The 2025 survey conducted by Korn Ferry, a global organization consulting firm, of Fortune 500 companies found that 47% of chief communications officers now report directly to the CEO, up from 40% just two years earlier. Just over half sit on the executive committee. This clearly means that the person who used to get called in after a decision was made is now in the room when the decision gets taken.
India too is catching up. There’s no equivalent national survey tracking how many Indian CCOs report to the CEO versus the CMO, which itself tells you something about how new this conversation still is here. But the direction remains the same. In June this year, Canon India gave Puneet Datta, already a senior director with full P&L ownership, the additional title of Chief Communications Officer, a rare case of a business operator, not a career comms professional, taking charge of the narrative because the two jobs had become inseparable. That fusion is the real story here, more than any title change.
Just a decade ago, corporate communications in India meant press releases, journalist relationships, and damage control after the fact. It sat a few levels below the CEO, often under marketing, brought in to write the quotes after strategy was set elsewhere. That model breaks down the moment a company operates in public the way every company now does, through X (formerly Twitter) threads, WhatsApp forwards, NSE disclosures and a 24-hour news cycle that doesn’t wait for an official statement.
Look at what sinks Indian companies now. Byju’s didn’t collapse because of one bad press cycle. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs eventually cleared it of financial fraud, but its year-long probe found real governance lapses , acquisitions not disclosed to the full board, meetings called on short notice to push through deals, a failure to bring in finance and compliance professionals early enough. Prosus and Peak XV Partners walked off the board over exactly these gaps. A communications function bolted onto the business as an afterthought could not have caught any of this, let alone managed the fallout. A CCO with a seat at the table, reading board packs and sitting in on M&A discussions, might have flagged the story before it became one.
That’s the case Korn Ferry’s Peter McDermott makes when he says today’s CCO must understand where the money comes from and where it goes, not just how to phrase the response once something goes wrong. The job has expanded into something closer to a risk function that happens to specialise in language and public perception. 9 in 10 CCOs at large global firms now own executive communications, crisis management, media relations, and internal communications as a single portfolio. A third also own analytics and measurement, treating reputation as something you track with numbers, not just gut feel.
The pressure driving this in India is structural. SEBI’s disclosure regime has tightened. Retail investors, many of them first-timers who came in during the 2020–21 boom, watch listed companies with a scrutiny that didn’t exist a decade ago. Startup governance failures have made “how transparent is this founder, really” a question every investor asks before term sheets, not after a scandal. In such an environment, the person managing the story isn’t a spokesperson anymore. They’re advising on whether there’s a story to manage at all, before the decision gets made.
None of this means every Indian company needs a CXO-level comms chair by next quarter. Plenty of mid-sized firms still run communications as a two-person team reporting into HR or marketing, and for their scale that may be perfectly workable. But for listed companies and anyone operating under regulatory or public scrutiny, keeping the communications head out of the boardroom is starting to look less like frugality and more like an unhedged risk. As businesses navigate tighter regulation, heightened stakeholder expectations, and an always-on information ecosystem, corporate communications is evolving from a support function into a strategic discipline. The question is no longer whether communicators deserve a seat at the table, but whether organisations can afford to make critical decisions without their perspective.
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