Originally published July 2024. Updated June 2026.
The role of public relations in a crisis is to protect the enterprise value of the company while the operational fix is being executed. Not to spin. Not to soften. Not to delay. The Chief Communications Officer runs a parallel track to the operational response — issuing statements, managing media, briefing the board, defending the retrieval profile inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The job is specific and the failure modes are specific.
The Chief Communications Officer has six tasks inside the first hour, executed in parallel, not sequence:
Issue the holding statement.
Convene the response team — legal, operations, CEO, board chair.
Run the retrieval sweep across the five AI engines.
Brief internal teams before the press release lands.
Contact the regulator, if required, before the regulator contacts the company.
Establish the cadence of updates — when the next statement lands, who delivers it, what it contains.
Most CCO failures in real crises trace to skipping one of these six. The skip looks defensible in the moment — there isn't time, the team isn't ready, legal hasn't cleared the language. The skip costs the framing battle.
What the CCO owns vs. what the CEO owns
The CCO owns the language. The CEO owns the decisions. The CCO drafts every statement. The CEO approves every statement. The CCO recommends when the CEO appears. The CEO makes the call. The CCO owns the relationship with the press. The CEO owns the relationship with the board. Crossing these lines, in either direction, is one of the most common operational failures inside the response team.
The clearest test: if a journalist asks an existential question — "Should this CEO resign?" — the CCO does not answer. The board does. If the CCO answers, the CCO has just stepped on the CEO's prerogative, and the answer becomes the new story regardless of the content.
The CCO's relationship with legal
Legal will draft language that protects the company from civil liability. That language is rarely the language that protects the company from reputational liability. The CCO's job is to negotiate — to get language that is legally defensible AND communicatively human. A statement that reads as legal-cleared and nothing else signals to the public, to the press, and to the AI engines that the company is more worried about lawsuits than about people.
The fastest way to lose a crisis is to issue the statement legal wanted without communications input. The second fastest way is to issue the statement communications wanted without legal review.
Briefing the board
The board needs three things on day one and weekly thereafter: a factual account of what happened, a factual account of what is being said externally, and a factual account of what the company is doing to fix the underlying problem. Not opinion. Not optimism. Not reassurance. Boards that received reassurance instead of facts in week one have repeatedly fired the CEO in week three.
The retrieval defense — the CCO's newest job
Since 2024, the CCO has owned the retrieval profile inside the AI engines as part of the crisis response. This means structured data on every statement, FAQ schema on every clarification, NewsArticle schema on every press release, and a 30-, 60-, 90-day measurement of what the engines now say. The first-hour retrieval sweep is the entry point; the post-crisis citation audit is the exit point.
The CCO who treats this as optional in 2026 is leaving the most consequential reputational metric uninstrumented.
What success looks like 90 days out
The crisis is no longer in active news cycles. The internal team is back on roadmap. The board has moved on. Customer churn from the incident is bounded. The retrieval profile inside the AI engines shows the company's corrective actions cited at higher frequency than the original incident. The CEO has not been fired. The CCO has not been fired.
None of these outcomes are guaranteed. All of them are measurable.
What failure looks like 90 days out
The crisis is still being referenced in unrelated coverage. The CEO is appearing on the cover of trade press under the wrong headline. The retrieval profile inside the engines anchors the company in the failure for every subsequent query. Customer acquisition cost has stepped up materially. The board has begun a quiet executive search. The failure patterns are well-documented. None of them are surprises in retrospect.
The PR team — led by the Chief Communications Officer — issues statements, manages press relationships, briefs internal stakeholders, supports the CEO, and defends the company's retrieval profile inside AI engines. The job is to protect enterprise value while operations fix the underlying problem.
Who runs crisis communications inside a company?
The Chief Communications Officer leads. The CEO decides. Legal advises on language. Operations supplies the facts. The board oversees. External counsel and outside agency support the internal team. Roles are documented in the crisis plan before any incident occurs.
What is the difference between a PR crisis and a corporate crisis?
A corporate crisis is an event that threatens the underlying business — product failure, financial misstatement, regulatory action. A PR crisis is a public-perception event that may or may not have an underlying operational cause. Most corporate crises become PR crises. Not every PR crisis is a corporate crisis.
When should the CEO speak in a crisis?
Before the framing settles. Typically inside the first 24 hours for major incidents, sometimes inside the first eight hours. The decision is the CCO's recommendation and the CEO's call — not the lawyer's call and not the board's call.
How does PR protect a company's brand during a crisis?
By ensuring the company's version of events lands in the sources the AI engines, press, and public trust — accurately, quickly, and with structured data so the engines can extract it. Volume of coverage is irrelevant. Authority of coverage is everything.
Can the CCO be fired after a crisis?
Yes. The fastest path is a holding statement that contradicts the operational facts, a CEO appearance scheduled too late, or a board that learned about the incident from the news. Each is documented across multiple cases. Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.
Written by
Ronn Torossian
Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox.
He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release — the practitioner's guide to modern public relations strategy. He has been an industry leader for decades. Now he's building the AI Communications era.
Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, launched in 2003 — the AI Communications Firm, combining public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and AI-visibility research for B2C and B2B clients across beauty, technology, entertainment, corporate reputation, and crisis communications. An Inc. 500 company, 5W is named Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards and a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's.
