5 Digital Reporting Lessons from Workiva’s Amplify Barcelona

What does “digital first” look like in reporting right now? More to the point, what will it mean for everyone in comms tomorrow? To explore this, I joined a panel at Workiva’s Amplify conference in Barcelona to talk about “Digital-First Design: How AI is Leading the Next Evolution.” 

We discussed strategy, audiences, creativity, AI (obviously) and more. I think that if you’re involved in corporate comms, investor relations, talent attraction or content design you should be thinking and acting on this. Here are five takeaways that stood out:

1. Digital-first shouldn’t be optional 

AI is fundamentally changing how people discover, consume, and interpret company information, news, stories and data. From zero-click search results and AI-generated summaries, to screenless interactions via voice assistants, your audience may never even visit your website. 

Your digital content needs to provide the answers to the questions your audiences are asking, whether they’re easy or tricky to address. AI will then be able to read and consider your content and return it in the answers that it’s providing, rather than using someone else’s content.

2. Create content people actually read

Not all audiences consume annual reports the same way. We use a framework called ‘Skimmers, Swimmers, and Divers’ to help us map content to user behaviour. In simple terms, think Skimmers want headlines, Swimmers want stories and Divers want data.

Up until now, it’s taken a lot of effort to create engaging content for all audiences in the run up to publishing your report, which is always a busy period. AI can support this by helping you more easily, create digestible content that can be shared before and during the launch of your report.

3. Publish across all channels for max effect  

Your audiences are active in different platforms, so make sure that you’re creating content that appeals to them wherever they find their news. Whether that be LinkedIn for talent or website charting for Investors.

Also, platforms like Workiva and integrated CMS systems are enabling single-source publishing across formats and platforms. This doesn’t just reduce production time, it ensures consistency and compliance across everything from investor microsites to AI chatbots.

4. AI is a creative partner 

One of the strongest themes from the panel was the idea that AI enhances human storytelling. It helps surface insights, visualize data, and automate repetitive tasks, freeing you up to focus on strategy and messaging.

A great example is using AI to create multilingual video summaries and interactive SVG graphs for report summaries, which help transform dense data into engaging digital stories, in minutes, not weeks.

5. Think beyond launch day 

While your annual report is a reflective document and summarises the previous year, it also lays out your strategy for the year ahead. In effect, this gives you themes to plan and create content around for the next 12 months.

Again, AI-powered tools can extract, summarize, and repackage content into smaller, modular formats that can live on social channels, search results, or even voice assistants.  

Final Thought 

The future of reporting is dynamic, discoverable, and data-rich and AI is accelerating that shift. The biggest challenge now is bridging the trust gap, making sure it’s used responsibly, and empowering your teams to think about it differently. 

To carry on the conversation, reach out to [email protected]