Governments are operating in a new phase of the digital age – the age of algorithms. Information consumption patterns are fragmented, discourse on policy is often divisive, and public attention is shaped by personalised recommendation algorithms as opposed to common information sources. Many people encounter public information indirectly, via online creators and communities. Traditional channels for reaching broad audiences, such as news media, are now less effective. This landscape is further being disrupted by the rise of AI, whose full effects are only beginning to emerge.
These trends have significant consequences for governments’ ability to reach people, understand their views, and maintain dialogue on complex and long-term policy challenges. Such dialogue is a core element of unleashing governments’ capacity to deliver key reforms against today’s priorities. When people do not understand the purpose, trade‑offs, and practical implications of reforms, implementation slows and public acceptance erodes. The OECD Trust Survey showed that when people feel that reforms and their effects are clearly communicated, they are also likelier to trust the national government, which in turn helps sustain political room for manoeuvre over the life of a reform.
Trustworthy, people-centred communication is therefore an essential part of a broader shift toward more open, participatory, and responsive governance – and towards reinforcing democracy. Realising its strategic value requires decisionmakers to no longer view communication as a secondary function but to fully embed it as an integral part of policymaking.
Five years after the OECD’s first global analysis on public communication, this function has changed quickly but unevenly, creating a widening gap between how people now encounter information and how many institutions still communicate. This is the view of senior government communicators surveyed by the OECD, two-thirds of whom feel the nature of the function, expectations placed on it, and the challenges it faces have changed significantly or drastically compared to a few years ago. This report therefore sets out how governments can modernise the communication function so that it better reflects how people communicate today and can support public action more effectively.
Governments need novel strategies to connect with citizens with information that matters to their everyday realities. Today this happens chiefly online: 28% of communicators in the OECD Survey say news media is no longer the primary means for achieving communication goals and another 49% say its importance persists mainly because political leadership prioritises it, despite declining audience relevance.
However, algorithms, not followers or authority, now determine what people see online. Platform fragmentation and adversarial discourse have reduced the usefulness of social media for meaningful interaction with citizens or reliable insight on public opinion. While about half of respondents still consider these platforms somewhat useful for engagement, 23% report that interactions tend to be unconstructive and dominated by highly vocal groups. As online debate splinters across niche communities, institutions increasingly recognise the need to complement signals from social media with rigorous social research.
To reach citizens in this environment, institutions increasingly choose to partner with the creators that have come to dominate online spaces or to become more like them: authentic, personable, relatable. These approaches speak to a broader pivot toward a more decentralised and networked form of communication, where building trust and collaborating with members of different online communities help institutions cut through the complex web of information intermediaries that exists today. At least three-quarters of communication teams in the OECD Survey have embraced this strategy.
Like for other domains in the public sector, the rapid rise of AI offers major opportunities to make communication more effective while using fewer resources. If adopted responsibly, AI could help address many of the core challenges identified in this report and play a central role in reforming the function. Early applications already reflect this potential, yet adoption remains uneven: 46% of respondents describe their team’s use of AI as exploratory, while 35% report that it depends mainly on individual experimentation. Many institutions lack the skills, guidance and data foundations needed to deploy AI safely and at scale. Meanwhile, generative AI is reshaping how people search for and access information, raising new questions about how governments can reach citizens via a new set of virtual intermediaries.
The report concludes with a roadmap to make communication the effective lever for government delivery, citizen engagement, and public trust that today’s context demands. Making communication a routine element of any policy process is core to this goal, starting from the agenda-setting stages of policy, through to its design, announcement, and implementation. This change is underway: a third of respondents say their institutions now see communication as a primary lever for achieving organisational and policy goals. Still, only one-quarter report being engaged across all phases of policymaking.
Looking ahead, decision makers will need to address the barriers that prevent innovation, agility and resilience by equipping teams with the skills and capabilities the profession now requires. This concerns primarily making communication more data‑driven and citizen‑centred, the top priorities for reform identified in the OECD Survey. Both reflect widespread recognition that institutions still struggle to use evidence systematically to guide decisions or measure their impact on policy outcomes.
The areas of action listed below describe how governments can position communication to meet future demands:
Strengthen the institutional foundations to reinforce communication’s coherence across the whole of government and ensure that it informs policy design with public insights, guides policy implementation, and supports public understanding of what government actions mean for people.
Navigate a decentralised information space by prioritising trustworthiness, clarity and relatability, and reducing over‑reliance on traditional news media as the main route to reach people.
Strengthen institutional capacity to listen by investing in evidence, evaluation and analytics that offset the limits of skewed social media signals. This is the basis for more people‑centred communication.
Redesign institution’s online presence by adopting creator‑style communication where appropriate, using authentic, platform‑specific formats, partnering with trusted intermediaries, and targeting outreach to disengaged or under‑served groups.
Scale AI responsibly by moving from isolated experimentation to co-ordinated adoption (setting common guidance, building data and skills, and integrating ethical safeguards) so innovation eases constraints without amplifying risks to trust, accuracy or information integrity.
Build agility by fostering a culture that supports responsible experimentation, simplifying procedures, and forming flexible, cross‑functional teams with the necessary skills, while addressing risk aversion, siloed processes and skills gaps.