Who's in the Room? AI, Digital Communications, and the Audiences You Didn't See Coming

AI has changed how communications teams work. It's also changed who's watching – and most organisations are only dealing with one side of that.

This parallel session brings together two conversations: how a global corporation is building the internal capability and culture to use digital tools and AI well across communications, and what a multi-year behavioural audit of corporate websites reveals about the external audiences (human and machine) that comms directors aren't seeing or designing for.

PART 1 - Decentralised by design, aligned by 1,100+ voices: how ABB is embedding AI across its global communications function

ABB operates across 100+ countries with a communications function that cannot afford to wait for central mandates. When AI arrived at scale, the question was not whether to adopt it -- it was how to move teams from experimentation to genuine strategic impact, without losing local relevance or global coherence.

In this session, Megan Ronaldson and Katja Roelants du Vivier will share how ABB built a Digital Community of Practice that turned individual curiosity into collective capability. From Abby, ABB's internal AI platform, to practical frameworks for web, social, and storytelling -- they will show what it looks like when AI stops being a tool people use and starts being the reason teams can do more meaningful work.

The session will leave you with a replicable model for embedding AI in a decentralised organisation, and a clear argument for why communities of practice are not a soft investment -- they are a structural answer to the speed of change.

PART 2 - Your Corporate Website Has an Audience You've Never Met - and They're Forming Opinions You Can't See

AI systems are crawling it. Journalists are monitoring it. Institutional investors are forming opinions from it. ESG analysts are scoring you against it. Most comms directors have no idea any of this is happening.

Drawing on a multi-year behavioural audit of global corporate websites - and on the new rules for credible corporate communication when your audience is half-machine - this session shows who actually arrives, what they read, how long they stay, and what they leave with. The audiences that matter most to corporate reputation are doing things on your website that comms directors aren't seeing - and aren't designing for.

A session on what's actually happening on your website, who's behind it, and what to do about the gap between what your website was built for and what it's now being used for.