thinning of the junior resources, which is not happening necessarily in the consulting world. And, but at the same time, it's like might be moving from a pyramid to more of a column. And again, early days, but that's the direction it seems to be taking, which doesn't eliminate roles, but it refocuses them and it might have a smaller pool.

Yeah. It's funny. I was speaking to a PR firm agency leader recently, and we were going into some detail around how do we actually. Restructure what we look for entry-level roles, right? And it actually, the conversation isn't necessarily, hey, we're just like cutting the number in half. It's just that what we're looking for is actually really specific now in many ways. And what do we put on the, how do we assess AI literacy and adoption for an entry-level role, right? How do we assess it? What sort of questions we ask? Also, the questions we asked 3 months ago are different than the questions that we ask now because the pace of play of innovation is so fast. So I guess all to say, this is, we were playing with live ammunition across how do we think about these functions and So on and so forth. I have another question, Russell, here from, from another Adam in the, in the Zoom Q& A. How are you handling AI adoption amongst different managerial levels? So managers, submanager levels, were you seeing pushback from communicators on, hey, I don't want, I don't think AI is right for this, or I don't want to do it, or I'm just going to kind of pocket veto this. How do you manage and really navigate some of those dynamics?

The truth is in BCG, we haven't had that problem. Everyone knows so much of the firm's growth and revenue now comes from large-scale transformation that's driven by GenAI. Basically every engagement includes GenAI, like literally everyone. So no one who works at BCG can think that their role doesn't have a GenAI component of it or an AI component of it. So that's not been an too much of an issue for us. I have seen in other instances where, you know, people who are in relatively senior roles are like backing away from the technology. And I just think that's a risky move or thinking that like it's not really gonna, it's really just still just a function of art and not realizing how this could have such positive change to the art. It doesn't replace it. So I do think that there's a challenge. I've seen more towards the top, more tenured than elsewhere, but I think this isn't like new. This is the kind of thing with every technology change.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's funny. You said the word risky to not adopt. I would call it like catastrophically fucking dumb if you don't adopt it. I hope just, and you're being more diplomatic than I would, but, but yeah, I tell my team, Clipbook, I'd like tell them like, hey, if you're not like an, we're not going to hire you if you're not an AI super user or innovator pretty actively. But also like I tell them like, hey, if if you're not pushing the bar for your function, you're like, you're not right for us. You should go work at a slower paced company because we're like, that's what gets us excited. And I'm also curious, Russell, actually somebody to your point on the art and the of communications and how AI impacts that. One of the questions we have here from Kira, which is what are your views on AI and human creativity? And especially for the communications function where there's such an art to so much of the work, like the storytelling work, the speech writing, the the narrative generation and so on and so forth. So how do you see it impacting human creativity more broadly for the comms function?

I'll give you two quick thoughts. Like for, if I look at our publishing team, they've created a tool that's trained up on almost all of our past reports from the past 60 years. And so they can take information, decks and other things and turn it into a first draft, this story builder. And like, it's really damn good, right? Because it's really well constructed. Does it remove the need for the author and the writer to then craft it into something that is unique into the marketplace? Absolutely not, but it's pretty darn good. A good— so I think it's a springboard and it is taking the speed like and massively accelerating it. We'll see the same thing for visual assets in our social team and how they're being created. Like, it still takes a lot of creativity in how the prompts are created and also just understanding what technologies to use. But it gives us the ability to be more visual more readily. I've been with people I've talked and I've spoken with outside of BCG with a more traditional creative team of some scale. People were scared. They felt like this is the place where jobs are going to be replaced. And the feedback instead has been, we're doing it faster and better than we ever did before. And that GenAI has been an incredible accelerant there too. So far, that's been the reaction is actually faster, better creativity, as long as you set the right constraints. Again, will all of these things over time have an impact on jobs? I think they will, but for right now, that's the reaction.

Yep. So Sarah from the audience as well, Russell, and also just a reminder for those who, you know, are on the call, feel free to drop your questions into the Zoom Q&A. We have a bunch coming in right now, so I'll field them as best as we can. Sarah from the Q&A has also asked, what advice would you give to somebody who's at like a midpoint in their career, right? Given the broader industry transformation, would, yeah, we'd love to hear your advice.

First of all, be that super user. Be the person that people turn to say, how did you do this and how can I do that? Because you're a couple steps ahead, be the one that's experimenting with new technology to be able to deliver better work more swiftly. So that's like the starting gate. I also do think in the— if you're midway into your career, this isn't really the question you're asking me, but like you have to start picking your specialization. And I think it's dangerous to stay a generalist for too long. Depending what you like to do, you can lean into different areas. Some parts of PR pay better than others. So like my view is always also try and congregate near where the money is and the money's being made, because that's where the opportunity is to get a return. But if you're just looking for internal job satisfaction, don't take that into consideration. But otherwise, like you may want to rank order and pick the one you're most interested in that pays the best.

Yeah, that's funny. And to that on specialization, I'm kind of curious what kind of specialization is, what kind of specialization are you talking about? Is it within the function within comms? Is it industry or segment function or otherwise? What are the kind of the—

Yeah, I think I was more thinking there intuitively because what, when I was mid-career, I was at an, I was at an agency is picking what industry are you going to If you're in the biopharma space, like that's highly rewarded. If you're in the financial services or financial comms, that's highly rewarded. Are you someone who wants to be a large-scale client leader? That's really well rewarded and run big integrated programs. Or are you going to be a media specialist and understand how the media ecosystem is moving and changing and building a contact base? There, there are different pieces of that puzzle. And then there are the analogs to that. From an in-house perspective.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Another, this is an anonymous question. For organizations looking to fill a new CCO or CMO role, what roles and responsibilities would be important to look for to make sure we're getting somebody who's right? So maybe, and Russell, you, you took the mantle of the first CCO role at BCG and the inaugural role as CCO. What if you were to, you know, if you were Christophe or Rich hiring now in 2026 for that role, like, what are you looking for?

Look, it depends on the kind of company. And so if you're, you know, at a CPG that needs to deliver growth in a low margin environment, you're going to look for something different than if you're at an airframe manufacturer, not to be named, that's had a whole bunch of challenges or whatever it might be. And so I do think first the composition of the company and like what the agenda is for its public presence has to define the job because it needs to be defined by— there's probably like a 5 to 7 year problem you're solving and you want that person to be very well equipped to solve that problem. Or you think the industry is changing and you want to get ahead of the curve and take a similar approach. So that's just like you have to rank order these things to start because you can— there are Tons of competent people, some are way more creative and are going to be, be able to plug into an advertising-based creative environment and do all that. Some people are going to be able to look at a risk and understand risk tolerance and public affairs, and that's where they're going to be led from. My personal view is though, what you really want is someone who's ambidextrous, who is, they can get as energized on the creative side as they can on the public affairs risk crisis defense side and someone who knows how to work with the creative communities, who, with the team who's really highly competent in that kind of agenda and can also turn and drive a well-trained, well-structured protect program. So that to me is really key. And then someone who can speak the language of the business and be able to connect with the board, the executive committee, the CEO, and be able to move at their pace and speak their language and understand their priorities. That seems like it's a given, but it's definitely not. So those would be the kinds of things. And then ultimately you need someone who can build a great team. Like one person is helpful. A great team is transformative. Yeah.

And it's funny to, I love that to the question for organizations looking to fill a CCO or CMO role, right? Even that is a big, that's a big decision, right? And starts with what's the business do? And if the CCO is going to live under the marketing team, right? What does that signal about your priorities and how the CCO's organization and construction is really going to fit within a broader marketing team? If you're a D2C, a consumer business, right? Selling, I don't know, lipstick or selling footballs or selling a consumer SaaS tool, right? Like that changes how you think about the communications team, the function, what their core competencies are versus say if you're a publicly traded financial services business and how does that fit with your IR team or your corporate affairs team or otherwise. So yeah, I think like I would also just say really think through the core objective of the business, think through what are the structures that are going to be the natural organic touchpoints to even put the CCO in before starting to work on the role charter. So I'll ask one more question here. Actually, I'm in— I see Sean in the call is actually a follow-up question to what we just asked, which is What is the difference between a CMO and a CCO? And maybe Russell, maybe I'll just, maybe we can talk through maybe some of the different role categories that we're seeing in comms more broadly. Your comms category, your public affairs, your corporate affairs, your CMO, marketing function. How are you seeing the different flavors of organizational construction in large companies really look like now?

Just to make it easy, I'll explain, maybe it's not so easy, but I'll explain how we structure it at BCG. The CMO and I started at the same time, and her job is data-driven marketing and making sure that BCG is communicating to the most important buyers around the most important content when it's paid or direct and in digital properties. And that's a distinct engagement, but the overall, what are we promoting? What's the content agenda? What do the analytics look like? How is the brand showing up? All of those kind of things, those are at the center that there's an overlap between the two. So there's the marketing agenda, the comms agenda, and then a whole chunk of overlap. So we decided to merge. So we have a Venn diagram kind of organization where there are those things that marketing does, there are those things that comms handles, and there are those things that sit in the middle that we have either shared resources or one person leads and the other one has significant input or reverse or the other way. And I, no way I could do what she does. She's like a very deep expert in data-driven marketing who's a senior partner at the firm and bringing that to bear for BCG versus on the comms side, all of the stakeholder strategy component of it and all of the earned mindset component of it. Gets driven. So that's really the difference between the two. So they're cousins, but they're not the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So to quickly shift gears here, I know a lot of people on this call right now are in planning mode. They're just wrapping up Q1, heading into Q2, working through budgets, working through priorities, figuring out where to spend their money, where to put resources. As teams are setting these priorities for the remainder of the year, where should they focus their time and their investments? What advice do you have to them?

Where—

I'm also curious, where do you conversely see areas where CCOs globally are maybe overinvesting and missing some of the mark?

Yeah, the first thing I'll say is we're very focused on doing fewer small things and a handful of big things that are very audience-rich and going to have a big impact. And we'll see how it goes, but it feels like very much the right play. As long as you can find those places to show up or the thinking to deliver to the marketplace. The next part is we're making sure we're AI ready. So all of the discoverability components that you need in the future, you really want to get on that now. Things like Wikipedia matter again, and making sure we understand the right path on that front, I think is really critical for us. And then there's the AI enablement of the function overall and making sure you have a chunk of change to fund that journey. Those are probably the top 3 right now. Of course, there's a range of others, but that's, those are the newer bits.

Yeah, I thought it was just coffee budget, Russell, but good to hear you guys are thinking about LLM search visibility and everything else.

Yeah.

I know that we just have a couple minutes left. So we're going to shift gears to our final section for the discussion. For those of us who are joining us for the first time at Clipbook, we oftentimes like to tell a story. Probably familiar to those of you on the call that have interacted with ClickBook. We always joke that every communications team, every PR team, every PA team has some poor 22-year-old intern or associate who at ClickBook, we lovingly refer to that associate as Derek. And poor Derek, we love Derek, we worship Derek because he is the poor soul that typically would get stuck doing all of the really painful manual workflows in the category. And at ClickBook, we exist really to support Derek's work. The daily monitoring, the research, the analysis to really give, to be a force multiplier for Derek. This next set of questions, Russell, I'm going to channel that 22-year-old associate Derek. I'm going to ask you lightning round format, some of the, some of the questions that the 22-year-old would ask the CCO of BCG. So are you ready to jump in?

All right, let's do it.

All right. So even as a senior leader in communications or otherwise, what's the most interny thing that you've done in your career?

When I started at Edelman, I had 3 months without a desk. So I had to just walk around and ask people if they needed help and then was like leaned over on whatever surface I could find to do my work. So that was probably highly interning.

Okay. And anything more recent from your time at BCG? That's fair enough. You ever had to fix the footnote of a slide or something?

Yeah, of course. As you know, at BCG, you like, you start with strategy, end up with the font size and people are giving feedback on that.

That's right. That, that is true. Been there. I've edited a lot of slides. What's the most memorable, fun, quirky campaign, ad comms campaign that you've worked on over the course of your career?

For a while, I ran Edelman's corporate and public affairs practice. And so like, I come more out of that end of things, but when I was running the New York office, I had to get involved in all sorts of consumer marketing, which was like not really my thing at first, but I learned from an amazing team. And one of my clients was Church Dwight. And we found out that they were going to introduce a line of personal massagers. And the team came up with this really clever idea, like to take an uncomfortable topic like that and have large-scale product giveaways. And having these given away at Grand Central and all sorts of things, like made people super uncomfortable and got great buzz. So that was like a really quirky, uncomfortable moment for me.

Nice. I love that. Last question for you. If you could put one piece of PR wisdom or communications wisdom on a billboard in Times Square, what would it say?

The adage that I like is that earned is a mindset, not a tactic.

Earned is a mindset, not a tactic. Okay. Do you want to peel back that onion for 30 seconds?

Yeah, so a lot of people think that it's like It's about earned media. And so like you're always just looking for the idea to place a story as opposed to like if your whole program had no money behind it, could it earn relevance across all of your audience? Yes or no? So like when we used to hire creatives at Edelman, we'd look at their creative and say, if I had no money, is this clever enough that it would carry the day? There's a very different way to approach things and there are brands that do it this way. And I think that's the job of comms is to bring earned as a mindset.

Awesome. I love that. We're just over time here. This was such a treat, Russell. Thank you so much for joining us. Before we run, we have one final plug for the attendees. If you were on this call, if you're part of a communications team or in a public affairs team, our team at Clipbook would love to meet you. Reach out anytime. You can reach out to me directly, adam@clipbook.com. We're a research and analysis platform for communications teams. We automate you know, poor Derek's manual workflows. So again, Russell, thank you and happy Thursday, everybody.

Thanks for having me.