AI and Reputation: Today's Biggest Geopolitical Risks?
Every July, the Oxford-GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey is published with relatively little fanfare outside the communications profession. That is a mistake because if you care for how you are perceived and your reputation then this is a report that you should be reading.
The 2026 edition, drawn from 294 senior Corporate Affairs leaders across every international region and sector, is one of the clearest data-backed readings available of how the people closest to corporate risk actually see the world right now. And what they see should matter to three groups who rarely read this kind of research: governments courting investment, frontier technology companies building in deeptech, AI, space, quantum life sciences and defence, and the investors, from sovereign wealth funds to corporate venture capital companies and single family offices, allocating capital into all of it.
The headline finding is not new in direction, but it is new in scale. Geopolitical risk has topped this survey for seven consecutive years, and in 2026 it is cited by 76 percent of respondents as the single biggest threat to global business. What has changed is the texture underneath that number. Geopolitics is no longer a vague, ambient unease. It has hardened into geoeconomics: tariffs, supply chain fracture, energy costs and regional alliance-building, all pursued as instruments of national interest rather than by-products of it. The report's own framing is blunt: ‘Political aims are increasingly being pursued through economic means, and businesses are the terrain on which that contest plays out.’
For anyone advising governments, building frontier technology, or allocating capital across borders, this is not an abstract observation. It is the current operating environment, which is likely to become more mainstream.
The signal governments, frontier tech and investors cannot afford to miss
Three things jump out from this year's data that deserve attention well beyond the corporate affairs function.
First, AI and technology risk has overtaken the macro-economy and climate change to become the second-highest concern globally, cited by 44 percent of respondents, up from just 17 percent in 2025. That is a 27 percentage point jump in a single year, the sharpest movement in the survey's history. Second, governance has become the dominant reputational risk within ESG, rising to 45 percent, up ten points and now far ahead of environmental risk at 27 percent and social risk at 26 percent. Third, and perhaps most tellingly, only 18 percent of organisations say they feel fully prepared to manage AI-driven misinformation or a deepfake incident, even as the risk itself is judged to be rising fast.
Put those three signals together and a pattern emerges. The world is not simply becoming more dangerous, it is becoming harder to read, and organisations know it. Reputation, once treated as a soft output of good behaviour, is being recast as a hard input to market access, licence to operate and investor confidence. Ninety-four percent of respondents now say protecting trust and reputation is the area where Corporate Affairs contributes most to the business, ahead of risk reduction and policy influence at 69 percent, and ahead of market access, revenue enablement and talent attraction at 46 percent. Trust has become the asset. Perception has become the mechanism by which that asset is priced.
Geoeconomics is replacing geopolitics as the working vocabulary of risk
The distinction matters more than it might first appear. Geopolitics describes the shape of the world. Geoeconomics describes what states and companies actually do about it, using trade policy, export controls, tariffs, investment screening and industrial strategy as tools of statecraft. Remember, the world is being reshaped into different trading environments - North America, Europe and China, with markets outside of these core areas being pulled in back and forth between them.
Data from the report shows this shift is already reshaping how risk is prioritised regionally. In Africa and North America, tariffs specifically are cited as the dominant driver behind macroeconomic risk, at 12 percent and 26 percent respectively. In South America, reputation risk itself is unusually pronounced at 26 percent. In Europe, regulatory pressure and policy change lead at 17 percent.
This regional texture confirms something governments in particular should sit with. A stable, predictable regulatory and investment environment is no longer simply good governance. It is a reputational asset that competes directly against other jurisdictions for the same pools of mobile capital. Countries that can demonstrate policy certainty, transparent investment screening and consistent rule of law are, in effect, marketing trust as an economic differentiator. The corridors I work across most, including Japan-UK, GCC-Europe, and Singapore and Malaysia, are all competing on exactly this basis. Predictability has become a form of soft power, and its absence is now measurable as reputational drag.
AI risk has risen faster than almost anything else, and it is widely misunderstood
The sharpest movement in the entire survey is the rise in AI and technology risk, and it deserves closer scrutiny because the risk is frequently mischaracterised. Corporate Affairs leaders are not primarily worried about AI as a productivity tool going wrong. They are worried about AI as an amplifier of two older problems: misinformation and governance failure. Data privacy and cyber risk entered the top five risks for the first time this year, sitting alongside AI concerns, reflecting a broader anxiety about data sovereignty and the pace at which AI adoption is outrunning organisational and regulatory controls.
This is where the Oxford-GlobeScan findings connect to a wider body of evidence the survey does not capture. Independent reporting this year has described a sharp rise in deepfake-enabled fraud, with some assessments suggesting the large majority of organisations experienced at least one deepfake attack in 2025. Disinformation research has found that false stories can travel roughly six times faster than accurate ones, and that a single viral hoax can strip meaningful value from a brand's reputation before fact-checking has any chance to catch up. In the UK, from January 2026, new corporate governance obligations under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act now require boards to formally report on controls covering social engineering, business email compromise and deepfake-enabled fraud, with personal liability increasingly attached to that oversight.
A genuine governance gap comes into focus when you also see that only 18 percent of organisations feel fully prepared for AI-driven misinformation, and that Europe and Africa are markets being least prepared. This is not a technology problem sitting with the IT department, but a cultural issue that needs to be addressed at board-level, because, for frontier technology companies in particular, reputation is a core area that manages a company's valuation and potential in a competitive market.
Governance has quietly become the number one reputational risk
The other structurally significant shift that the report highlights is the rise in the perception of governance processes as the leading reputational risk within ESG, up from last place in 2024 to first place in 2026 at 45 percent. Environmental risk and social risk have both fallen back, not because they matter less, but because organisations increasingly describe them as more established, more closely managed categories relative to the newer uncertainty around ethics, accountability, board oversight, disclosure and regulatory compliance.
The clearest evidence of this recalibration is what has disappeared from the list. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which was the second most cited issue in 2025 at 21 percent, has collapsed to 7 percent and fallen out of the top ten entirely in 2026. This is not evidence that social issues have stopped mattering. It reflects a more cautious corporate posture in the face of political and cultural backlash in several major markets, with organisations retreating to the areas of governance and compliance where expectations are clearer and the cost of inaction is more immediate and more measurable.
For boards, the implication is straightforward. Reputational risk has migrated from the environmental and social columns of the ESG ledger into the governance column, where it sits closest to the fiduciary duties directors already carry. That should make it easier, not harder, to secure board attention and resource, provided Corporate Affairs and risk functions can frame it in those terms.
Capital is already voting, and it corroborates the survey's signal
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Independent capital markets data shows the multipolar reallocation the Oxford-GlobeScan report describes is already under way in the sums being deployed. Gulf sovereign wealth funds have deployed a record 53.9 billion US dollars in investments so far in 2026, according to Modern Diplomacy. Separately, Bain & Company estimates total sovereign wealth assets under management have grown to around 15 trillion US dollars globally, and projects this could nearly double to 30 trillion US dollars by 2035. Sovereign allocators are reported to be deepening active management specifically as a response to geopolitical volatility, while showing renewed appetite for exposure to China's technology sector even as broader macroeconomic transition risks persist.
This matters for reputation because sovereign and family capital does not move on financial returns alone. It moves on relationships, trust and the credibility of the institutions and jurisdictions it is entering. Separately, the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that societies are retreating into what its authors term insularity, with seven in ten people now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who holds different values or comes from a different background. Trust in national government leaders has fallen sharply, while trust in institutions closest to daily life, employers, neighbours and colleagues, has risen. Business remains, notably, the only institution perceived as both ethical and competent.
Taken together, the Oxford-GlobeScan data and the Edelman findings describe the same underlying condition from two different vantage points. Corporate Affairs practitioners are watching governance and reputation risk rise because the societies and capital allocators they answer to are themselves retreating into narrower, more selective circles of trust. Winning access to capital, markets and licence to operate increasingly means winning trust deliberately, market by market, rather than assuming it as a background condition of doing business internationally.
What this means for governments
Governments courting inward investment, whether national or international, or particularly in the corridors that matter most for deeptech, quantum, space and defence-adjacent industries, should treat national reputation as strategic asset and infrastructure, not as a marketing exercise run in parallel to trade policy. Perception and the predictability of regulation, consistency of investment screening, and clarity of political intent are themselves competitive assets in a multipolar world where capital has more destinations to choose from than at any point in the post-war order. The countries winning this contest are the ones treating trust-building with institutional and sovereign investors as seriously as they treat trade negotiations.
What this means for frontier technology companies
Deeptech, AI, space, quantum and defence and dual-use businesses face a particular version of this challenge. These sectors sit precisely at the intersection the survey identifies as highest risk: governance scrutiny, AI misperception, and geoeconomic exposure through export controls and technology transfer restrictions. Many of these companies are engineering-led and founder-driven, often without the Corporate Affairs muscle that larger, more established businesses have built over decades. Yet they are frequently the most exposed to having their purpose misunderstood by regulators, the public or capital markets, particularly where dual-use technology blurs the line between civilian benefit and strategic capability in the public imagination.
There is a specific pattern worth naming here. A quantum or space company that speaks fluently to engineers and specialist investors can still be almost entirely unintelligible to a trade minister, a defence procurement committee, or a retail investor reading a headline about export controls. That translation gap is not a marketing failing. It is a governance failing, because it leaves the organisation's licence to operate dependent on how well someone else chooses to explain it, at exactly the moment geoeconomic scrutiny of frontier technology is increasing. Building a credible, well-governed narrative early, rather than reactively after a crisis or an export control dispute, is now a competitive necessity rather than a public and tactical communications nicety. It is also, increasingly, a precondition for raising capital from sovereign and government-adjacent sources that will not commit without confidence in how the business is governed and perceived.
What this means for investors
Institutional investors, corporate venture capital arms and single family offices should treat the governance shift identified in this survey as a due diligence signal, not simply a compliance checkbox. Governance-related reputational failure is now the leading ESG risk category globally, which means it sits far closer to enterprise value and exit multiples than environmental or social factors alone. Investors should also expect the trust relationship between limited partners and general partners, and between family principals and their advisers, to be tested more directly as geoeconomic volatility increases the premium placed on judgement, discretion and demonstrated governance discipline.
There is also a capital allocation signal worth acting on directly. As sovereign wealth funds and family capital diversify away from single-region concentration and towards AI infrastructure, critical minerals and supply chain resilience, the investors best positioned to move quickly will be those who have already done the harder work of building trusted relationships across multiple jurisdictions, rather than treating each new corridor as a cold start. For CVCs in particular, this survey's finding that only 31 percent of organisations formally track investor perceptions as a reputation metric suggests that most corporates are still not measuring the thing that increasingly determines whether co-investors and government partners choose to engage. That is a gap worth closing before a capital raise or a cross-border deal, not during one.
And here is an issue that investors need to revisit. If they perceive communication just as a tactical exercise rather than a strategic perception and confidence shaping need then they are not protecting their investments. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, according to a 2020 KPMG report by Lloyd’s of London, corporate brand and reputation accounted for 25.3% of the market capitalisation of the world’s leading equity market indices, equating to $16.77 trillion of value for shareholders in Q1 2019. For technology companies that accounted for up to 43%. These are figures from nearly 7 years ago, which is why investors need to look at companies in their portfolio and look at the perception and reputational risks that exist and how they should be investing in protecting these.
Five strategic priorities for boards, right now
Elevate reputation to the main enterprise risk register, assessed with the same rigour as financial, cyber or operational risk, rather than treated as a communications function's internal metric.
Build anticipatory governance capability specifically for geopolitical and geoeconomic shocks, so that scenario planning happens before disruption, not during it.
Move impact measurement beyond media monitoring. Only 49 percent of organisations formally measure Corporate Affairs impact today, and investor perception is tracked by just 31 percent of those that do. That gap is a governance weakness in its own right.
Name AI-driven misinformation and deepfake risk explicitly as a board-level item, with resourced preparedness plans, given the direction of regulatory travel and the exposure the survey itself identifies.
Recognise that trust must now be built deliberately across a wider and more plural set of governments, capital allocators and publics, rather than assumed as a universal condition based on any single region's norms.
The strategic conclusion
The Oxford-GlobeScan survey was designed to track the evolving priorities of a single professional function. Read alongside independent evidence on trust, capital flows and AI-enabled misinformation, it tells a much larger story. In a multipolar world, reputation, trust and perception are no longer downstream of strategy. They are strategic capital in their own right, priced daily by regulators, capital allocators and the public, whether organisations choose to manage that price deliberately or not.
The organisations, governments and investors that treat this as a strategic discipline, resourced and measured with the seriousness it deserves, will be the ones that convert volatility into advantage. Those that continue to treat it as a communications afterthought will find that the cost of that decision shows up exactly where the 2026 data says it will: in access to capital, in licence to operate, and in the confidence of the stakeholders whose trust can no longer be taken for granted.