On Monday, The Walt Disney Company's ABC started running spots on its own broadcast stations urging viewers to file public comments with the FCC opposing two government actions at once: an early review of the licenses for ABC's eight owned-and-operated stations, tied to an investigation into Disney's DEI practices, and a separate probe into whether "The View" should lose the "bona fide news" exemption that lets it host political candidates without triggering equal-time obligations. The spots carry QR codes that drop viewers straight onto the FCC comment page. Almost none of this is normal. By ABC's own account in its legal filing, the FCC hadn't demanded an early license renewal in over five decades, and outside experts say the tool hasn't been aimed at a major broadcaster in decades. A network running on-air advocacy against its own regulator, at scale, with a direct call to action and a QR code, pointed at its general audience... that's definitely new territory.

The narrative ABC chose is the thing to look at because the spots aren't about DEI compliance or the mechanics of equal-time rules. They're about free speech and your local station. One tells viewers the FCC is "questioning our commitment to the community" and asks them to help "keep your trusted local station on the air." The FCC fired back that ABC is running "a campaign of misinformation." Whatever you make of the merits, ABC took a regulatory proceeding and turned it into a public mobilization, much like we just saw with Caraway Home, and in the narrow sense it is working; comments flooded the docket. It has already changed what the fight looks like.

That reframe is fair, and it works.... on the people watching online. The trouble is that the people watching online aren't the ones who decide how this ends. Caraway's case gets decided by a judge, and by the big retailers who choose whether to keep stocking its pans. Not by 45,000 petition signatures. ABC's gets decided by the FCC and, if it goes that far, the courts. You can win the public argument and still lose in the one place that can actually shut the fight down and the louder and more public you've been, the more humiliating it is to back down if that place makes you. Caraway has already had to soften its claims once under pressure so if a judge makes it do that again, all those billboards stop looking brave and start looking like the thing everyone replays.

So the question ABC leaves the rest of us with isn't "should we be bolder." It's when you're tempted to turn a legal or regulatory fight into a public campaign, is the fight you'd win online the same fight that gets decided by the people who actually hold power over you and if a judge or a regulator forces you to fold, can you still live with the story you spent all that energy telling? ABC has decided the public fight is the whole point, and it may be right. But it's betting on something it doesn't control, and it won't know if it was the smart call until it sees what the regulator it just picked a public fight with decides to do over the next few years.

Roblox named Marc Johnson as its next chief communications officer. He comes from Meta, most recently as VP of Content Studio and before that VP of Corporate Communications. The part that's easy to miss is that the role he's stepping into isn't actually new; Roblox split communications out from marketing back in 2024, when it elevated Desiree Fish to CCO and brought in Jerret West from XBOX as CMO. So this is a company that decided two years ago that comms deserved its own seat, and is now hiring into it from a platform that knows what sustained reputation pressure feels like from the inside. Given Roblox's ongoing scrutiny over child safety and moderation, that background isn't incidental, even if no one is saying so on the record.

Forty-eight hours later, AMD named Carolyn Guss as its CCO. She arrives from Salesforce , where she had been chief communications officer. AMD's CMO, Ariel Kelman, also came from Salesforce, where he was president and CMO before joining AMD in February. Whether that's deliberate coordination or simply a leadership team recruiting from a company it trusts, the effect is a comms function and a marketing function that already share a vocabulary and a working relationship from day one. AMD is in a market-positioning fight with Nvidia over who owns the enterprise AI narrative, and Guss's job is to help win that narrative before the market settles it on its own.

At first, I read these as opposite hires: Roblox playing defense, AMD playing offense. But I think that's tidier than the real story here. Johnson's mandate at Roblox is explicitly about telling the platform's story, not just managing its crises, and Guss spent years doing reputation work at PagerDuty and Orange. The better read is that both companies did the same thing: they pulled communications out from under marketing and handed it to a senior outside operator, because in an AI-pressured environment they decided comms was too consequential to run as a sub-function.

If comms reports to your CMO today, you probably can't redraw the org chart yourself but you can walk into your next 1:1 with the CEO or CHRO with these two hires in hand and ask one question out loud: are we keeping comms under marketing because we decided that's the right structure for us, or because nobody's looked at it since the last reorg? Roblox and AMD both looked, under the same AI pressure you're operating in, and both pulled comms out.

And if you want a faster read than the reporting line gives you, pull up the last three big calls your company made - a layoff, a product pulled, a leadership change. Were you in the room while they were being decided, or did you get handed the result to announce? That's the real test of whether comms is a standalone function or a sub-function, and it sticks no matter what the org chart says. If you were announcing and not deciding, that's exactly the gap Roblox and AMD just moved to close.

Anthropic admitted something about itself that most organizations adopting AI are not ready to say out loud. On a recent episode of Lenny's Podcast, Fiona Fung, who leads the Claude Code and Cowork teams, described what happened as agentic AI use inside the company climbed: the work started to feel solitary. "After a while," she said, the team "felt it could start being a lonely experience because we all started just working with our agents so much." The response was hackathons and pair-programming lunches, structured reasons to put people back in the same room. Fung says the interventions worked.

Now, look, this is one engineering leader's account, and by Business Insider's reporting there are no metrics behind it, no measured drop in collaboration, no before-and-after on morale. So treat it as an anecdote, not a study. But the mechanism is intuitive enough that you don't need a dataset to take it seriously. When your most productive collaborator becomes a machine you work with alone, the friction that used to pull people into rooms together disappears. The hallway conversation, the lunch where someone reframes a problem you've been stuck on, those don't happen when everyone is heads-down in their own solitary agent session. Organizational researchers have flagged versions of this with every adoption cycle, from email to remote work, but AI compresses the timeline.

Now, the company disclosing the loneliness problem is also the company selling the product that, by its own engineer's account, helps cause it. The candor is real, and it's also good marketing because it makes Anthropic look thoughtful while it promotes the thing everyone is adopting. That's not a knock, just a reminder that the most durable version of "we're being honest about the hard parts" is the one that also happens to be operationally true. Anthropic noticed something, named it, and built a response. The statement holds up because the action behind it does, which is the only reason any statement ever holds up.

Most organizations adopting AI at pace are measuring output, quality, and efficiency. Almost none are measuring isolation. Before your next people-strategy or internal-comms review, ask a plain question: does anyone here have visibility into what our AI adoption is doing to human connection, not just to throughput? If the answer is no, that's a gap worth looking at. You don't need the intervention figured out yet but you should be the person who asked what it was costing.