Let me be honest about something that does not get said enough in our industry circles: most of what Sri Lankan organisations call “Communications” today is going to look painfully thin by 2030. Not because the craft of good storytelling will somehow lose its relevance, but because the entire foundation on which communications work is built and measured is shifting under our feet, and very few organisations here are paying attention.
Gartner recently published a set of predictions about the future of the Communications function that I have been sitting with for a while. Not because they are shocking, but because they are specific. They put numbers and timelines to things that many of us in the industry have been sensing for years but could not quite articulate to a sceptical CFO or a board that still thinks of PR as press releases and event coverage. Reading through the findings, my honest reaction was not surprise. It was urgency.
So let me walk through what Gartner is actually saying, what it means for Sri Lankan organisations specifically, and why the time to start thinking about this is right now rather than 2028.
Communications is Moving to the Centre of the Room
Gartner’s headline finding is this: by 2030, Communications will sit at the centre of enterprise AI strategy. Not as a function that benefits from AI tools, but as the function that shapes how narrative, data and technology come together to drive business outcomes.
That is a significant repositioning. For most of the last few decades, the Communications function lived in an interesting but ultimately peripheral space. Strategy was made in the boardroom. Communications translated that strategy into language for external audiences. The function was downstream of everything that mattered, which is also why it was always the first budget to get cut when things got tight.
What Gartner describes is a fundamentally different arrangement. The most effective communications teams in 2030 will not be waiting for strategy to hand down messages. They will be inside the intelligence loop, helping to shape decisions in real time by bringing together data, narrative analysis, stakeholder intelligence and technology in ways that genuinely inform what the business does next.
This is not aspirational language. It is a description of how the function needs to be built if it is to remain relevant. And for Sri Lankan organisations that are still thinking of communications as a vendor relationship rather than an internal capability, the gap between where they are and where they need to be is already significant.
What the Gartner Numbers Actually Say
The report makes three specific predictions that I think every communications leader and senior executive in Sri Lanka should read carefully.
The first is that by 2027, large language models will replace traditional search engines as the primary way people discover information, and this will drive a doubling of PR and earned media budgets globally.
This one tends to get a reaction when I raise it in conversations with clients. The doubling of budgets sounds counterintuitive until you understand the mechanism. When someone types a question into ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI search today, they are not getting a list of links. They are getting a synthesised answer that has been constructed from credible sources, particularly earned media coverage, owned content and authoritative third-party references. Paid advertising does not feature in that answer. Credibility does.
What this means practically is that an organisation’s visibility in an AI-driven discovery environment depends almost entirely on the quality and volume of genuine media coverage, thought leadership content and credible online presence it has built over time. The Sri Lankan companies that spent years treating their PR retainer as a discretionary cost are now sitting on a very thin foundation. The ones that invested in building real editorial relationships and genuine public positioning are in a meaningfully better position, and that position is going to become more valuable, not less.
Gartner’s data shows that 36 percent of CCOs globally are already increasing PR investment in response to this shift, with another 34 percent increasing corporate brand budgets, 26 percent in public websites and 23 percent in external social media. The direction of travel is clear.
The second prediction is that by 2029, 45 percent of Chief Communications Officers will adopt what Gartner calls narrative intelligence technologies to monitor and manage reputation in a landscape where disinformation moves at a pace that traditional monitoring simply cannot keep up with.
This is the one that I think has the most immediate relevance for Sri Lanka. We have all seen how quickly a story can travel here, across social media, into messaging apps, picked up by online publications, and then landing in mainstream media, often with significant distortion along the way. Traditional media monitoring, even the good platforms, are capturing what has already happened. They are not mapping how a narrative is forming, where it is gaining traction, or how fast it is moving before it becomes a crisis.
Narrative intelligence works differently. It identifies emerging story arcs before they reach critical mass, maps the networks through which particular narratives are spreading, and gives communications teams the ability to intervene when there is still room to shape the story rather than simply respond to it. In Sri Lanka’s political and business environment, where reputations can shift fast and the line between stakeholder communication and public narrative is very thin, this kind of capability is not a luxury for large multinationals. It is a practical necessity for any organisation that faces meaningful public scrutiny.
The third prediction is about money: by 2029, Communications spending on data and analytics will double, reaching around 6 percent of the total function budget.
I find this one particularly telling because it speaks to a problem I have watched play out in board meetings and budget reviews for years. Communications has always struggled to speak the language of the C-suite. Marketing had its attribution models and conversion data. Finance had the numbers. Operations had its efficiency metrics.
Communications has historically shown up with coverage reports and media value equivalencies that executives nod at politely and then quietly discount.
The shift Gartner is describing is about closing that credibility gap by building measurement frameworks that actually connect communications activity to business outcomes. Not proxies for value. Actual evidence of how communications shifted audience behaviour, accelerated a sales cycle, reduced regulatory risk or influenced a critical stakeholder relationship. When communications leaders can make that case with data, they stop defending a budget and start driving a strategic conversation.
That is the seat at the table that the function has always needed but rarely earned by merit of its measurement alone.
What Actually Needs to Change
The practical implications of all of this come down to a few things that most communications programmes in Sri Lanka are not yet doing.
Content and campaigns need to be designed with AI discovery in mind, not just traditional search or human consumption. This means being genuinely authoritative and specific in your content, the kind of content that gets cited in AI-generated answers rather than simply indexed by search algorithms. It means building a body of thought leadership that has real depth rather than volume.
It also means developing the internal capability to turn complex data into clear, compelling narratives that actually reach the people who need to act on them. Executives and boards are not short of information. They are short of clarity. The communications function that can take a complicated set of signals and distil them into a story that makes a decision obvious is the function that gets invited into the room where decisions are made.
And it means treating paid, earned, shared and owned media not as separate channels with separate teams and separate objectives, but as different instruments that need to be orchestrated around a single, coherent narrative that can be tracked and measured against real outcomes. That level of integration requires both the right thinking and the right tools, and most organisations are not there yet.
Where Sri Lankan Organisations Stand
I want to be transparent about how I see our role in all of this, because it relates directly to how we have always thought about communications practice.
Mark and Comm has never been a conventional agency in the sense of producing creative campaigns, managing routine press coverage or serving as a crisis resource that gets called when things go wrong. What we have consistently focused on is something that requires more patience and more commitment from clients: building real communications capability inside organisations. Not managing communications on behalf of a brand, but helping that brand develop the infrastructure, the intelligence and the strategic discipline to do it properly themselves.
The most concrete expression of this in recent years has been our exclusive partnerships with Hootsuite and Talkwalker for Sri Lanka and the Maldives. These are enterprise-grade platforms for social media management, employee advocacy and social listening, and the reason we pursued these partnerships is precisely because we believe that organisations need to own their intelligence, not rent it. When a company builds a genuine social listening capability in-house, it starts to understand its stakeholder environment in real time. It stops being surprised by what is happening in its own space. It makes better decisions, faster.
The same thinking applies to what Gartner is describing for 2030. Narrative intelligence, data-driven measurement frameworks, AI-informed content strategy: these are not things you can bolt onto a monthly PR retainer. They require investment in the right tools, the right talent and the right processes, and they require a leadership team that understands why that investment matters. We are building out our advisory practice specifically to help organisations navigate this shift, not by replacing what they already have but by adding the layers of capability and intelligence that will determine whether their communications function is relevant by the end of this decade.
The honest truth is that most agencies in Sri Lanka are still focused on the things that are most visible and most billable: content production, events, media relations, advertising adjacents. There is nothing wrong with any of that work. But it does not prepare an organisation for the environment Gartner is describing. What prepares an organisation is a willingness to think about communications structurally rather than tactically, and to start building that structure now rather than waiting for the competitive pressure to become obvious.
The organisations that begin this work in the next twelve to eighteen months will be in a fundamentally different position by 2028. The ones that wait for the landscape to force the conversation will be spending twice as much to catch up. That has always been the pattern with major shifts in how communications works, and there is no reason to think this one will be any different.
About the Author
Thanzyl Thajudeen is the Managing Director of Mark & Comm (Pvt) Ltd, recognised as Rest of South Asia PR Agency of the Year 2025 by Campaign. He is a Chartered PR Practitioner and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the first recipient of this distinction from South Asia, and serves on the PRCA Asia Pacific Board and CIPR International Committee. He is a Fellow of CIM and CMI, and also serves on the PRCA Education Advisory Board and Membership Committee.
