Post by Silicon Reef

The team have returned back from the two-day Institute of Internal Communication Festival and there was one big theme running through almost every session: internal comms has well and truly moved beyond campaigns and into the infrastructure of how organisations operate. A few takeaways from Warbrook House this week. • Leading without a landing. Change isn't slowing down. 75% of leaders say it has accelerated in the last 12 months, and 82% expect more. Yet only 38% of comms covers strategy and rationale, while toolkits get the lion's share. Toolkits can't replace strategic understanding - they depend on it. • From managing resistance to reducing ambiguity. When adoption is slow, the instinct is to push harder. The smarter move is to check for clarity. Strategic clarity should be an explicit IC deliverable, not an afterthought. • Goodbye Workplace, hello Viva Engage. Risha Shah and Liz Fussell (Virgin Media O2) shared a really honest account of their migration - transparent decisions, no sugar-coating and channels designed around how people actually work rather than trying to be everything to everyone. A reminder that the real work starts after go-live. • AI as a cognitive prosthetic. Georgia Lewis Anderson reframed it neatly: "AI is the talented junior, you're the creative director." The advantage now sits with people who know what good looks like, not just those who can build it. • Communications in the Frontier Firm. Grounded in the Work Trend Index, this session with Jon Bates looked at how agents are starting to take on the execution of work, freeing people up for the parts that genuinely add value. AI isn't being used like a search engine - it's being used for analysis and the higher-value layers of work. The biggest predictor of successful adoption is organisational culture. Which brings it right back to the infrastructure point - the comms, the rhythms and the culture that surround the tech are what make it land. We also had a proud moment watching Alex Graves run our Copilot Agent workshop, showing internal communicators just how quickly they can build practical AI agents in M365 with the right structure. Across both days a few patterns kept surfacing. Campaign mode is shifting to always-on infrastructure. Announcements are becoming living narratives. And channels are being built around employees, not platforms. A huge thank you to the Institute of Internal Communication and everyone who shared their thinking. We've come away with plenty to apply to the work we do with our clients. #IoICFest26