READING TIPS

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 is based on an annual online survey in 28 countries with almost 34,000 participants (field period: October/November 2025). The report bundles the assessments of the trust situation in business, government, media and NGOs and diagnoses a growing “insularity” in 2026 on this basis: an increasing reluctance to trust people or institutions that are perceived as different.

In the study “The Communicator’s Role in Driving Generative AI Adoption” published by the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) in February 2026, Olivia K. Fajardo analyses the introduction of generative AI in organizations based on over 30 interviews with communications and technology executives. The focus is on the question of how roles, processes and responsibilities are changing in communications departments.

The report Human Truths in the Algorithmic Era – 2026 Media Trends by dentsu approaches the current media transformation through three recurring perspectives on human behavior. Instead of looking at innovations in isolation, the report asks which human expectations remain stable under algorithmic conditions.

Inside PR 2026 was published by Cision and is based on a survey of 561 PR professionals from agencies and in-house teams. It bundles assessments of current working practices in PR and describes a professional field that is under constant pressure from media change due to technological progress and a simultaneous shortage of resources.

The study by Anh-Hoang, Tran and Nguyen, published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence in 2025, analyzes the problem of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), i.e. false or unfounded statements presented as fact by AI systems. The aim of the work is to understand the extent to which such errors are influenced by the design of prompts and where the limits of prompting lie.

What content do AI systems pick up when they generate answers and what criteria do they use to select their sources? The report What is AI Reading? by Muck Rack investigates this question. The analysis is based on more than one million links evaluated from responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, collected between July and December 2025.

The Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots by Thomas McKinlay and Stefan Puntoni from the University of Pennsylvania provides a guideline for how companies can integrate AI-supported dialog systems responsibly and effectively into their communication processes.

For almost two decades, the European Communication Monitor has been one of the central scientific reference studies in European corporate communication and contributed significantly to the founding of AG CommTech in 2021.

The Generative AI and News Report 2025 by Felix Simon, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Richard Fletcher examines attitudes and usage habits towards generative artificial intelligence in the journalistic environment.

The study The ROI of AI 2025 by Google Cloud provides current data on the return on investment of artificial intelligence in large international companies. The results are based on a survey of 3,466 managers from 17 countries, including Germany.