Almost 66% of chief communications officers say their job scope has expanded over the past two years — yet 45.9% believe they are not getting the resources to handle it. Those two figures anchor the 2026 Page Navigator Benchmark Trend Report, which gathered responses from 179 CCOs across 33 countries.

The squeeze is forcing structural rethinks. Almost nine out of 10 respondents said their organization reviewed its communications structure over the past year.

Where headcount and budgets are heading

One resource clearly lagging the expanded expectations is people. In Page's 2025 survey, 49.4% of CCOs reported increasing headcount. This year that number fell to 35.2%. Headcount decreases reached 29.1%, versus 37.8% last year, and 35.8% said their teams stayed flat, compared with 22.8% in 2025.

Budgets tell a similar story. Only 36.5% of respondents said their overall communications budgets rose over the past year, down from 39.1% in 2025. Budget decreases climbed to 31.1% from 24.8%.

Is AI eating comms jobs? Respondents say no

The usual suspect in headcount-reduction narratives — AI — barely registers in the data. Just 2.6% of CCOs said AI led to job eliminations over the past year, and another 2.6% said employees were redeployed to new roles. About 1% said AI actually created new roles.

Despite the industry's AI obsession, practitioners rank it low on their actual to-do lists. Out of 22 job duties surveyed, AI strategy ranked 19th. Media relations/PR topped the list, followed by corporate reputation, organization-wide employee communications and content creation. ESG/sustainability communication, ESG/sustainability strategy and DEI occupied the bottom three spots.

The single biggest factor shaping what companies expect from comms teams is business transformation, cited by 79.7% of respondents.

Does CEO access actually prove business value?

For years, "a seat at the table" has served as shorthand for comms-function success. The Page data pushes back on that. Reporting directly to the CEO may help a CCO join the executive committee, but the survey finds it does little to build confidence in demonstrating a communications team's business value.

"The data show that access alone is not enough," said Candace Steele Flippin, Page's VP of thought leadership and professional development. "A CCO can have access to the CEO and still face real constraints in demonstrating business value."

Flippin argues the more useful diagnostic is the function itself — its structure, resources and capabilities — and whether they align with what the organization expects communications to deliver.

What this means for practitioners

For comms leads reading the numbers, the takeaway is blunt: mandates are growing while budgets and headcount mostly shrink or stall. The share of teams holding steady on headcount jumped 13 points year over year, and nearly a third absorbed budget cuts.

At the same time, the work hasn't changed as much as conference agendas suggest. Media relations, reputation and employee communications still dominate the CCO's calendar, while AI strategy sits near the bottom of the priority pile — even as only a sliver of respondents report AI-driven job losses.

The structural reviews now underway at nearly nine in 10 organizations suggest CCOs are not passively absorbing the mismatch. Whether those reviews produce better-resourced functions or simply leaner org charts with wider mandates is the question Page's next benchmark will have to answer.