Sabra Sciolaro is the Chief People Officer at Firstup, a leading platform for intelligent workforce communication and engagement.
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In June 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported something communicators have waited decades to hear: Chief communications officers have moved from the margins of the org chart into the center of it. Data supports this assessment. According to Korn Ferry, nearly half of CCOs report directly to their CEO, and they spend their days shaping strategy in the room where it gets made. However, that shift in influence tells only part of the story. Some of the most consequential communication work happens much further down in the organization, often led by people who don’t have communication in their title.
In an earlier article, I made the case that employee engagement has stopped predicting retention. What pushes people out is often friction: missed company updates, shifting priorities, managers forced to translate information on their own. Communication is often where that friction either gets created or removed, and in most organizations, there are people quietly doing the work of removing it.
Who Closes The Gap Between Strategy And Execution
Every organization has someone who takes a decision made in a boardroom and gets it to land with the workforce. You’ll find them in HR, internal communications, operations, IT, sometimes on the floor itself. These people take the initiative to rewrite an announcement so it makes sense to someone holding a phone with four minutes to spare. They know which shift will miss the message, and they plan for it. They notice when a policy change lands badly and raise it before it shows up in turnover, productivity or safety. These are your workforce champions.
While their titles may be different, workforce champions occupy the same space: the intersection of strategy and execution. They see the disconnect between what the leaders believe they communicated and what employees actually understood—and they close it. That intersection is where most strategies quietly fail. A plan can be sound, funded and unanimously approved only to fall flat somewhere between the all-hands and the loading dock. Workforce champions turn corporate decisions into something employees can understand and act on. That’s not simply good communication; it’s operating capacity.
What AI Changes About Internal Communication
For a long time, the constraint on this work was arithmetic. One communicator could write a single message carefully or write 40 messages adequately. Anyone trying to reach a distributed workforce had to choose between depth and scale, and scale usually won.
However, AI adoption has changed that math for many organizations. Communication tools can handle the mechanics, like segmenting audiences, adapting a message for a night-shift nurse versus a regional director, selecting the channel and the moment and translating across a dozen languages without losing the meaning. What it hands back to people is the part that always deserved more attention: deciding what to say, who needs to hear it and why it should matter to them. That kind of judgment is earned through years of knowing an organization and the people inside it. It’s the reason this role grows more valuable as AI spreads through the enterprise. The machine absorbs the labor of reach. The human decides what’s worth reaching people about.
There’s a business case underneath the principle. When this work gets funded properly, the return arrives in areas that HR and business leaders answer for: frontline retention, safety incidents and the hours a workforce spends hunting for information it should’ve been handed. My company, Firstup, commissioned Forrester to measure that return across all three. The composite enterprise used for the impact report—made of 10,000 employees, 65% of them frontline—cut serious safety incidents by 30% three years after implementing better communication processes.
How HR Leaders Can Equip Their Workforce Champions
Communication has historically been treated as a service function inside most organizations—something that supports the strategy after the strategy is set. But now it increasingly sits at the center of corporate strategy. HR should catch up to that, and here’s where I’d start:
• Find your workforce champions. They’re already in your organization, doing this work. Ask who reliably gets messages to land on the front line, and the same handful of names will surface. Those people are driving execution.
• Equip them properly. Give them the tools to segment, personalize and measure, along with the standing to push back when a message is unclear or badly timed. The outcome isn’t simply better communication. It’s faster adoption, less confusion and fewer hours lost trying to find or interpret information.
• Measure what they change. Open rates describe delivery. Instead, measure the impact of communication: whether the shift actually adopted the new procedure, whether incidents fell, whether the people closest to the customer understood what changed and acted on it. Connect communication to business outcomes, and its value becomes easier to see and fund.
• Build AI fluency before you buy more tools. The organizations struggling with AI in communication tend to be the ones that bought a platform and hoped for strategy. Train your champions to direct the technology so it reaches more people more precisely and moves the organization from decision to action faster.
Why This Matters On The Front Line
The Wall Street Journal article discussed communication executives winning a seat at the table. The story I find more compelling is happening much further from headquarters.
It’s happening in the moment a maintenance technician learns about a safety procedure change before the incident rather than after. In the moment a nurse understands a new staffing policy well enough to plan her week around it. In the moment a frontline manager can answer her team’s questions with confidence because someone thought carefully about what she’d need and when she’d need it. These moments affect retention, productivity, safety and ultimately where strategy gets executed.
Every person on your front line deserves to know what the company decided and what it means for their Tuesday. Somewhere in your organization, someone is already fighting to make that true.
Find them. Then give them what they need to do it at scale.
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