As communicators brace for another year of AI disruption, two of Gartner’s latest predictions suggest the function is on the brink of its biggest reset in decades — externally and internally.
The first shift is already visible in how people search. By 2027, Gartner predicts mass adoption of public large language models (LLMs) will double PR and earned media budgets, as conversational AI tools increasingly replace traditional search engines.
The data signals are striking. AI-powered chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw traffic surge 608 percent year over year between the first half of 2024 and 2025, while Perplexity AI grew 262 percent. Meanwhile, traditional search giants Google and Microsoft’s Bing both slipped 1 percent, even if they still dominate volume.
More importantly for communications leaders, AI answer engines overwhelmingly favor nonpaid sources. Vendor research cited by Gartner shows more than 95 percent of links referenced in AI-generated answers come from earned, shared, or organic owned content, with 27 percent originating directly from earned media. Press releases, long a staple of corporate comms, are among the least cited. When recency is implied in a query, nearly half of the citations are news coverage.
The implication is profound: visibility in the AI era will hinge less on paid search and more on authoritative third-party validation. High-domain news outlets, government and NGO content, encyclopedic entries and academic research are shaping the narratives that LLMs surface.
As a result, Gartner expects organizations to reallocate spending from paid channels toward PR, corporate brand, owned platforms and external social — and to build new capabilities around answer engine optimization (AEO). Communications teams will need to benchmark how AI tools source information, invest in proactive media relationships and develop new measurement models to track how earned coverage influences AI-generated answers.
If the first prediction reshapes how companies are discovered, the second transforms how they speak to their own people.
By 2028, Gartner forecasts that 75 percent of employees will rely on chatbots as their primary channel for internal communications, replacing newsletters, intranets and even managers. The appetite is already there: 75 percent of employees say they use AI tools at work, and 85 percent of managers believe AI could meaningfully improve their teams’ output.
The driver is in information overload. Employees experiencing high overload are significantly less likely to feel aligned with strategy or intend to stay. Conversational AI offers an antidote: personalized, on-demand answers for pull communications and tailored alerts for push updates. As hierarchies flatten and manager headcount shrinks, chatbots will increasingly contextualize strategy and change in real time.
For chief communications officers, that means redesigning the internal channel mix around conversational AI — while simultaneously tightening governance. Safeguards against hallucinations, misinformation and fragmented narratives will require deep partnerships with IT, HR and legal. Success will be measured not by open rates, but by adoption, satisfaction and strategic alignment.
