Looking Ahead to 2026: Three Shifts Corporate Affairs Leaders Shouldn’t Ignore

As we step into 2026, it's clear that corporate America is navigating a landscape shaped by some fascinating shifts. For those of us in corporate affairs, these changes are more than just signals. They’re opportunities to make a real impact. Here are three big themes from 2025 that will shape the year ahead and how we, as corporate affairs professionals, can lead the way.

1. State Involvement and Market Access: A New Public-Private Dynamic

One of the standout shifts of 2025 was the increasing role of governments in negotiating market access for corporations. In other words, state capitalism took on a new flavor, with the government acting as a gatekeeper to lucrative markets and in some cases taking a slice of corporate profits. For example, in the United States, the federal government took equity stakes in strategic industries like steel and semiconductors to secure supply chains. In the European Union, there was a new pharmaceutical regulation package to speed up drug access and boost competitiveness. Meanwhile, China introduced a law to promote its private sector, encouraging more private business activity. And in Canada, a new law was passed to protect supply-managed sectors like dairy and poultry from trade concessions.

Taken together, these moves signal a global recalibration of the relationship between governments and corporate market access.

Where Corporate Affairs Can Make an Impact: As corporate affairs leaders, we can play a crucial role here by shaping the narrative and strategy. We can guide our companies in navigating these agreements, ensuring that we communicate transparently with stakeholders about why these partnerships are happening and how they align with our brand values. In other words, we’re the bridge between public policy and corporate reputation.

2. The Automation Evolution: Reshaping the Workforce

In 2025, automation and AI moved from experimentation to execution, with major companies such as Amazon and Verizon accelerating restructuring efforts in pursuit of efficiency and scale. While these shifts were often framed as productivity gains, they also introduced a new level of uncertainty inside organizations. Many employees increasingly viewed AI not as a tool, but as a potential replacement, fueling concern about job security, role relevance, and long-term career paths. This tension is reshaping how companies think about work itself. Automation is not simply eliminating roles; it is redefining them.

As organizations look ahead to 2026, a critical question emerges: how will AI change the type of talent companies recruit, the skills they prioritize, and the implicit contract between employer and employee? The answers will have implications not only for workforce planning, but for culture, trust, and internal stability.

Where Corporate Affairs Can Make an Impact: Corporate affairs leadership is critical in helping organizations navigate the human implications of automation and AI. The role is not simply to explain efficiency gains, but to help leadership anticipate and manage employee concern, uncertainty, and erosion of trust that can accompany rapid technological change. Corporate affairs professionals can advise on how and when to communicate AI adoption, ensuring transparency without fueling unnecessary fear.

Just as important is shaping the narrative around reskilling, workforce evolution, and talent strategy. As AI reshapes roles and skill requirements, corporate affairs can help align internal messaging with recruiting, learning and development, and workforce planning efforts, reinforcing that automation is a transition, not an abandonment, of people.

In 2026, organizations that approach AI with credibility and empathy will be better positioned to maintain morale, attract the right talent, and avoid internal issues that can quickly become reputational risks.

3. Culture, Inclusion, and the Corporate Reset

In 2025, several major corporations publicly restructured or scaled back traditional DEI programs amid shifting political, legal, and stakeholder pressures. These changes ranged from AT&T’s announced end of DEI initiatives to the widespread reframing of diversity commitments in annual corporate filings. The result was not a rejection of inclusion itself, but a recalibration of how companies talk about it, fund it, and operationalize it.

At the same time, company culture came under sharper scrutiny, with employees and external stakeholders increasingly judging organizations not by stated values, but by how leadership decisions reflected those values during periods of change, restructuring, and uncertainty.

As we look toward 2026, the question is no longer whether inclusivity matters. It’s whether companies have learned how to advance it in ways that are durable, defensible, and embedded in business strategy and corporate culture rather than positioned as standalone initiatives. The organizations that get this right will treat culture less as a headline and more as infrastructure reinforced through leadership behavior, decision-making, and employee experience allowing inclusion to endure even as the external environment remains volatile.

Where Corporate Affairs Can Make an Impact: Corporate affairs leadership here is essential. The role is not to retreat from inclusion, nor to overcorrect with performative messaging, but to help organizations recalibrate culture and belonging through the lens of business outcomes, workforce engagement, and enterprise risk. Corporate affairs leaders can guide companies in integrating inclusive practices into leadership development, talent pipelines, and employee experience in ways that are practical, durable, and less vulnerable to external scrutiny.

Equally important is advising leadership teams on when to speak, when to act quietly, and how to communicate cultural commitments with consistency and credibility. In the coming year, the companies that get this right will be those that treat culture not as a headline, but as infrastructure reinforced through decisions, behaviors, and accountability. Corporate affairs will be central to making that shift stick.

Final comments . . . In 2026, corporate affairs professionals have a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of these transformations. By bridging the gap between policy and practice, championing the human side of automation, and fostering a culture of flexibility and inclusion, we can help our organizations not just navigate change, but truly thrive in it.

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