Are communicators prepared for emerging risks?
Philippe Borremans analyses the findings from his 2025 survey of crisis communication professionals.
Image by Rochak Shukla | Freepik
In late 2025, we surveyed 102 senior crisis, emergency, and risk communication professionals to discover how the field is responding to a risk environment that keeps getting worse.
Nearly half of respondents we surveyed have more than 15 years in the field. This means that these are not junior practitioners guessing at the future; instead, they have managed real crises, with around 60 per cent of them having handled between one and five major public crises in the past two years alone. These individuals are aware of what is coming, yet they're not acting on it.
As we advance into an era of compounding risks, AI sits at the centre of discussion for many professionals. However, it seems alarming that very few are ready. In our survey, adoption scored a mean of just 2.49 out of five, while almost half of the organisations rated themselves at a ‘one’ or ‘two’. The barriers to adoption are not simply technical, but organisational: lack of in-house expertise topped the results, followed by budget constraints and data privacy concerns.
Moreover, while AI threatens organisational reputation, it isn’t being utilised to detect and counter it. Our results revealed that 37 per cent rated AI-generated deepfakes as high or critical risk; however, 77 per cent admitted they have no documented protocol for dealing with it, and more than a third have no plans to develop one.
The integration picture is not much better. Crisis communication plans are most tightly connected with executive leadership. This is generally a good sign; however, integration with human resources, legal, and cybersecurity remains weak, scoring below three out of five across the board.
This matters because crises rarely stay within one function. A cyberattack could trigger a data breach, which in turn results in employee unrest and media scrutiny. When the functions do not talk to each other before the crisis hits, the response falls apart. Our data backs this, as there is a strong correlation between testing frequency and cross-functional integration. The organisations that appear best prepared are not the ones with the most polished plans; rather, they are the ones that practise together, across functions, under pressure.
This makes one of the survey’s findings all the more frustrating. While everyone agrees that testing works, 12 per cent of organisations never or rarely test their plans and nearly 10 per cent do not test them at all. The reasons are familiar: competing priorities, resource constraints, fear of exposing weaknesses, or simply no clear owner of the process. But those explanations do not change the reality that a plan on a shelf is already obsolete.
Trust presents a similar challenge. Two-thirds of respondents agreed that maintaining stakeholder trust is harder today than five years ago. However, the measurement infrastructure to track where trust erodes, why, and how fast remains strikingly underdeveloped. Many organisations still continue to rely on gut instinct and media clip counts. Without baseline data, you cannot demonstrate effect, and without demonstrating effect, you cannot secure investment.
The capability gaps identified by respondents point to where the profession believes it needs to go next. AI literacy, data analytics and digital forensics all rank among the skills practitioners want to develop. The question now is whether that intention converts into actual budget, actual training, and actual change.
Based on our results, we can conclude that a crisis communicator in 2026 will not survive as a press officer with better tools. Instead, they will need to read data, understand AI governance, work across legal, HR, IT, and operations, and translate all of it into language the board understands.
The full report, including detailed survey data and practitioner quotes, is available for free download here.
Philippe Borremans is an independent crisis, risk and emergency communication consultant and Managing Director of RiskComms.