It had been a very long time since I had picked up my pen to isolate trends, but our firm, Saper Vedere, is currently in such a ferment of innovation that it seemed important to take stock of a number of key subjects I have been observing for three years. Naturally, I am painting with a broad brush, without caveats or half-measures, to be sure of hitting my approximate target. It covers three main categories:
• Technological (AI, tool customisation, new practices).
• Societal (rise of ethical issues, tensions over values, generational change).
• Economic (pressure on budgets, SaaS transition, reordering of priorities).
Pioneering organisations in issue management will begin to emerge
With the arrival of artificial intelligence and the rise of societal issues, public affairs, communications and CSR departments will gradually align. The major projects around AI agents (autonomous systems designed to perceive their environment, analyse information, and make decisions or carry out actions to achieve predefined goals) will encourage these teams to work together more, despite tools, objectives and indicators that often differ.
These departments will realise that their missions are closer than they appear and that many synergies are possible, notably through a consolidated budget able to support their shared ambitions.
This change is already noticeable at the agency, where more and more departments approach us jointly on specific issues. It heralds the creation of a single portfolio managing the “3 extras”: extra-financial, extra-legal and extra-reputational. It is a domain that is still largely uncodified, where everything rests on compliance, the social dimension, and subtle management of risks.
The search for indicators that make sense
This new portfolio will seek to develop indicators far more relevant in its own eyes, setting aside the standardised metrics supplied off the shelf by platforms and SaaS tools. This approach will become a necessity, because it will have to demonstrate its added value to the CEOs of large groups. Into the bin:
- The number of meetings with politicians in public affairs (the only discipline that, miraculously, still sets objectives of means rather than results).
- Fake social media impressions, displayed in trillions and totally disconnected from reality.
- Absurd reputation scores, which count three “neutral” mentions as one “positive”, artificially boosting quarterly results and the reports of CAC 40 companies after each sponsorship deal.
- Advertising value equivalents, or the simple count of the number of articles as a performance indicator in press relations.
- Likes, shares and other engagements from different platforms, with completely heterogeneous meanings and often devoid of real value.
Data in organisations is about to truly take off. With it, the interoperability of infrastructure will make it possible to isolate dedicated, customised and ultra-360 funnels, optimised for strategic issues such as key recruitments, acquisitions, partnerships and much more.
Small teams, centralisation and globalisation of processes
Large organisations will seek to centralise their architecture, their operational management teams and other functions to maximise efficiency. With artificial intelligence, priority will go to interoperability, to small, highly trained and competent teams, and to global management of hyper-specialised areas.
Social listening SaaS tools will begin their decline
The online reputation SaaS market is in complete stagnation, just as economic analysts are already predicting the end of SaaS (software as a service) in favour of AI agents. When you analyse the market, the tools are almost strictly the same from year to year, except that they have incorporated corpora without ever thinking about the user experience they provided. An unusable monster, a tool with no interaction, or data fragmented across 485 dashboards to cover every network: monitoring social media has become rather Kafkaesque.
At the dawn of AI agents, no-code dashboards and an era of falling budgets, the time of global SaaS tools multiplying personas among their clients is going to be difficult. A large part will have to be made more customisable. When you see the time and resources invested in making a social media report shareable and customisable for the executive committee...
All the more so because data is becoming a costly issue for SaaS vendors, who are forced to cut their margins. This is both the final nail in the coffin and a lifeline: on one side, it now prevents organisations from retrieving their own data, making them dependent on these tools; on the other, it limits the scope for these tools to innovate.
Moreover, contracts with X prohibit any reseller from reselling their data outside their own software. And X has no interest in opening up access to its precious data, which directly feeds its Grok artificial intelligence. Because where the politically biased fool looks at the social network X, the wise man looks at Grok's valuation since the takeover of X.
Ethics and values will be at the heart of many decisions
Absolutely crucial dilemmas of values and ethics will arise, not only for leaders but also for their teams. Among the difficult questions:
- Can we stay on a social media platform that does not respect our values but is the only one holding assets essential to carrying out our societal strategy?
- Should we lobby RN politicians if they become the majority or play a key role in the National Assembly?
- What do we do with artificial intelligence if it makes it possible to lay off 200 people? How are these AIs trained, and what biases might they reproduce?
These dilemmas are immensely complex. The choices ahead will rely on a variety of ethical compasses: the profile of the leaders, the organisation's core values, employees' expectations and many other factors.
Large organisations will miss crises
Social media departments and tools remind me of PR departments and tools ten years ago: bogged down in ageing processes, connected to outdated media, and covering only a fraction of what really makes up reputation.
We are still left with a majority of CAC 40 organisations that “monitor” their reputation on the basis of forums, AFP web articles (paywall obliges), X, YouTube video titles and public Meta pages (to read the AFP web articles a second time).
Out: Threads, Bluesky, Telegram, TikTok, podcasts, YouTube videos (beyond titles and descriptions), and LinkedIn.
The hole in the ozone layer is healing just as fast as the coverage gap of these groups is growing
As ten years ago, I therefore predict that some crises will escape social media and communications departments. They will be detected too late, through other indicators such as a fall in sales, recruitment difficulties, or other peripheral signals.
There will be an AI & data scandal in politics
When you look at the political mapping that Grok can produce on a profile, you understand that artificial intelligence will soon make it possible to collect and analyse data with disconcerting ease. It will enable an extremely precise definition of individuals' political, societal and philosophical identity.
The simplicity of these practices will make them almost impossible to regulate, so accessible will their use be and so hard their power to control. There will be a scandal.
Hard times for young students
We are entering a period of turbulence for young students fresh out of university. Public affairs and communications already generally favour profiles with at least three years of agency experience, and the rise of artificial intelligence risks freezing the market temporarily.
The tasks usually entrusted to interns and work-study students will be largely handled by bespoke AI tools. Mid-level managers will then rework these outputs, while seniors will provide their strategic recommendations.
All this is compounded by business school and university training that is completely out of date, with some still holding fountain-pen exams. Even if studying Hobbes's Leviathan or Machiavelli's The Prince remains worthwhile, practice in the field is evolving so fast that it is quite detached from any real-world reality.
Teachers' pay is so abysmal that the people capable of training the next generation will pass. And for the boldest, the French administration will see to it that they are put off by the abstruse paperwork it demands.
The technological resources needed to match professional standards will be almost unaffordable for one generation. Of course, vendors will kindly make tools available to schools free of charge. But all of this will take time.
In short, times are likely to be temporarily hard for students and young graduates, until the market adapts to these changes... It will not, however, last very long.
Public affairs will integrate communications and social media
After decades of considering their missions more important than those of communications agencies, public affairs agencies will be forced to mobilise communications tools and services. Because:
The new political generation is coming
This generation, connected since adolescence and familiar with social media as a natural extension of daily life, will profoundly shake up traditional practices once it fully takes power. The system of media op-eds without real pressure and influence work around them risks showing its limits, and it will hurt.
Getting ahead in order to be on time
Societal issues are often integrated into public affairs strategy far too late relative to real needs.
Saving time and gaining a competitive advantage
The high point of public affairs lies in the institutional meeting. An organisation that limits itself to that meeting has an hour to present itself, explain its position and exchange views. An organisation that communicates beforehand, by contrast, spends less time explaining who it is and what it wants, because it has already made its identity and position known. This is a real competitive gain in approaching issues.
Bringing people together
Social media communication is structured so that the opinion leaders needed for a good societal presence follow the organisation's accounts and can be mobilised at any time to sound the alarm if necessary.
Providing more ammunition
Communication can also be a lever of pressure on elected officials where all political options seem closed.