Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Internal communications professionals are happy in their jobs. They feel valued and secure. Most would choose this career again. But the outlook for the IC function in 2026 is more complicated than those facts suggest.

There’s a paradox happening with AI: Usage and productivity are up, but bottom-line results aren’t always as obvious. It’s a familiar pattern you might be seeing in your organization: Leadership invests in AI, and employees say they’re getting more done: more code, more campaigns, more analysis.

Today marks a major transition for the Zulip open-source project and for Kandra Labs, the company behind it: I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation. The new structure provides stability, a renewed commitment to our values, and opportunities for charitable fundraising to support our mission.

By the time you finish reading this sentence, somewhere a manager has just reviewed a screenshot of an employee’s screen. Mind you, that’s not a hyperbole. That’s just a modern workplace in 2026. Employee monitoring statistics tell two very different stories depending on who’s telling them. Employers see dashboards, productivity metrics, and security systems designed to reduce risk.

The learnings are based on our recent webinar, “Inside Reddit’s IT playbook for AI and scale”. Check out this session and other conversations with customers on-demand. When Reddit grew from fewer than 400 people before 2020 to roughly 4,000 globally distributed employees today, it wasn’t just their headcount that changed. The mandate for IT changed with it.