In this episode of The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Heidrick & Struggles’ Paula Davis speaks with Corey duBrowa, the global CEO of Burson and a seasoned communications leader whose career spans senior roles at Google, Salesforce, Starbucks, and Nike.

Drawing on his decades of experience, Corey offers insights for today’s corporate communications leaders on how to effectively harness AI, anticipate and respond to emerging trends, and guide CEOs and boards in framing and asking the right questions that shape strategy and reputation.

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior level executive search, leadership assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture-shaping. Every day, we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Paula Davis: Hi, I'm Paula Davis, a consultant in Heidrick & Struggles’ New York office, and a member of the Corporate Affairs and Communications Practice. Today I am delighted to be joined by Corey duBrowa, the CEO of Burson, the Global Communications Leader purpose-built to create value for clients through reputation.

Corey is also a member of the executive committee of Burson’s parent company, WPP, the creative transformation company. Corey brings a 30-year career in brands, technology companies, and agencies to his role leading the flagship Burson group of companies, which includes excom earned first global communications agency for tech brands and brands with a tech story, Burson Buchanan, the financial communications and capital markets advisory firm, GCI Health, and Hill & Knowlton before Burson, many of which you may know. Corey was the global CEO of BCW and the BCW group of companies. He came to BCW after spending five years as vice president of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google and its parent company Alphabet.

Before his tenure at Google, Corey was executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at Salesforce and spent seven years at Starbucks as senior Vice President of Global Communications. He has extensive agency experience having begun his career and employee communications at Nike.

Please welcome Corey to the podcast today. Hi, Corey. 

Corey duBrowa: Hi, Paula. It's great to see you, and thanks for such a nice introduction.

Paula Davis: Wow. I mean, the experiences that you've had, it was hard to focus in on one topic, but we're going to tackle AI in this masterclass from many different vantage points. Let's start with the easiest question on AI. Where's the lowest hanging fruit? What should every corporate communications leader be doing now on the AI front, if they're doing nothing else? 

Corey duBrowa: First of all, let me just start this way. I think AI is creating tools and flexibility that are changing our profession. And what I mean by that is that when I was at Google and even before that working at Salesforce, we used to talk about in engineering the concept of full stack-engineers.

So, there used to be like real specialization in engineering. You know, there were people who coded, there were people who sort of proofed the code, there were people who essentially finished it and shipped it. And as code became more sophisticated and AI kind of crawled into that picture of coding, they started calling people full-stack engineers, meaning there wasn't the need for specialization. You were now hiring engineers that could kind of do everything at every step of the creation or build process. And I think that's also happening for communicators. So, you're now seeing communicators that can really do it all; they can do the analysis, the strategy, the creative, the execution, the consultation, the measurement, all of it.

And I think that communicators developing this new expertise means that, from where I sit, they're even more valuable to clients and within their companies than they were before. So, in terms of the lowest hanging fruit, now we'll get to your question. AI is such a disruptive force for the industry, right? When I think about platform shifts that we've seen before, I think about what we experienced with the dawn of the internet back in the nineties and how that changed communication, and basically just like the task orientation of what we did. I would say that the mobile revolution had a very similar kind of an impact.

And so, to me, AI is having a very similar impact at this point right now. And what I would say in terms of low-hanging fruit is it's less about the technology or the change in technology than it is the change in the way of work. And so, I think the people that don't have their hands on the tools right now are in danger of falling behind really quickly.

So, the value that we see at Burson with AI is not just generative AI, right? Like that's one of the set of tools: people have ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever chat tool or generative AI tool that they're using right now, which is great, but we think pairing that with cognitive AI really helps to improve counsel and outcomes. Certainly, from an agency perspective, you know, when I was at Google, we used to say all the time that we were data-rich, but analysis-poor. All businesses have access to so much data, right? Like mountains of it, and yet their ability to really extract insight or value from this data, it's pretty limited.

I think many companies sort of struggle with that. And so, what we're doing at Burson is to use cognitive and generative AI together to uncover insights from this data, and also use those insights to advise clients on how they should act, how they should communicate ultimately what they should do, and predict with some degree of clarity and precision what the reputational impact is from those actions or inaction.

So, from where I sit, corporate communicators really can make the most of AI just by getting their hands on those tools and thinking about how to pair creative tools with data-based cognitive tools, right? So that they're really pairing both the insights that you yield from those kinds of tools, and then translating them into the creativity, the action, and ultimately the communication that communicators have been executing for decades.

The biggest place that we are using it on behalf of our clients is in service of reputation. So, in June, we just introduced a new platform, a new product called Reputation Capital, and it really gets to the heart of how we're using AI to build, enhance, and protect reputation on behalf of our clients.

Reputation has always been seen as sort of a soft asset. People thought it was important—you would talk to boards of directors or C-suites or people on your comms team or other folks across the company, and they would say, sure, it's important—but they couldn't measure it. The same way that you could see stock prices move or that you could see valuation and other parts of your business sort of move around. A problem we were trying to solve starting a couple of years ago was how to quantify the business value of reputation. And I think most of us know that reputation has always been much more than just trust. 

Trust is such a binary way of thinking about things like yes or no. You're trusted, you're not trusted: the world just isn't binary like that. So, reputation capital and the methodology that we've defined, we look at eight different levers of reputation management ranging from citizenship and social responsibility to the quality of management, leadership to creativity, and innovation to the financial health of your company.

We look at the impact on each one of those levers. The models take in and analyze information 24/7 and capture signals ranging across all client-owned information to digital and social media. The analysis really yields like an up-to-the minute reputation score that illustrates how a brand is perceived overall, and then it isolates which levers need action or need attention or can improve reputation and ultimately create a direct impact on the business.

Paula Davis: Right, so the opportunity, and then also on the other side, the threat of misinformation and being ready for any misinformation that can start to propagate quickly through AI. 

Corey duBrowa: Of course, I feel like all of us in communications have learned this less than a thousand times, that nature of the horrors of the vacuum, right?

And so, when you don't lead the message for your company, your brand, your service, others will fill in that gap for you and often with profoundly damaging results for any client of any size, being mindful of the idea that AI can take away the control of your brand almost instantaneously. This probably puts the onus back on communicators and on the C-suite to yet again be thinking about how do we lead as quickly as possible to get ahead of the possible damage that can occur if we delay.

Paula Davis: What's the next frontier if communicators and those with responsibility for communications and corporate affairs want to be ahead of the game? What planning, preparing, and investing should leaders be doing to be early adopters? 

Corey duBrowa: So, I'm going to start with something kind of funny to me. The industry chatter right now is we're entering into an agentic future. And to paraphrase the Princess Bride, the industry keeps using that word and I don't think they know what it actually means, right?

Agentic to me and to a lot of people in the field—colleagues of mine, engineers at Google and Microsoft who've been around machine learning for decades—implies agency. Agency implies autonomy, and I don't know that I see a fully autonomous future anytime soon. Agentic sounds good, but it's not actually what's happening.

I actually think that what's happening is that we're seeing tools that augment human wisdom and creativity, but they don't replace it yet. So, I wouldn't get so wrapped around the axle of this idea of an agentic future. So, for me, when I think about investment, Paula, I always think it makes sense to start with what problem are you trying to solve? And then work backward from that problem to figure out what your investment should be. So, prioritizing investment and taking on the work that can free up the most people for higher-order thinking. 

Paula Davis: Absolutely. So, on that point, what skills are now in demand that you've started to see that maybe you could attribute to AI and the digital evolution?

What increasing skills are you seeing in demand and what experiences or achievements are you seeing more in demand? 

Corey duBrowa: Well, to me the big lesson here of maybe the last year and a half is—I forget who said this, it's become somewhat apocryphal—your job won't be taken by AI, but your job might be taken by someone who can use AI more effectively than you can. So, I think you're asking the right question, which is probably sort of a more skills-based kind of a question. And you know, as I think about skills or talent and what we're seeing demand for, it's really demand for talent with a clear and demonstrated ability to apply AI to their chosen profession or their part of the profession.

It's kind of like you're saying bring out your case studies, show us the kind of work that you've actually done. So not everyone needs to be an engineer. I mean, I think we've kind of proven AI writes great prompts, so a year ago everyone was like, oh my God, you need to be a fantastic prompt engineer; no, you don't. To me it's less about tasks that are skills specific to like building AI and it's more the ability to use AI in the context of your profession, which, like you're saying, I think gets you to maybe the way to think about it, Paula, like an AI portfolio of achievements, right? So that you can demonstrate to your board or your C-suite or whoever your boss is that AI has created efficiencies that enable your team to take on these higher order challenges or that it's opened up the ability to better solve problems for your clients. 

So, this goes obviously for any professional services organization, not just communications, right? I think we're all in that same boat, if you will, of kind of thinking about how do we create this AI portfolio of achieving skills or things that we can do. So, for us, Paula, inside of Burson, our training focuses less on the actual technology itself and more on a new way of working. What it really does is forms a new way of work, a new way of collaborating with clients. And I think for us, those are the skills we're seeking.

Paula Davis: Right, and here's a good segue to knowing what questions to ask. Are you advising CEOs what they should be asking of their communications and marketing teams? Talk to us about how you gauge, you know, that you don't know what you don't know, how to get at asking the right questions and how to advise CEOs and their boards to know what questions to ask.

Corey duBrowa: Most organizations that we're working with have roles in place—they could call it chief AI officer or chief innovation officer or technology officer—with people who are studying the landscape and like we've talked about, you know, it's moving at sort of lightning speed. So, they're having to move at a pace that's probably a little uncomfortable for them and making decisions at a pace they're uncomfortable with.

And you know, AI has been such a huge trend in the media for, geez, the last two years or so. So, for all CEOs and boards, AI is super top of mind. What CEOs and C-Suites want from their comms and their public affairs teams is, you guys have lots of inputs from the media, from electeds, from all these different stakeholder sources, so, is there a way to consolidate that input and drive synthesis and sort of extract analysis or extract insight from that in a way that can help be more predictive? I mean, it is funny to think that we've had agents for a hell of a long time, like Microsoft had Clippy, when was it? Like 2000 or something?

Clippy was an agent, right? He was maybe just not the agent that people wanted at that point in time. And so maybe Copilot's just a better, more sophisticated version of Clippy. But I love that Microsoft has continued to pursue this, right? Like they weren't deterred, they weren't put off, they didn't stop the work. They just thought of better ways to apply it. So, I think that's what CEOs are really asking for. Like they get that it's important their boards are pushing them, but what they want is, again, sort of practical, tactical, show me how these tools yield better work results for me and will help the company, the enterprise perform better, and drive more value around reputation.

Paula Davis: Right. Both the power of and then also the defense part of it as well. 

Corey duBrowa: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of CEOs are sometimes focused on like the issue or crisis du jour. And that's fine. I mean, you know that certainly we all do that, who have ever been in this profession. But ultimately, what you really want to do is drive more proactive value for your brand, your company, your service. And so I do think these tools are useful playing defense, but I'm here to tell you Paolo, like we're more focused on how do we get them to play offense in any sector, in any part of a business, and drive campaigns where you can just see the value upfront. You can have a conversation with your board of directors that doesn't feel like guesswork.

You can actually be more accountable. And ultimately, I think as communicators, that's what my CEO boss has always wanted, right? Because the CMOs, they were building martech stacks for decades, right? Like we can show you performance marketing and more accountability for the dollars that we spend. And comms kind of lagged behind that for many years, and I think we're now at a point where we can significantly catch up and prove the value, the predictive value of what it is that we do and how it relates to reputation. 

Paula Davis: All right. I know we're coming up on time. So, Corey, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a great conversation on AI and beyond, and please come back again soon.

Corey duBrowa: Paula, thank you so much for asking, and I love the guitars in the back. I hope a little of this video sneaks its way out onto the web. People should see that.

Paula Davis: All right, thanks Corey.

Thanks for listening to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. To make sure you don't miss the next conversation, please subscribe to our channel on your preferred podcast app. And if you're listening via LinkedIn or YouTube, why not share this with your connections? Until next time.

About the interviewer

Paula Davis (pdavis@heidrick.com) is a principal in Heidrick & Struggles’ New York office and a member of the Communications and Corporate Affairs practices.