“Content is King”: navigating corporate communications in the age of AI

As AI transforms the way we search, write and communicate, corporate websites are in the spotlight. No longer just digital brochures, they’re becoming vital battlegrounds for truth, reputation and visibility in a noisy, algorithm-driven world.

Caterina Sorenti joined Colin Dobinson, strategic communications specialist with Equinor and former chief editor of Equinor.com, to talk about what it takes to build a resilient, trusted digital presence in 2025. With nearly three decades of experience at the forefront of corporate website development, Colin shares his reflections on the evolving role of corporate websites, the power of clear content and the tools communicators need to stay ahead.

Caterina Sorenti: It’s the hot topic du jour – the ongoing evolution of AI. Being in the corporate communications space and figuring out AI can feel oversaturating. It’s easy to get lost in the noise… are you feeling that too?

Colin Dobinson: Definitely. I mean there's information overload to a great extent. It’s such a paradigm shift. It's so big — it's almost bigger than the web itself. It's incredibly exciting, but there is so much information out there and of course separating the wheat from the chaff... there's no substitute for real personal experience with it. You have to try out the tools. You have to explore and invest quite a lot of time in it.

CS: It seems like it’s becoming increasingly difficult for companies to cut through the noise and make sure that, for example, AI large language models draw on their corporate websites as sources... Have you got any advice for corporate communicators looking to cut through?

CD: I think this really goes to the heart of the issue here. There is a huge deluge of misinformation and fake news. So yes, we have to cut through the noise. There are no shortcuts — it comes down to good content. It comes down to what we always used to say at the start of the web — content is king, and it still is. Informational text that is easy to read, easy to search, easy to scan...

Make sure that all of the issues are covered, including the difficult ones — the content that you may struggle to get approval from superiors to write and publish on the website. You will have to do some extra legwork to gain understanding for answering controversial questions on your website. And there are various ways of doing that.

If you don't say something, then your competitors or your opponents will... If they don't let you publish information on touchy subjects, there is a risk that others will fill that void with disinformation which could harm you. Make sure that it's accessible by robot crawlers. Don't go burying it in PDFs. Don't go burying it in multimedia. There's nothing that beats a good plain HTML page.

"If you don't say something, then your competitors or your opponents will..."

CS: That’s really interesting, especially what you said about opponents and competitors filling that space. Are there any great examples of companies being transparent?

CD: Nestlé and McDonald's and others have done good FAQs. BP had a good example after the Deepwater Horizon incident. McDonald's Canada — I think it was about 10 years ago — had a very good “Ask McDonalds” website answering public questions about the nutrients in their products. A friendly, readable FAQ, that even included videos.

Ask the question in the phrasing that the external public would use. That way your content then comes up.

CS: What do you see as the role of the corporate website in 2025?

CD: It's the only channel over which we have complete control. The corporate website really is your most valuable communications channel in most companies. I think we need to basically ask: how do we get the best out of our most valuable communications asset going forward in the world of AI? It has tremendous reputational advantages. It's the only channel where we really control messaging. There will always be a need for some sort of company brochure — someplace where you go to get information from the horse’s mouth, from the source, from the mothership, whatever you want to call it... a single source of truth.

CS: How can companies maintain authenticity and a human tone of voice in the age of AI?

CD: Start with photos. Real life settings with real life employees. Then it's the language. You have to get away from corporate speak. Write in a friendly, copywritten style that appeals to anyone really of school age upwards. Invest in a good copywriter, empower your web editor with a strong mandate, use AI tools to verify the readability; ask the tool to verify the readability of the text you've written, or to suggest improvements.

CS: Looking out more broadly, what are the other pressing challenges AI brings to corporate communications?

CD: One of the biggest dangers to communications professionals is the risk of hallucinations, where AI is too ‘eager to please’ and gives you plausible looking answers that actually have no root in reality. Always ask the AI tool to give you links to sources, as any factual or financial errors can be devastating, especially in tightly regulated industries. Never publish anything without double-checking your sources.

Another is the influx of fake images or facts, generated by others, which can be impossible to stop once they find their way to social media. When creating and publishing content, fact-checking becomes ever more important, and of course there are tools and companies who offer AI-based services to do exactly that, like Factiverse.

Authenticity is at risk if you start to use too much poorly curated AI-generated content. Users are already becoming highly sceptical to AI-generated images, and they can spot them a mile off, so I think there will be a need for increasingly authentic imagery and content on corporate websites, showing real employees in real situations, building trust. Talk to your photographers about aiming for authenticity.

CS: If you had to look into a crystal ball, what do you think the corporate website will look like by 2030?

CD: So long as the web remains relatively open and free as it is today, and not increasingly controlled or censored by nation states, as I fear it may be, I do believe the basic need for easily accessible, trustworthy information about a company will not have changed. 

I don’t think social media will take its place. Social media is too ephemeral, it’s here today, gone tomorrow. It’s not easily searchable, and people’s attention spans are short. Social media needs somewhere to send the calls to action that the users follow, and websites need the additional traffic and stop effect of social media to pull in the readers, so there are strong synergies. 

But what I haven’t seen so much of yet on corporate websites, and which I’m looking forward to, is AI tools tightly integrated into corporate websites, giving users a chance to approach and understand your company in entirely new ways. 

Imagine a corporate site that you can interact with and ask questions that were previously impossible — e.g. instructions on how to apply your products in a highly specific user context, or financial or performance trend analyses based on a decade of previous news stories or quarterly results, or recommended job opportunities based on someone’s qualifications.

So, I hope there will be a new drive to see just how useful we can make websites for users and dream up new ways of adding more value for them, which in turn will give business advantages. 

CS: You were a pioneer of corporate websites in the 1990s. Can you take us back to that moment — what drove the innovation, and what were the early challenges?

CD: Well, it certainly wasn’t the result of a strategic corporate decision — it was far more haphazard and experimental than that!

I was working in a long-established  Norwegian maritime engineering and consulting company, and in my spare time I was dabbling with online services, learning the basics and coding pages. 

I realised that as a knowledge-based company, we ought to have a company website, but I wasn’t based in corporate communications at the time and didn’t know who to approach. Young as I was, I ended up rather brazenly writing a memo straight to the head of corporate communications to explain that we needed one! Fortunately he took it well, and I was forgiven. My manager at the time forbade me spending work time on what he was sure was a flash in the pan, but together with another colleague I moonlighted at weekends to create the company’s first website. Once people saw it, they understood and the tide turned.

So, I think it was a combination of being inspired by the work of Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium and seeing an opportunity for our company and putting the two together. Apart from getting buy-in and support from management, the main challenges were the lack of tools, labour-intensive page design, and browser compatibility. 

I remember the company ran the story as front-page news in their internal printed news magazine, and then the cat was well and truly out of the bag. And web has been my passion ever since.