Sholto Douglas-Home, Chief MarComms and Sales Officer, Expo City DubaiAs financial analysts and investors debate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) giants’ soaring valuations, and employers confront the technology’s seismic effect on the skills landscape, there’s no doubt we are firmly in the AI era.
From a marketing and communications perspective, AI is rapidly reshaping our industry, not least in the areas of creative workflows, media performance, data interrogation and the speed of decision-making.
While AI presents a huge opportunity for our profession, navigating this transformation to an AI-empowered world poses several challenges for our industry to grapple with in 2026 and beyond.
Securing a seat at the AI table
With companies accelerating their adoption of AI, marketing leaders must ask themselves: how do we assert our place at an organisation’s AI table and ensure we play a meaningful role in the journey ahead?
In answering this question, the challenge lies in connecting AI’s potential with enhancing the customer experience and supporting a brand’s integrity and reputation.
This means positioning our profession as the ‘translators’ within the organisation: helping interpret the complex technology driving AI to deliver tangible, human-centred value for customers and stakeholders, as well as demonstrating commercial benefits the rest of the C-suite can relate to.
Reorienting teams without intimidating them
As part of this journey, perhaps the most immediate challenge lies closer to home. AI is reshaping our workforce and, for many marcomms teams, that change can feel unsettling.
For marketing leaders, our role is to create an environment that frames AI as an enabler, not a threat. How can we reorient our teams – and the skillsets within them – to embrace AI, rather than be intimidated by it?
AI presents marketers with an opportunity to amplify and accelerate so much of what we do: from prompting a reappraisal of how other departments engage with marketing and communications professionals to demonstrating how we can play a major role in generating value and driving innovation across an organisation.
I have seen how quickly marketers in Expo City have mastered new AI tools to deliver increased productivity, particularly in creative workflows and production processes.
And with marketing sitting at the interface between organisations and their audiences, our remit is expanding to include championing the ethical and transparent use of AI. In 2026, the organisations that thrive will be those that invest as much in their people skills as they do in the technology itself.
Retaining our primary focus as marketers
Another key challenge is ensuring that chief marketing officers (CMOs) are not so blindsided by AI that they lose sight of their primary responsibility – guiding, nurturing, protecting and managing the brands for which we are responsible.
While brands may sit as intangible assets on a company’s balance sheet – until their value is realised in a sale or acquisition – a clearly articulated and powerfully communicated brand proposition is an immensely valuable asset, and one that no other department in an organisation can lay claim to.
“For marketing leaders, our role is to create an environment that frames AI as an enabler, not a threat.”
This is why marketing and communication teams must never stop seeking braver, more distinctive, inventive and future-proofed propositions for their brands. We must constantly challenge what our brands stand for, why they exist, and why they deserve the attention of our audiences in increasingly crowded markets.
Strong brands are built on rigorously defined positioning and strategy, supported by a cycle of constant evaluation and evolution. AI may enhance how we execute, but CMOs remain responsible for the creativity and stewardship required to grow brand value over the long-term.
Avoiding the corporate cancel culture
In an unforgiving, always-on media environment, too many organisations are dangerously exposed to the consequences of poor crisis communication – more so considering AI’s potential to amplify reputational risks through misinformation, speed and scale.
Whether it’s a customer complaint going viral or a high-profile accusation of ‘purpose washing’, failure to prioritise crisis preparedness makes organisations vulnerable to the corporate cancel culture. A brand’s reputation can be damaged in hours, yet it can take years to rebuild and require enormous levels of investment. Too often, organisations rely on fragile internal systems that have not been stress-tested, with unclear ownership and crisis manuals that sit untouched in shared digital folders.
Marketing and communication leaders must treat crisis preparedness as a core brand strategy. This means conducting regular reassessments to maintain clear lines of responsibility for rapid response, running refresher scenario planning and simulation exercises, and ensuring robust tools for social listening are in place.
More than ever, disciplined crisis communications should be seen as the safety net that protects the brands we work so hard to build.
In short, it’s clear that AI will continue to reshape the workplace throughout 2026. How organisations – and particularly their marketing and communications teams – steer this evolution to ensure that technology serves as a force for good depends as much on the strength of human insight, interaction and relationships as it does on AI itself.
By Sholto Douglas-Home, Chief MarComms and Sales Officer, Expo City Dubai
