“Corporate communications is an endurance sport – with everything that entails”

Where is communications management heading? Artificial intelligence will not reduce the need for strategic communicators – it will increase it. An interview with the trade magazine Kommunikationsmanager (issue 03/2026) aboutcommunicators’ professional identity and the relationship between communication and management.

Professor Ehrhart, you have announced that you will leave Bosch at the end of the year and focus more strongly on projects outside the company. What is at the top of your priority list for the coming months—as Chief Communications Officer and as a leader?

Christof Ehrhart: After three decades in international communications roles, I am about to begin a new chapter. I have served as Chief Communications Officer in the media, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries, aerospace and defense, logistics, and now at Bosch, a technology company. Since starting out in the 1990s, I have communicated in every phase of the economic cycle, from boom to crisis. Having quite literally seen it all as a communicator, I now want to share my knowledge beyond the confines of a single company. Effective communication has a major influence on developments in business and politics, and I can contribute in that regard. Until the end of the year, I will support the new Management to the best of my ability as it takes its first steps, while also working to make myself as dispensable as possible to my communications team. Announcing my departure has not changed my daily routine: my days still begin at 7:30 a.m. with the situation briefing for top management.

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Providing food for thought and offering deep insights – communicative advice beyond self-dwarfing.

The debate surrounding the actual value creation of communications management goes back much further than the current discussion about the role of AI in corporate communications and agencies. Media scholar Michael Kunczik fueled this debate well into the 1990s by consistently using the terms PR and propaganda synonymously and, when asked about the daily work of communications managers, paraphrasing a statement from Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo”: “Public relations workers are a race of inventive dwarfs who can be hired for anything.” This (mis)understanding still precedes the discipline, and therefore it is no surprise that communication tasks are regularly defined today as bullshit jobs that can be done by AI sooner or later.

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Proximity and distance – How corporate communications successfully integrates into management

Over the past decade, the understanding of goal-oriented management in companies has fundamentally changed: Disruptive digital technologies, most recently generative artificial intelligence, increased value creation expectations among diverse stakeholders beyond economic success and intensified national and international distributional conflicts have created a completely new environment. Today, corporate added value arises in the tension between fundamental material and identity-related “experiences of loss” in society, which sociologist Andreas Reckwitz describes in his latest book as the “fundamental problem of modernity,” and the surplus reality that arises from innovation-intensive competition in a volatile geopolitical environment.

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Communicators in the Loop — Attractions in technical communications management

The relationship between humans and machines has been a defining feature of the world of work in its various eras since the first industrial revolution. Now, there is intense debate about the role that artificially intelligent machines and their applications might play in production, creation, and decision-making processes in the future. Significant changes are expected in communications management in particular, because the unique characteristic of humans as designers, distributors, and interpreters of content and messages, which has existed since ancient clay tablets, is coming to an end. Yuval Noah Hariri argues that AI will be not only an artificial “myth-maker” but also a digital “bureaucrat,” whose dark side is more likely to be read in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” than seen in James Cameron’s “Terminator.”

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Thinking in the second future tense – communications management as an orientation task

There is an inherent tension in the nature of corporate communications: between an organization that is directionally geared towards achieving goals and resource efficiency and the collaterally effective ability of people to communicate, which is a natural characteristic that eludes all-encompassing control. In the roughly one hundred years of development into a modern management discipline, the focus has nevertheless always been on the instrumental, goal-oriented aspects of communication. If we as representatives of our profession today confidently claim strategic approaches for ourselves, then we are also meeting the increased expectations of the reliable transmission performance of corporate communication.

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