Pretend for a moment that you’re the head of communications at a multinational corporation. Your CEO is mid-flight from Hong Kong to New York and she’s planning to get some sleep.
Suddenly, your monitoring alerts start going off. Her X account has become very active, sharing detailed information about the corporation’s business strategy – details you and other leaders haven’t seen before. Reporters and industry insiders are commenting on and sharing the posts. It even appears as if your CEO is replying to them in real-time, all without contacting you or anyone on your team.
You try messaging the CEO on your internal chat system. No response. You text her cell. Still nothing. Media inquiries are already rolling in from The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and Associated Press. The Chair of the Board has sent a furious email asking what’s going on and why your CEO is doing this without consulting the entire Board. Out of desperation, you FaceTime the CEO and she answers, groggy and confused –she has no idea what you’re talking about and says she hasn’t logged into her X account in over a week.
This isn’t the beginning of a corporate thriller or a spin-off of HBO’s Succession. With the advances in AI and Large Language Models (LLM), this is a very real scenario that businesses and communicators need to start thinking about and planning for. AI is already being used to mimic someone’s voice, steal money or copy our likenesses to sell us products. What’s to stop a bad actor from hijacking an executive’s social media account, programming their own Generative AI model to “pretend” it’s that CEO, and make significant public announcements?
New Decade – New Crises
The scenario above is just one of many potential crises businesses could face in the coming decade. While advances in technology can precipitate many situations, damages to a business’s reputation or challenges to its operations will come from a variety of sources in the next ten years – from environmental issues to economic challenges to geopolitical upheaval. It’s impossible to create a comprehensive list of all potential risks, but there are plenty of scenarios businesses and communications professionals need to start thinking about to prepare for what’s coming.
- Deepfake Videos: Deepfake technology has been around for a while, but coupled with a LLM programmed to sound and act like a CEO or Board Chair, the damage they could do in just a few minutes could take weeks or months to clean up.
- Meme Stocks: The GameStop episode in early 2021 was just the tip of the iceberg around potential market manipulation. A planned and coordinated run on a publicly traded company’s stock from an unethical competitor could create absolute chaos and lead to devastating consequences.
- Extreme Weather and Natural Disasters: With storms getting stronger, critical infrastructure is increasingly at risk. Whether it’s a rapid series of intense hurricanes disrupting shipping lanes for weeks at a time to uncontrolled wildfires destroying manufacturing facilities and the surrounding communities to intense drought crippling food production, nature’s potential impact on businesses and their operations is only growing.
- Workforce Political or Social Divides: Political and social divides are getting deeper, and all sides are becoming increasingly intractable. Corporate policies, business practices, investment strategies, and more are being viewed through a political lens. In turn, employees are becoming more brazen about sharing their views and pushing back on what they see as conflicting with their political or social identities. While most employee pushback will happen internally, online, or in the media, organizations must remember that as political and social divisions deepen, the possibility of violence can increase.
- Misuse of AI Tools: It’s not just bad actors who can misuse AI to the detriment of an organization’s reputation. Without proper training and appropriate oversight, employees utilizing AI tools in their day-to-day work could inadvertently create serious issues. For example, a finance manager might use an AI tool to help develop an internal audit. But if the data inputs are inaccurate and the audit isn’t appropriately reviewed, regulatory scrutiny – and a whole host of issues – won’t be far behind.
Crisis Planning for the Future
Now that we’re all appropriately terrified, what should happen next? The good news is businesses and communicators can rely on the tools of the past to communicate through crises of the future. However, that doesn’t mean pulling a dusty, old, 80-page crisis playbook off the shelf and thinking you’re good to go. Here are three steps to thoroughly appraise existing tools and ensure they’re useful for what’s happening today and what’s coming tomorrow.
- Conduct a thorough review of the business’s operations. This shouldn’t be a cursory glance by a few members of the team, but a full top-to-bottom analysis of how the business operates, the tools it utilizes, and the protocols that are in place.
Once the review is complete and there’s a thorough understanding of how the organization works, it’s time to determine the most significant risks. Some will be obvious and have a high likelihood of happening, but the impact will be minimal. Others may be hard to find, but if they were to happen the impact would be catastrophic. - Take a look at the policies and procedures that are in place and review those with HR and legal counsel. Are all policies up-to-date? Do they consider the latest technological or operational changes? Is the company utilizing tools or technologies in line with the regulations and statutes governing their industry? Are those policies easy to find, frequently discussed, and well-known throughout the organization? If the answer to any of these questions is, “no,” that must be addressed as soon as possible.
- Most importantly, if a crisis communications plan doesn’t exist, it’s well past time to develop one. If one does exist, it should be reviewed and updated annually (at minimum) to stay current. This is where all the work outlined above comes together so when a crisis happens (and it will), the business and its communicators aren’t caught flat-footed. The crisis communications plan should have:
- Scenarios for the least likely but highest impact risks, including pre-drafted messages, holding statements, Q&As, fact sheets, and more.
- Names, contact information, and responsibilities for everyone who should respond to a crisis.
- A detailed process for how the organization will respond to the crisis.
- A link or links to virtual war rooms so the team can quickly gather once a crisis hits.
Unfortunately, preparing for these new crises won’t stop AI from pretending to be the CEO on X or hold back a Category 5 hurricane from destroying a production facility. However, when those things happen, appropriate preparation will help the company quickly address the situation, respond to its key stakeholders, and minimize the long-term damage. The future isn’t crisis-proof, but planning for what could come is the best defense and the surest path to recovery.
Summary
From advances in AI to more devastating natural disasters to socio/political divides, businesses could be caught up in numerous new crises over the coming decade. This article shares how organizations should identify and prepare for the risks of the future, so they aren’t caught flat-footed when a crisis strikes.