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AI risk, trust, and preparedness in a polycrisis era
In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz speak with crisis and risk communication specialist Philippe Borremans about his new Crisis Communication 2026 Trend Report, based on a survey of senior crisis and communication leaders.
The conversation explores how crisis communication is evolving in an era defined by polycrisis, declining trust, and accelerating AI-driven risk – and why many organisations remain dangerously underprepared despite growing awareness of these threats.
Drawing on real-world examples, including recent AI-amplified reputation crises, Philippe outlines where organisations are falling short and what communicators can do now to close the gap between awareness and action.
Highlights
About our Conversation Partner
Philippe Borremans is a leading authority on AI-driven crisis, risk, and emergency communication with over 25 years of experience spanning 30+ countries. As the author of Mastering Crisis Communication with ChatGPT: A Practical Guide, he bridges the critical gap between emerging technologies and high-stakes communication management.
A trusted advisor to global organisations including the World Health Organisation, the European Council, and multinational corporations, Philippe brings deep expertise in public health emergencies, corporate crisis communication, and AI-enhanced communication strategies.
He is the creator of the Universal Adaptive Crisis Communication framework (UACC), designed to manage complex, overlapping crises. He publishes Wag The Dog, a weekly newsletter tracking industry innovations and trends.
Follow Philippe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippeborremans/
Relevant links
https://www.riskcomms.com/
https://www.wagthedog.io/
https://www.riskcomms.com/f/the-2026-crisis-emergency-and-risk-communication-trends-report
Transcript
Shel Holtz
Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.
Neville Hobson
I’m Neville Hobson.
Shel Holtz
And we are here today with Philippe Borremans. We have known Philippe for at least 20 years, going back to the days where he was managing blogging at IBM out of Brussels, located today in Portugal. And an independent consultant addressing crisis, risk, and emergency communications. Welcome, Philippe. Delighted to have you with us.
Philippe Borremans
No, thanks for having me and it’s good to see you both.
Shel Holtz
And before we jump into our questions, could you tell listeners a little bit about yourself, a little more background than I just offered up?
Philippe Borremans
Sure. Yeah, as you said, I mean, I started out in PR with Porter Novelli in Brussels, that’s ages ago, and then moved in-house at IBM for 10 years. So that was from 99 to, I think 2009, must be, working on, as you said, the first blogging guidelines, which then became the social media guidelines. It was a great project, I was responsible for all external comms there. And then…
In fact, moved away from Belgium, lived four years in Morocco, working in public relations on a more, a bit more strategic level. And since then I’ve been specializing in risk, crisis and emergency comms. So that’s actually the only thing I do. It’s mainly around all the things that could happen to either a private sector organization, a government or a public organization.
Shel Holtz
And you also produce and distribute a terrific newsletter on all of this. So we’ll ask you later to let people know how to subscribe to that. We thought we would start with a case study, although we are going to get into a survey that you recently wrapped up and released. there was an incident in which an executive at Campbell’s, the company that makes Campbell’s soup, claimed that the company’s products were highly processed food for poor people and that the company used bioengineered meat. He also made some derogatory remarks about employees and this surfaced and spread around. An analysis found that negative sentiment around the company surged to 70 % and page one search results were flooded with these negative narratives. And that included the AI overviews. One analysis said the ears of marketing and branding were wiped away in an instant.
And that same analysis said that one of the biggest risks that AI introduces is an inherent bias toward negative information. What happened with Campbell’s is that coverage spread really fast across social media and traditional news outlets when this email surfaced. That created a flood of new content that AI systems were happy to start ingesting ⁓ and reinforcing. So when people started searching for 3D printed meat and questions about whether Campbell’s uses real meat, AI didn’t correct those perceptions. It surfaced fragments of context. It pulled language from the company’s own website that referenced mechanically separated chicken. I don’t want to know what that means. And all of this muddied perceptions instead of clarifying things. What should communicators be doing? What didn’t Campbell’s do to protect itself from this? It really is a new reality about how information is gathered up and then shared back out?
Philippe Borremans
It makes you wonder sometimes but it does tell me that the organization probably was not investing enough in their online reputation side of things. I mean, I recently had discussion with a client, they were asking me about how do we prepare our online information so that it surfaces on AI searches and all these things. And I said, well, maybe you should already start by in your newsroom, not publish your press releases in PDF format because that is so the basics most of the time are not in place. And I think in this case, again, I mean, looking at how search engine optimization is changing, how AI is looking at information. That is crucial. It’s basics because if your online reputation is out there with the information that you have, the bias of AI, I can get it. But if you know that, again, you can work with that. And so I think the organization was simply not looking at their online side of the reputation and information dissemination.
Neville Hobson
What do you think, Philippe – it’s intriguing when I read this story originally that an organization as storied as Campbell’s Soup, one of the leading FMCG companies, with experience galore in communication, made errors such as and highlighted in this report. And it also highlights, I think, the speed with which this evolved and spread so rapidly, caught everyone by surprise. Is this a one-off, do you think? I mean, surely companies can’t be so unprepared as Campbell seemed to be with some kind of system in place, procedures, et cetera, or even going further back than that, the notion that an executive would say such things even. What’s your thought on that in terms of, of literally the self-inflicted damage they have heaped upon themselves?
Philippe Borremans
But I think in many cases, if we would take all the crisis communication cases that are publicly available, you would see that that is a trend that, you know, when people talk about crisis communication, they often think about the things that happen from the outside, right? The things that are sudden. But that is not the case. If you look at crisis communication history, the biggest proportion of crises are not sudden. There are smoldering crises that then break out. So that means that it’s first an issue that you can still manage, but that you for one or the other reason don’t look at and then it becomes a crisis. So it’s not sudden. You knew it was there at some point. And then the other thing as well, we think it’s external factors. But again, the majority of crises have an origin from within the organization, at least in the private sector. So what it tells me, first of all, it’s not new. It’s again, the old story of internal happening and it was an issue probably first and it came out and it was badly managed. And that shows to me or that tells to me that again, crisis, preparedness, reputation management with the big word is still not ingrained in on that top level executive level in the private sector.
Shel Holtz
Philippe, you’ve released a survey and Neville and I have been looking at it. We have questions, but can you give us an overview of the survey before we jump into our questions?
Philippe Borremans
Sure, yeah. So at the end of last year, I did a survey through my contacts, network, newsletter readers on crisis communications, a bit of looking at what the trends would be. Of course, AI is in there, but other things as well. And I got 102 responses that I can actually use. So was amazed. I was like, okay, this is something at least that shows some direction and I’ll just take my notes. Now one of the things that was interesting to see is that when we talk about AI for instance, one out of 87 people reported full AI integration. So that goes in line with other surveys that we see where, yes, there’s a lot of talk about AI in comms and the big changes it can bring and what have you, but we actually see a very, very small amount of implementation, structural implementation of AI. Most of us communicators are still playing around and discovering AI, and this was confirmed as well. Now, the respondents here are senior-level crisis slash communication director types. The adoption levels are low. The top barrier is very interesting. So I asked about the top barrier. So why then is AI not integrated in? And it’s 23.5 % set skills, huge skills gap. And again, that is in correlation with other surveys that I could see. Budget, okay, and then privacy security reasons at 14.7%. But the skills gap, that is the one that I’m really worried about because AI is not new. It’s been three years that we had access to the GenAI tools. We know we can install open source models on our own machines. We can sandbox them in an enterprise environment and still skills and the actual application are very, very low.
So that was for AI. Another one, which I was really afraid of and unfortunately confirmed is exercising. Do organizations actually exercise their plans? They all have a plan somewhere, but we know it’s just a plan and it’s the first thing that goes out of the window when something really happens. But do we exercise? Do we do crisis simulations, tabletops, large scale simulations and only 26.5 % of the respondents here test at least annually? 9.8 reported they never tested and then you’ve got the whole middle who test from time to time when they feel like it probably. Public sector was a bit different than private sector but still that is worrying because I know from experience having worked in this field now for the last 15 years
Good crisis communication or risk communication or emergency communication is about… It’s a muscle, right? If you don’t exercise it, whatever your plan is, it will not work. You need much more an agile approach, which comes from training and simulation exercises, than a rigid protocol plan. You need a plan, I’m not saying you don’t need it, but what will get you through a crisis is your agile approach because things change all the time. And that is only possible to get there, it’s only possible through exercising and we see that it’s not the case. Another one linked to AI. Everybody in the survey said, and it was really on top of when I asked about the biggest risks, AI, going wrong, AI risks related to AI. So fakes and what have you, deep fakes, etc. But only 3.9 % said that they had a tested gen AI crisis protocol. And 27.5 said they had no protocol and no plans in place to face an AI generated crisis. So it’s right on top there. Everybody’s afraid of it. Nobody’s planning for it. Again, an interesting insight I found.
Neville Hobson
That is interesting. Yeah.
Philippe Borremans
And then the first thing, mean, said that trust was much more difficult to manage than before. But what I saw in the rest of the information of the survey as well is that, again, the problem is there. what we actually and when I say we, it’s communicators and crisis communicators, what we don’t do is prepare, train and create protocols for different scenarios.
Neville Hobson
On that topic of trust, timely mention there, Philippe, because that’s one of my questions I was going to come back to a bit later, but this is the right moment to talk about that. The report actually describes a widening trust deficit. You touch on that with many organizations struggling to measure trust at all. That surprises me, I have to say, let alone rebuild it during a crisis. In fact, that applies to, I think, the Campbell Soup situation quite well, and it’s a crisis of trust they have now encountered. It’s timely to talk about this because in the context of the bigger picture of trust, Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which landed today as we record this, which is the 20th of January, it raises that question of the widening trust deficit in the context of crisis communication. So, I wonder your thoughts on the perennial question about communicators wanting to be taken seriously in the boardroom in particular. How should they rethink trust? And indeed, is that the right question to ask them even in this current climate of widening trust? Trust is already low. How on earth do you lift yourself up from that? How should they rethink it, as I mentioned, not as a value, but as something they can actually measure and manage? What’s your take on it?
Philippe Borremans
Well, I’ll even go a step further and I like your question. Is it even one of those concepts that we need to look at? I have a big issue with I do a lot of speaking at conferences and do workshops and every single time at least at conferences, every single other speaker has one slide that says we need to build trust. Right. And I got so fed up with that. I mean, what is trust, Neville and Shel? All three of us have different cultural backgrounds. Trust, the concept, is a different thing for all three of us. How we relate to government, how we relate to the private sector, how we relate to our community in society, it’s different. There is not one single definition. Of course, there is the broad definition of what it means, but when you look at it from a communications point of view and a relationship point of view between an organization and the publics, you will see that in every different part of the globe, it’s a different interpretation. And trust is not only, is not the only variable that works or that is important for crisis comms, then at least we have around 12 of them. Peter Sandman, you know, put the groundwork in that work, scientific research, but we have 12 to work with. Trust is just one of them.
So already there, I’m very cautious about using trust as the…you know, the mantra or the silver bullet. But once we understand what we’re talking about and agree on it, to me, it’s very simple. It all starts with and ends with completely and completely understanding your different audiences. We always talk about stakeholders. Sure, they are important. But from a communications point of view, from trust building, and I think
At least that’s my analysis from the Edelman Trust Barometer report as well. They talk about segmented audiences finally, we, I hope now finally most communication professionals understand that the general public doesn’t exist. We need to segment our audiences. And it’s understanding those through and through. Knowing what their context is. Knowing what their definition of trust is, what their relation is with your organization. Only then can you start building plans looking at how you would approach this in the context of a crisis. That’s what I think about this.
Shel Holtz
I want to stick with this issue of trust, even though it’s just one of several variables. Your survey found that nearly 66 percent of practitioners find building trust is harder today than it was five years ago. And you reference the idea of this being the era of the perma crisis. It’s always happening. Is this decline in our ability to build trust to failure of communication or is the external environment just too volatile to to manage effectively?
Philippe Borremans
But as an organization, as communicators, we’ve always worked in an environment that was shifting. Sure, maybe it’s, you, we’re in a peak moment where a lot of things are shifting. But if you actually look at, if I just look at different moments in my career at IBM, et cetera, and other organizations, there were always things shifting around. Now, either you look at it from your micro environment where you actually have something that you can
manage or on a global scale. But I think it’s much more about the profession as communicators. First of all, understanding the environment. Not a lot of communicators truly understand polycrisis and permacrisis concepts and how it actually translates into communications. It’s thrown out there and geopolitics and what have you, but how does that translate to your day-to-day work for your organization? So that’s already, I think, a gap. And then once you understand that, what can you actually do to minimize that impact from a communications point of view? We only have so much that we can actually work on. That means we need to work with other departments as well and probably with industry associations, cetera, et cetera. We are not the, you know, we cannot solve everything. But if we actually already start knowing what we can do in our corner and understanding the global environment now, which is not easy. Then already we can take the first steps. I’m always amazed when I work with clients, they all have media and social media monitoring platforms. And they actually think that for them, that’s intel, that’s the insights they need. Most of the time I tell them, well, yes, you need that part, but you have nothing around predictive analytics. You have nothing on horizon scanning. You have nothing on. So there’s huge gaps in there. And that’s actually the new things that you need in a world which is changing all the time.
Shel Holtz
I remember reading in an IABC document, somebody said that a crisis is what you get when you fail at issues identification.
Philippe Borremans
It is an issue, badly managed issue is of course something that becomes a crisis. on trust, Shel, I think out of the report came that the majority of respondents find it much more difficult to manage trusts than five years ago. But when I asked, well, how do you actually measure that? Nobody knew. there, again, it’s an impression they have. It’s a feeling.
Shel Holtz
It’s a feeling.
Philippe Borremans
But where is your benchmark? How are you going to measure your impact that you have or don’t have? How do you work with that if you don’t have the data? And that’s a gap.
Neville Hobson
You mentioned ‘polycrisis’ and indeed your report starts out by saying we work in an era of polycrisis. And you then said communicators need to understand what that means. Well, I’m a communicator. Help me out here, Philippe. What does it mean?
Philippe Borremans
Well, a polycrisis is an interesting concept. So what it actually means is that you have different crises which are interlocked, right? And that can happen in the same crisis window, meaning you could face a climate hazard, let’s say a hurricane, which could result in a blackout, which means, you know, critical infrastructure which then could have an impact on your data center and you suddenly are in a very commercial crisis there because clients rely on your data center if you’re an infrastructure provider. So it’s that interconnectedness of different types of crisis. And that is an interesting concept. First of all, it’s closer to reality. I’ve seen it here in Portugal. We had our famous blackout for more than 12 hours, but you see how it trickles down and impacts different things.
Neville Hobson
Yeah.
Philippe Borremans
infrastructure, mobile connection, business, etc. etc. etc. So that idea of interconnected crisis is now it is interesting in the context of crisis communication because we have previously always been trained on siloed crisis. All the plans are written like, okay, if we have a product recall, what do we do? If we have a critical infrastructure breakdown, what do we do? If we but it’s all separated, it’s not integrated. And of course that changes the game, that changes how you prepare for a crisis.
Neville Hobson
So that leads into, nicely, the question I had, which is precisely on that point, one of the strongest themes in the report is that crisis communication works best when it’s integrated across functions. Yet, HR, legal, maybe cybersecurity, certainly comms are often only loosely connected. So when a real compound crisis hits, where do you most often see integration break down? And what distinguishes organizations that get this right from those that don’t?
Philippe Borremans
Yeah. Well, a good example was Heathrow. You know, remember the blackout of Heathrow? It was so crazy because at one point I put two screens next to each other. So through my network of crisis communicators, we were all going like, my God, how is this possible? You know, I mean, but I had actually next to that a screen with my feed of my connections in the business continuity world, the operational side. And they’re all going like, we got an airport, one of the biggest airports in the world up and running in less than 24 hours again. Job well done. So that’s where it happens in an organization. You have the comms people going crazy and you’ve got the ops people working very hard and doing what they do. But they don’t you know, there is no interconnectedness. And then, of course, you have legal good friends from legal. And now you have entities, of course, HR. mean, one of the things that I’m still very much amazed when I work with clients is that internal comms is never at the table. While we all know that your first communication during a crisis is your internal communications. And it’s still not the case. So that where it’s often go wrong. The big chasm that I see is between comms and operations. once they get together, you see fabulous things happening because we can translate what it actually means if they can be up and running in half an hour or in two days. We can translate that to our audiences and our stakeholders and say, look, that’s the situation.
Cybersecurity is interesting as well because there’s a lot of pressure to integrate that now into crisis management teams simply and not because people think that’s the best way to do it, because it’s becoming the law within the EU. It needs to be integrated. It’s the law. You have no choice. So there’s a couple of things moving, but it’s more on the pressure of law and ISO quality norms and what have you, than actually understanding, yes, we all need to sit around the same table and let us all do our own jobs that we’re good in. We can translate stuff. You do the operational stuff.
Shel Holtz
It’s interesting, our CEO, I work for a construction company and our CEO says the thing that keeps him awake at night the most is cybersecurity and nothing to do with the industry. It’s just cybersecurity issues. Philippe, one of the new insights that came out of your report was a reference to populist politicians undermining science-based policy. How can organizational communicators deal with this landscape where facts are increasingly viewed through a partisan or an ideological lens?
Philippe Borremans
Well, again, it goes back to understanding why and how this happens. If you look just around a topic, which again is often discussed, mis-dis and malinformation, we talk about online and offline, right? It’s understanding what it actually means. I’m running a couple of workshops now on specifically on inoculation and pre-banking, which are two techniques and probably the only two techniques that work to counter this mis, mal and disinformation online. And so it’s, it’s understanding the psychology behind it. It’s not only about technology, it’s a lot about human biases and psychology. And, of course, countering the world’s geopolitical narratives, which, you know, have a certain way of going, that is, of course, very difficult, but understanding why they happen and how they work and how they then can impact certain audiences which and stakeholders were important to you. I think that is crucial as a communicator. And that is by studying, just looking at, what does this actually mean? Can we identify it? Can we translate how it could potentially impact what we do? And then how can we counter it?
Unfortunately, if it’s about online mis-dis and malinformation, there’s only two techniques that work. And even then, those two alone will just create a small protective layer because it’s very difficult to take online. But pre-banking and inoculation are the only techniques that work for the moment. Other ones, is, and they’re being talked about like, let’s increase media literacy. Well, that’s first of all, up to up. I mean, it’s not our responsibility. I think as communicators, we have other things to do. It’s probably the responsibility of the government, institution, Ministry of Education, but then we’re off for the next three decades.
Neville Hobson
I want to go back to the gaps that we touched on earlier. The big gap that struck me from reading it is how so many leaders see AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes as critical risk. Yet most organizations still don’t have the documented protocols to deal with them. And you’ve made that point very strongly about no protocols, no plans. I wonder, what’s really holding back organizations from moving from beyond awareness, that like, yes, they know, to action. So I guess a simple question, like the takeaway for listeners in this one, if you’re a communicator, what’s the simplest first step you could take to move from awareness to action to develop a plan? Let’s say in the next 90 days, what would you say to someone with that?
Philippe Borremans
It starts with sensing, right? You have to listen for these things because otherwise you’ll just see them when they’re actually out there and you’re in trouble. So it’s actually sensing. So I’m a very strong believer in AI driven predictive analytics. So this is different than your standard monitoring. Your standard monitoring, look at brand mentions and CEO mentions, executive mentions, et cetera. That’s not how you’re going to detect deep fakes. There are actually platforms out there today which do predictive analytics look at the activation of bot networks, the spreading of a certain narrative in a certain context, and that will show you something is brewing.
I’m making it very simple now. Something is brewing, things are getting organized, we could have something coming towards us, which could be deep fake and what have you and what have you. So first listening so that you have your alert system done in place. Then on the defense side, it’s actually also having what I call a truth bank. That’s a database or an Excel sheet, whatever. I can’t believe I said Excel sheet, a database where you have actual proof that your communication assets are yours, authentic and come from you. Because we are getting into an area where at one point in time, will, an organization will be questioned. Yes, you can say that press release is yours, but is it actually yours? You can say that that video of your CEO is actually true, but how can you prove that? We call me in an area as far as that. So you actually need to do it.
And you know, I’m a big defender and also user of blockchain technology. It’s very simple today. You can actually, you know, actually prove without irrefutable doubt that some pieces of communication are yours. Example of a bank in Belgium. Already years, every single press release they send out is stamped through a blockchain system so that they can actually prove it’s theirs. And they started to do that more than five years ago because they had fake press releases going out. And that wasn’t even AI driven. That was just someone who got very creative.
So first listening, then protecting your assets, making sure that you can prove it yours, and then countering. But countering depends on the situation. If it’s a rage farming attack, for instance, it’s no use in going against the originators, the people, the bad actors. That’s no use at all. You need to focus on the…
Neville Hobson
Can you just explain what rage farming is, Philippe?
Philippe Borremans
Sorry, yeah, rage farming. Rage farming is a technique where a bad actor, and most of the time it’s about making money, organizes an attack on your brand and they make money simply by the algorithms on the different platforms who then bring in sponsors and what have you and and clicks etc. Rage farming is an attack which is actually taking your normal communication standard comms, your next press release, your next presence at a conference, your next speech of your CEO, takes it out of context, looks at how it can be repurposed with one single objective to trigger rage.
So a very practical example, imagine that a retail company decides to make unisex uniforms. Men and women dress the same. We don’t make a difference. You could think, wow, gay, why not? Taken out of context, that means that it could be translated by bad actors in, look, they don’t want women to be women anymore. look, the whole woke context, they would reframe that and then target that message. It’s just out of context, but target that message proactively to communities online who are much more conservative, who have a much more conservative worldview. They would then be triggered by rage, start to spread it, and then actually you have that whole system. That’s rage farming. And why did we come to rage farming? Lost my…
Neville Hobson
Yeah. You were trained to thought. Yeah. No, that was, no, we actually moved on from that question, which was these steps to take, and you were going through each of the steps…
Philippe Borremans
Yeah, so and against rage farming, is one of those things that you need to do. So is that actual listening and in the context of rage farming, it’s no use at all to go against the bad actors because they’re in there to make money. Most of the time they have a whole network. It’s no use at all. But you need to then focus on your audiences that you can at least still inform. So not even to the in this example, the more conservative community online, because you will not change their mind. That’s their cultural background. That’s how they think about the world. So you actually need to know very well where you can make a difference or not, which is not always easy.
Shel Holtz
Let’s stick with this theme of gaps. The respondents to your survey were mostly C-suite, director level professionals. Is there a generational gap in how senior leadership views risks compared to the lower level, more junior practitioners? They’re the ones who are monitoring the feeds and they’re the ones who are going to be tasked with implementing a response. Is there a gap between them and the senior leadership in terms of how they perceive these things, these issues?
Philippe Borremans
I didn’t, I couldn’t get that out of the survey. I could probably look at it more deeply, but my gut feeling and based on experience is that you have some senior leaders who definitely see these risks, but on a very strategic level. And there is a gap in translating that into an, shall we call it an operational level. That’s what other responses and other questions tell me. Like, we know it’s difficult to manage trust compared to five years ago. Yeah, but you don’t have the benchmark. So how would you know? It’s just a gut feeling that you have. we know AI generated crisis are top risk. Yeah, but you don’t have your pro. So it’s that translation, I think. So there’s a top layer, think, that actually reads all the reports and meets around with senior peers and they talk about geopolitics and the world changing and polycrisis, what have you, and they understand.
But then how do you translate that into actual practical things in operational stuff? How do you upskill your team, your communications team today? Right. So that they can actually face all these these new issues. How do you change and adapt your crisis communication, preparedness planning? How do you integrate that? Those are the kind of practical questions that probably don’t trickle down. And of course, if down there you have more junior people, they maybe wouldn’t know the best way to go about it. That’s my feeling.
Neville Hobson
I’d like to talk a bit about testing. You can have a crisis communication plan, indeed more than one, which is not much use if you don’t ever test it to see if it all works. Anecdotally, I’ve heard, over the years, I suspect that that’s a major hurdle for many who perceive it as, know, organization wide. This is a massive project to get through. And yet I’ve often wondered, do you have to do that even? And then your report talks about things like embracing micro simulations, which I think maybe you could talk about that a little bit. But I’m also thinking something I found quite intriguing, make testing a governance requirement. And I suppose that makes sense in jurisdictions where testing isn’t any kind of legal requirement. So you voluntarily do this. But can you talk a little bit about the embracing micro simulations in particular and maybe some examples of how to make it seem both less daunting to a communicator and also relatively easy that they can actually implement some kind of testing process.
Philippe Borremans
Yeah, and that’s, that’s one of the things that comes back when I talk to people, like not specializing, so communications colleagues, I recently was at a conference and someone said, I am so convinced of this, but how do I translate that and tell that and ask for this to my management, because they see only the costs. Now, I actually have a little AI assistant that I trained into calculating return on investment of these things. But people think simulation is this big thing, right? You see ambulances coming and you see probably a big war room with big screens and what have you. It doesn’t have to be every single time that kind of simulation exercise. Organizations can start from the minimum, which is micro simulations.
I have a a small micro simulation platform that I coded myself. I do workshops with that. It’s an half an hour exercise. It’s a lunch and learn time, right? Get people around the table with a sandwich and say, okay, what is the crisis that we’re going to role play today? Half an hour, you get feedback. Fine. You can do that every single week. People find it fun, but it trains the muscle because it’s based on real scenarios and it’s real feedback and etc. Tabletop exercises. You have many different forms and formats. They can range from one hour to three hours. They can be functional exercises. They can be completely invented exercises. And let’s not forget, mean, communications people have no experience at all.
They’re actually simulation kits you can pay for and they’re not expensive and download, read through the manual and go through the motions. That also trains you maybe as a non-specialized communicator on what it actually means to manage and to do good simulations. But the most important thing is it doesn’t have to be the big thing. You can do micro simulations on a very regular basis, make it fun. You can do tabletop exercises every quarter, hopefully with an executive team, but put it in the agenda. And if you are in certain industries, I would actually say, well, you need a full scale simulation exercise every year if you’re in the petrochemical and what have you industry.
The point is you can actually position this not as a cost center exactly as a corporate insurance does. We know based on research and facts that organizations who train their plan first of all get through a crisis much quicker but rebuild after a crisis much quicker and that’s where the money goes. If it takes you two years to rebuild that’s a lot of money. If you can shorten that by half or even more. That is the actual game you do. And that comes from training, training and training. There is a reason why I was in the Navy. There’s a reason why the the captain of the ship, you know, did fire exercises every single day. And after the, you know, the 52nd, you go like, why are we doing this stupid thing? But actually, when you have a fire, you know why.
Shel Holtz
Ten percent of organizations never test their plans at all, according to your report. What happens to these organizations when they’re confronted with a Black Swan event? mean, can you wing it these days?
Philippe Borremans
It’s a good question. Can you wing it? Some organizations wing it and then suddenly they go through it and are like, wow, how did you… But that’s more luck than anything else, I think. Now, black swan incidents, of course, are interesting because those are the ones you cannot prepare for. Well, you cannot plan for, you can prepare for. Because if you build actually that agile muscle around crisis management and crisis comms. You are already much better prepared than somebody who doesn’t have that agile muscle, who is strictly following protocol and old school plans and then suddenly is confronted with a black swan incident.
And that’s why I’m a strong believer in working much more, again, you need plans, you need protocols, fully agree, but you actually need an agile communications team. We know things go very fast, they come from every single corner. You need that mindset. You need that agility muscle in there. And then teams are actually ready to take what comes and move at the moment.
And I do see a link. Another thing which is very difficult for communicators from my generation because we were trained like that, at least I was at PR school, I was trained that you do not communicate until you have all the facts. It took me a couple of years to switch that. When I work for the UN agencies during the pandemic and other epidemics, you actually need to communicate without having all the facts. And it’s very uncomfortable. It’s very contra training. But that’s what everybody in communications today should have that skill, because most of the time you will not have all the facts, and the facts will change day after day after day after day. So you need that muscle again, that agility. That’s the most important thing I think today.
Neville Hobson
I would agree with that view, Philippe.
Shel Holtz
The last question I have before we get to our traditional final question. You got a PR manager in a company who wakes up tomorrow morning, finds your report, reads it and realizes they’re part of the 77 % with no AI protocol. What should they do? What are the first steps they should take to update their crisis plan?
Philippe Borremans
I think if they don’t have a protocol now, it means that it hasn’t been on the agenda or not on the radar. They’ve heard a couple of things. So first of all, get informed about what it actually means. What is a deep fake? What are the different things that could happen? And then see, okay, how relevant is that for our organization? And then translating that into a couple of very basic steps, the monitoring, the protocol setup, and the what if exercises.
What if this tomorrow happens? What would we actually do? What would it mean for our audiences, for our executives, for our stakeholders? And how do we translate that? Not in a big plan and a long, you know, SOP, but simple steps. And most of the time it will not be a, you know, a communications team of 25 people. It will be one, two, maybe just split up the rows.
What do we do if tomorrow there’s a deep fake popping up? How will we do the triage? Because you don’t have to react to everything. And if we decide to react, who are the first people that we need to inform? Sometimes it’s getting really the very basics in place. It’s already much more than 90 % of the other people that are actually not looking at this for the moment.
Neville Hobson
Sound advice. And of course, we now come to that point of the question we didn’t ask you, that you wished we had or hoped we would. What would that be if there is one?
Philippe Borremans
That would be, “Philippe, when do we have another drink in Brussels?”
Shel Holtz
Not soon enough.
Neville Hobson
I like that. That’ll do. I like that one. Yes. It was a long time since we had that drink in Brussels, Philippe, so we ought to.
Philippe Borremans
Or when do we meet face to face again? Because it’s been that’s been a very long time as well. So yeah.
Neville Hobson
Well, you and I are in Europe, so that’s easy for Shel to come over here. And in fact, going to the States these days isn’t a very attractive proposition, I think, to many of us over here. But it’s been a terrific conversation, and I think you’ve shared some great insights for our listeners. Where can people get hold of you? How would people find you online?
Philippe Borremans
Well, the main I mean, if they’re interested in the topic, it’s it’s maybe a good idea to subscribe. So I’ve got a free newsletter every week. I talk about risk crisis and emergency comms and AI. And that’s at wagthedog.io. And if they need support before during or after crisis, it’s my corporate website, which is riskcomms.com.
Shel Holtz
And you’re also on LinkedIn, I presume, and sharing your insights there as well. Philippe, it has been terrific. Thank you so much for the time.
Philippe Borremans
Sure, definitely. No, thank you. It was really great seeing you again and we definitely have to find an excuse this year to meet.
Shel Holtz
I would love that.
Neville Hobson
Thank you.
The post AI risk, trust, and preparedness in a polycrisis era appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
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In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz speak with crisis and risk communication specialist Philippe Borremans about his new Crisis Communication 2026 Trend Report, based on a survey of senior crisis and communication leaders.
The conversation explores how crisis communication is evolving in an era defined by polycrisis, declining trust, and accelerating AI-driven risk – and why many organisations remain dangerously underprepared despite growing awareness of these threats.
Drawing on real-world examples, including recent AI-amplified reputation crises, Philippe outlines where organisations are falling short and what communicators can do now to close the gap between awareness and action.
Highlights
About our Conversation Partner
Philippe Borremans is a leading authority on AI-driven crisis, risk, and emergency communication with over 25 years of experience spanning 30+ countries. As the author of Mastering Crisis Communication with ChatGPT: A Practical Guide, he bridges the critical gap between emerging technologies and high-stakes communication management.
A trusted advisor to global organisations including the World Health Organisation, the European Council, and multinational corporations, Philippe brings deep expertise in public health emergencies, corporate crisis communication, and AI-enhanced communication strategies.
He is the creator of the Universal Adaptive Crisis Communication framework (UACC), designed to manage complex, overlapping crises. He publishes Wag The Dog, a weekly newsletter tracking industry innovations and trends.
Follow Philippe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippeborremans/
Relevant links
https://www.riskcomms.com/
https://www.wagthedog.io/
https://www.riskcomms.com/f/the-2026-crisis-emergency-and-risk-communication-trends-report
Transcript
Shel Holtz
Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.
Neville Hobson
I’m Neville Hobson.
Shel Holtz
And we are here today with Philippe Borremans. We have known Philippe for at least 20 years, going back to the days where he was managing blogging at IBM out of Brussels, located today in Portugal. And an independent consultant addressing crisis, risk, and emergency communications. Welcome, Philippe. Delighted to have you with us.
Philippe Borremans
No, thanks for having me and it’s good to see you both.
Shel Holtz
And before we jump into our questions, could you tell listeners a little bit about yourself, a little more background than I just offered up?
Philippe Borremans
Sure. Yeah, as you said, I mean, I started out in PR with Porter Novelli in Brussels, that’s ages ago, and then moved in-house at IBM for 10 years. So that was from 99 to, I think 2009, must be, working on, as you said, the first blogging guidelines, which then became the social media guidelines. It was a great project, I was responsible for all external comms there. And then…
In fact, moved away from Belgium, lived four years in Morocco, working in public relations on a more, a bit more strategic level. And since then I’ve been specializing in risk, crisis and emergency comms. So that’s actually the only thing I do. It’s mainly around all the things that could happen to either a private sector organization, a government or a public organization.
Shel Holtz
And you also produce and distribute a terrific newsletter on all of this. So we’ll ask you later to let people know how to subscribe to that. We thought we would start with a case study, although we are going to get into a survey that you recently wrapped up and released. there was an incident in which an executive at Campbell’s, the company that makes Campbell’s soup, claimed that the company’s products were highly processed food for poor people and that the company used bioengineered meat. He also made some derogatory remarks about employees and this surfaced and spread around. An analysis found that negative sentiment around the company surged to 70 % and page one search results were flooded with these negative narratives. And that included the AI overviews. One analysis said the ears of marketing and branding were wiped away in an instant.
And that same analysis said that one of the biggest risks that AI introduces is an inherent bias toward negative information. What happened with Campbell’s is that coverage spread really fast across social media and traditional news outlets when this email surfaced. That created a flood of new content that AI systems were happy to start ingesting ⁓ and reinforcing. So when people started searching for 3D printed meat and questions about whether Campbell’s uses real meat, AI didn’t correct those perceptions. It surfaced fragments of context. It pulled language from the company’s own website that referenced mechanically separated chicken. I don’t want to know what that means. And all of this muddied perceptions instead of clarifying things. What should communicators be doing? What didn’t Campbell’s do to protect itself from this? It really is a new reality about how information is gathered up and then shared back out?
Philippe Borremans
It makes you wonder sometimes but it does tell me that the organization probably was not investing enough in their online reputation side of things. I mean, I recently had discussion with a client, they were asking me about how do we prepare our online information so that it surfaces on AI searches and all these things. And I said, well, maybe you should already start by in your newsroom, not publish your press releases in PDF format because that is so the basics most of the time are not in place. And I think in this case, again, I mean, looking at how search engine optimization is changing, how AI is looking at information. That is crucial. It’s basics because if your online reputation is out there with the information that you have, the bias of AI, I can get it. But if you know that, again, you can work with that. And so I think the organization was simply not looking at their online side of the reputation and information dissemination.
Neville Hobson
What do you think, Philippe – it’s intriguing when I read this story originally that an organization as storied as Campbell’s Soup, one of the leading FMCG companies, with experience galore in communication, made errors such as and highlighted in this report. And it also highlights, I think, the speed with which this evolved and spread so rapidly, caught everyone by surprise. Is this a one-off, do you think? I mean, surely companies can’t be so unprepared as Campbell seemed to be with some kind of system in place, procedures, et cetera, or even going further back than that, the notion that an executive would say such things even. What’s your thought on that in terms of, of literally the self-inflicted damage they have heaped upon themselves?
Philippe Borremans
But I think in many cases, if we would take all the crisis communication cases that are publicly available, you would see that that is a trend that, you know, when people talk about crisis communication, they often think about the things that happen from the outside, right? The things that are sudden. But that is not the case. If you look at crisis communication history, the biggest proportion of crises are not sudden. There are smoldering crises that then break out. So that means that it’s first an issue that you can still manage, but that you for one or the other reason don’t look at and then it becomes a crisis. So it’s not sudden. You knew it was there at some point. And then the other thing as well, we think it’s external factors. But again, the majority of crises have an origin from within the organization, at least in the private sector. So what it tells me, first of all, it’s not new. It’s again, the old story of internal happening and it was an issue probably first and it came out and it was badly managed. And that shows to me or that tells to me that again, crisis, preparedness, reputation management with the big word is still not ingrained in on that top level executive level in the private sector.
Shel Holtz
Philippe, you’ve released a survey and Neville and I have been looking at it. We have questions, but can you give us an overview of the survey before we jump into our questions?
Philippe Borremans
Sure, yeah. So at the end of last year, I did a survey through my contacts, network, newsletter readers on crisis communications, a bit of looking at what the trends would be. Of course, AI is in there, but other things as well. And I got 102 responses that I can actually use. So was amazed. I was like, okay, this is something at least that shows some direction and I’ll just take my notes. Now one of the things that was interesting to see is that when we talk about AI for instance, one out of 87 people reported full AI integration. So that goes in line with other surveys that we see where, yes, there’s a lot of talk about AI in comms and the big changes it can bring and what have you, but we actually see a very, very small amount of implementation, structural implementation of AI. Most of us communicators are still playing around and discovering AI, and this was confirmed as well. Now, the respondents here are senior-level crisis slash communication director types. The adoption levels are low. The top barrier is very interesting. So I asked about the top barrier. So why then is AI not integrated in? And it’s 23.5 % set skills, huge skills gap. And again, that is in correlation with other surveys that I could see. Budget, okay, and then privacy security reasons at 14.7%. But the skills gap, that is the one that I’m really worried about because AI is not new. It’s been three years that we had access to the GenAI tools. We know we can install open source models on our own machines. We can sandbox them in an enterprise environment and still skills and the actual application are very, very low.
So that was for AI. Another one, which I was really afraid of and unfortunately confirmed is exercising. Do organizations actually exercise their plans? They all have a plan somewhere, but we know it’s just a plan and it’s the first thing that goes out of the window when something really happens. But do we exercise? Do we do crisis simulations, tabletops, large scale simulations and only 26.5 % of the respondents here test at least annually? 9.8 reported they never tested and then you’ve got the whole middle who test from time to time when they feel like it probably. Public sector was a bit different than private sector but still that is worrying because I know from experience having worked in this field now for the last 15 years
Good crisis communication or risk communication or emergency communication is about… It’s a muscle, right? If you don’t exercise it, whatever your plan is, it will not work. You need much more an agile approach, which comes from training and simulation exercises, than a rigid protocol plan. You need a plan, I’m not saying you don’t need it, but what will get you through a crisis is your agile approach because things change all the time. And that is only possible to get there, it’s only possible through exercising and we see that it’s not the case. Another one linked to AI. Everybody in the survey said, and it was really on top of when I asked about the biggest risks, AI, going wrong, AI risks related to AI. So fakes and what have you, deep fakes, etc. But only 3.9 % said that they had a tested gen AI crisis protocol. And 27.5 said they had no protocol and no plans in place to face an AI generated crisis. So it’s right on top there. Everybody’s afraid of it. Nobody’s planning for it. Again, an interesting insight I found.
Neville Hobson
That is interesting. Yeah.
Philippe Borremans
And then the first thing, mean, said that trust was much more difficult to manage than before. But what I saw in the rest of the information of the survey as well is that, again, the problem is there. what we actually and when I say we, it’s communicators and crisis communicators, what we don’t do is prepare, train and create protocols for different scenarios.
Neville Hobson
On that topic of trust, timely mention there, Philippe, because that’s one of my questions I was going to come back to a bit later, but this is the right moment to talk about that. The report actually describes a widening trust deficit. You touch on that with many organizations struggling to measure trust at all. That surprises me, I have to say, let alone rebuild it during a crisis. In fact, that applies to, I think, the Campbell Soup situation quite well, and it’s a crisis of trust they have now encountered. It’s timely to talk about this because in the context of the bigger picture of trust, Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which landed today as we record this, which is the 20th of January, it raises that question of the widening trust deficit in the context of crisis communication. So, I wonder your thoughts on the perennial question about communicators wanting to be taken seriously in the boardroom in particular. How should they rethink trust? And indeed, is that the right question to ask them even in this current climate of widening trust? Trust is already low. How on earth do you lift yourself up from that? How should they rethink it, as I mentioned, not as a value, but as something they can actually measure and manage? What’s your take on it?
Philippe Borremans
Well, I’ll even go a step further and I like your question. Is it even one of those concepts that we need to look at? I have a big issue with I do a lot of speaking at conferences and do workshops and every single time at least at conferences, every single other speaker has one slide that says we need to build trust. Right. And I got so fed up with that. I mean, what is trust, Neville and Shel? All three of us have different cultural backgrounds. Trust, the concept, is a different thing for all three of us. How we relate to government, how we relate to the private sector, how we relate to our community in society, it’s different. There is not one single definition. Of course, there is the broad definition of what it means, but when you look at it from a communications point of view and a relationship point of view between an organization and the publics, you will see that in every different part of the globe, it’s a different interpretation. And trust is not only, is not the only variable that works or that is important for crisis comms, then at least we have around 12 of them. Peter Sandman, you know, put the groundwork in that work, scientific research, but we have 12 to work with. Trust is just one of them.
So already there, I’m very cautious about using trust as the…you know, the mantra or the silver bullet. But once we understand what we’re talking about and agree on it, to me, it’s very simple. It all starts with and ends with completely and completely understanding your different audiences. We always talk about stakeholders. Sure, they are important. But from a communications point of view, from trust building, and I think
At least that’s my analysis from the Edelman Trust Barometer report as well. They talk about segmented audiences finally, we, I hope now finally most communication professionals understand that the general public doesn’t exist. We need to segment our audiences. And it’s understanding those through and through. Knowing what their context is. Knowing what their definition of trust is, what their relation is with your organization. Only then can you start building plans looking at how you would approach this in the context of a crisis. That’s what I think about this.
Shel Holtz
I want to stick with this issue of trust, even though it’s just one of several variables. Your survey found that nearly 66 percent of practitioners find building trust is harder today than it was five years ago. And you reference the idea of this being the era of the perma crisis. It’s always happening. Is this decline in our ability to build trust to failure of communication or is the external environment just too volatile to to manage effectively?
Philippe Borremans
But as an organization, as communicators, we’ve always worked in an environment that was shifting. Sure, maybe it’s, you, we’re in a peak moment where a lot of things are shifting. But if you actually look at, if I just look at different moments in my career at IBM, et cetera, and other organizations, there were always things shifting around. Now, either you look at it from your micro environment where you actually have something that you can
manage or on a global scale. But I think it’s much more about the profession as communicators. First of all, understanding the environment. Not a lot of communicators truly understand polycrisis and permacrisis concepts and how it actually translates into communications. It’s thrown out there and geopolitics and what have you, but how does that translate to your day-to-day work for your organization? So that’s already, I think, a gap. And then once you understand that, what can you actually do to minimize that impact from a communications point of view? We only have so much that we can actually work on. That means we need to work with other departments as well and probably with industry associations, cetera, et cetera. We are not the, you know, we cannot solve everything. But if we actually already start knowing what we can do in our corner and understanding the global environment now, which is not easy. Then already we can take the first steps. I’m always amazed when I work with clients, they all have media and social media monitoring platforms. And they actually think that for them, that’s intel, that’s the insights they need. Most of the time I tell them, well, yes, you need that part, but you have nothing around predictive analytics. You have nothing on horizon scanning. You have nothing on. So there’s huge gaps in there. And that’s actually the new things that you need in a world which is changing all the time.
Shel Holtz
I remember reading in an IABC document, somebody said that a crisis is what you get when you fail at issues identification.
Philippe Borremans
It is an issue, badly managed issue is of course something that becomes a crisis. on trust, Shel, I think out of the report came that the majority of respondents find it much more difficult to manage trusts than five years ago. But when I asked, well, how do you actually measure that? Nobody knew. there, again, it’s an impression they have. It’s a feeling.
Shel Holtz
It’s a feeling.
Philippe Borremans
But where is your benchmark? How are you going to measure your impact that you have or don’t have? How do you work with that if you don’t have the data? And that’s a gap.
Neville Hobson
You mentioned ‘polycrisis’ and indeed your report starts out by saying we work in an era of polycrisis. And you then said communicators need to understand what that means. Well, I’m a communicator. Help me out here, Philippe. What does it mean?
Philippe Borremans
Well, a polycrisis is an interesting concept. So what it actually means is that you have different crises which are interlocked, right? And that can happen in the same crisis window, meaning you could face a climate hazard, let’s say a hurricane, which could result in a blackout, which means, you know, critical infrastructure which then could have an impact on your data center and you suddenly are in a very commercial crisis there because clients rely on your data center if you’re an infrastructure provider. So it’s that interconnectedness of different types of crisis. And that is an interesting concept. First of all, it’s closer to reality. I’ve seen it here in Portugal. We had our famous blackout for more than 12 hours, but you see how it trickles down and impacts different things.
Neville Hobson
Yeah.
Philippe Borremans
infrastructure, mobile connection, business, etc. etc. etc. So that idea of interconnected crisis is now it is interesting in the context of crisis communication because we have previously always been trained on siloed crisis. All the plans are written like, okay, if we have a product recall, what do we do? If we have a critical infrastructure breakdown, what do we do? If we but it’s all separated, it’s not integrated. And of course that changes the game, that changes how you prepare for a crisis.
Neville Hobson
So that leads into, nicely, the question I had, which is precisely on that point, one of the strongest themes in the report is that crisis communication works best when it’s integrated across functions. Yet, HR, legal, maybe cybersecurity, certainly comms are often only loosely connected. So when a real compound crisis hits, where do you most often see integration break down? And what distinguishes organizations that get this right from those that don’t?
Philippe Borremans
Yeah. Well, a good example was Heathrow. You know, remember the blackout of Heathrow? It was so crazy because at one point I put two screens next to each other. So through my network of crisis communicators, we were all going like, my God, how is this possible? You know, I mean, but I had actually next to that a screen with my feed of my connections in the business continuity world, the operational side. And they’re all going like, we got an airport, one of the biggest airports in the world up and running in less than 24 hours again. Job well done. So that’s where it happens in an organization. You have the comms people going crazy and you’ve got the ops people working very hard and doing what they do. But they don’t you know, there is no interconnectedness. And then, of course, you have legal good friends from legal. And now you have entities, of course, HR. mean, one of the things that I’m still very much amazed when I work with clients is that internal comms is never at the table. While we all know that your first communication during a crisis is your internal communications. And it’s still not the case. So that where it’s often go wrong. The big chasm that I see is between comms and operations. once they get together, you see fabulous things happening because we can translate what it actually means if they can be up and running in half an hour or in two days. We can translate that to our audiences and our stakeholders and say, look, that’s the situation.
Cybersecurity is interesting as well because there’s a lot of pressure to integrate that now into crisis management teams simply and not because people think that’s the best way to do it, because it’s becoming the law within the EU. It needs to be integrated. It’s the law. You have no choice. So there’s a couple of things moving, but it’s more on the pressure of law and ISO quality norms and what have you, than actually understanding, yes, we all need to sit around the same table and let us all do our own jobs that we’re good in. We can translate stuff. You do the operational stuff.
Shel Holtz
It’s interesting, our CEO, I work for a construction company and our CEO says the thing that keeps him awake at night the most is cybersecurity and nothing to do with the industry. It’s just cybersecurity issues. Philippe, one of the new insights that came out of your report was a reference to populist politicians undermining science-based policy. How can organizational communicators deal with this landscape where facts are increasingly viewed through a partisan or an ideological lens?
Philippe Borremans
Well, again, it goes back to understanding why and how this happens. If you look just around a topic, which again is often discussed, mis-dis and malinformation, we talk about online and offline, right? It’s understanding what it actually means. I’m running a couple of workshops now on specifically on inoculation and pre-banking, which are two techniques and probably the only two techniques that work to counter this mis, mal and disinformation online. And so it’s, it’s understanding the psychology behind it. It’s not only about technology, it’s a lot about human biases and psychology. And, of course, countering the world’s geopolitical narratives, which, you know, have a certain way of going, that is, of course, very difficult, but understanding why they happen and how they work and how they then can impact certain audiences which and stakeholders were important to you. I think that is crucial as a communicator. And that is by studying, just looking at, what does this actually mean? Can we identify it? Can we translate how it could potentially impact what we do? And then how can we counter it?
Unfortunately, if it’s about online mis-dis and malinformation, there’s only two techniques that work. And even then, those two alone will just create a small protective layer because it’s very difficult to take online. But pre-banking and inoculation are the only techniques that work for the moment. Other ones, is, and they’re being talked about like, let’s increase media literacy. Well, that’s first of all, up to up. I mean, it’s not our responsibility. I think as communicators, we have other things to do. It’s probably the responsibility of the government, institution, Ministry of Education, but then we’re off for the next three decades.
Neville Hobson
I want to go back to the gaps that we touched on earlier. The big gap that struck me from reading it is how so many leaders see AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes as critical risk. Yet most organizations still don’t have the documented protocols to deal with them. And you’ve made that point very strongly about no protocols, no plans. I wonder, what’s really holding back organizations from moving from beyond awareness, that like, yes, they know, to action. So I guess a simple question, like the takeaway for listeners in this one, if you’re a communicator, what’s the simplest first step you could take to move from awareness to action to develop a plan? Let’s say in the next 90 days, what would you say to someone with that?
Philippe Borremans
It starts with sensing, right? You have to listen for these things because otherwise you’ll just see them when they’re actually out there and you’re in trouble. So it’s actually sensing. So I’m a very strong believer in AI driven predictive analytics. So this is different than your standard monitoring. Your standard monitoring, look at brand mentions and CEO mentions, executive mentions, et cetera. That’s not how you’re going to detect deep fakes. There are actually platforms out there today which do predictive analytics look at the activation of bot networks, the spreading of a certain narrative in a certain context, and that will show you something is brewing.
I’m making it very simple now. Something is brewing, things are getting organized, we could have something coming towards us, which could be deep fake and what have you and what have you. So first listening so that you have your alert system done in place. Then on the defense side, it’s actually also having what I call a truth bank. That’s a database or an Excel sheet, whatever. I can’t believe I said Excel sheet, a database where you have actual proof that your communication assets are yours, authentic and come from you. Because we are getting into an area where at one point in time, will, an organization will be questioned. Yes, you can say that press release is yours, but is it actually yours? You can say that that video of your CEO is actually true, but how can you prove that? We call me in an area as far as that. So you actually need to do it.
And you know, I’m a big defender and also user of blockchain technology. It’s very simple today. You can actually, you know, actually prove without irrefutable doubt that some pieces of communication are yours. Example of a bank in Belgium. Already years, every single press release they send out is stamped through a blockchain system so that they can actually prove it’s theirs. And they started to do that more than five years ago because they had fake press releases going out. And that wasn’t even AI driven. That was just someone who got very creative.
So first listening, then protecting your assets, making sure that you can prove it yours, and then countering. But countering depends on the situation. If it’s a rage farming attack, for instance, it’s no use in going against the originators, the people, the bad actors. That’s no use at all. You need to focus on the…
Neville Hobson
Can you just explain what rage farming is, Philippe?
Philippe Borremans
Sorry, yeah, rage farming. Rage farming is a technique where a bad actor, and most of the time it’s about making money, organizes an attack on your brand and they make money simply by the algorithms on the different platforms who then bring in sponsors and what have you and and clicks etc. Rage farming is an attack which is actually taking your normal communication standard comms, your next press release, your next presence at a conference, your next speech of your CEO, takes it out of context, looks at how it can be repurposed with one single objective to trigger rage.
So a very practical example, imagine that a retail company decides to make unisex uniforms. Men and women dress the same. We don’t make a difference. You could think, wow, gay, why not? Taken out of context, that means that it could be translated by bad actors in, look, they don’t want women to be women anymore. look, the whole woke context, they would reframe that and then target that message. It’s just out of context, but target that message proactively to communities online who are much more conservative, who have a much more conservative worldview. They would then be triggered by rage, start to spread it, and then actually you have that whole system. That’s rage farming. And why did we come to rage farming? Lost my…
Neville Hobson
Yeah. You were trained to thought. Yeah. No, that was, no, we actually moved on from that question, which was these steps to take, and you were going through each of the steps…
Philippe Borremans
Yeah, so and against rage farming, is one of those things that you need to do. So is that actual listening and in the context of rage farming, it’s no use at all to go against the bad actors because they’re in there to make money. Most of the time they have a whole network. It’s no use at all. But you need to then focus on your audiences that you can at least still inform. So not even to the in this example, the more conservative community online, because you will not change their mind. That’s their cultural background. That’s how they think about the world. So you actually need to know very well where you can make a difference or not, which is not always easy.
Shel Holtz
Let’s stick with this theme of gaps. The respondents to your survey were mostly C-suite, director level professionals. Is there a generational gap in how senior leadership views risks compared to the lower level, more junior practitioners? They’re the ones who are monitoring the feeds and they’re the ones who are going to be tasked with implementing a response. Is there a gap between them and the senior leadership in terms of how they perceive these things, these issues?
Philippe Borremans
I didn’t, I couldn’t get that out of the survey. I could probably look at it more deeply, but my gut feeling and based on experience is that you have some senior leaders who definitely see these risks, but on a very strategic level. And there is a gap in translating that into an, shall we call it an operational level. That’s what other responses and other questions tell me. Like, we know it’s difficult to manage trust compared to five years ago. Yeah, but you don’t have the benchmark. So how would you know? It’s just a gut feeling that you have. we know AI generated crisis are top risk. Yeah, but you don’t have your pro. So it’s that translation, I think. So there’s a top layer, think, that actually reads all the reports and meets around with senior peers and they talk about geopolitics and the world changing and polycrisis, what have you, and they understand.
But then how do you translate that into actual practical things in operational stuff? How do you upskill your team, your communications team today? Right. So that they can actually face all these these new issues. How do you change and adapt your crisis communication, preparedness planning? How do you integrate that? Those are the kind of practical questions that probably don’t trickle down. And of course, if down there you have more junior people, they maybe wouldn’t know the best way to go about it. That’s my feeling.
Neville Hobson
I’d like to talk a bit about testing. You can have a crisis communication plan, indeed more than one, which is not much use if you don’t ever test it to see if it all works. Anecdotally, I’ve heard, over the years, I suspect that that’s a major hurdle for many who perceive it as, know, organization wide. This is a massive project to get through. And yet I’ve often wondered, do you have to do that even? And then your report talks about things like embracing micro simulations, which I think maybe you could talk about that a little bit. But I’m also thinking something I found quite intriguing, make testing a governance requirement. And I suppose that makes sense in jurisdictions where testing isn’t any kind of legal requirement. So you voluntarily do this. But can you talk a little bit about the embracing micro simulations in particular and maybe some examples of how to make it seem both less daunting to a communicator and also relatively easy that they can actually implement some kind of testing process.
Philippe Borremans
Yeah, and that’s, that’s one of the things that comes back when I talk to people, like not specializing, so communications colleagues, I recently was at a conference and someone said, I am so convinced of this, but how do I translate that and tell that and ask for this to my management, because they see only the costs. Now, I actually have a little AI assistant that I trained into calculating return on investment of these things. But people think simulation is this big thing, right? You see ambulances coming and you see probably a big war room with big screens and what have you. It doesn’t have to be every single time that kind of simulation exercise. Organizations can start from the minimum, which is micro simulations.
I have a a small micro simulation platform that I coded myself. I do workshops with that. It’s an half an hour exercise. It’s a lunch and learn time, right? Get people around the table with a sandwich and say, okay, what is the crisis that we’re going to role play today? Half an hour, you get feedback. Fine. You can do that every single week. People find it fun, but it trains the muscle because it’s based on real scenarios and it’s real feedback and etc. Tabletop exercises. You have many different forms and formats. They can range from one hour to three hours. They can be functional exercises. They can be completely invented exercises. And let’s not forget, mean, communications people have no experience at all.
They’re actually simulation kits you can pay for and they’re not expensive and download, read through the manual and go through the motions. That also trains you maybe as a non-specialized communicator on what it actually means to manage and to do good simulations. But the most important thing is it doesn’t have to be the big thing. You can do micro simulations on a very regular basis, make it fun. You can do tabletop exercises every quarter, hopefully with an executive team, but put it in the agenda. And if you are in certain industries, I would actually say, well, you need a full scale simulation exercise every year if you’re in the petrochemical and what have you industry.
The point is you can actually position this not as a cost center exactly as a corporate insurance does. We know based on research and facts that organizations who train their plan first of all get through a crisis much quicker but rebuild after a crisis much quicker and that’s where the money goes. If it takes you two years to rebuild that’s a lot of money. If you can shorten that by half or even more. That is the actual game you do. And that comes from training, training and training. There is a reason why I was in the Navy. There’s a reason why the the captain of the ship, you know, did fire exercises every single day. And after the, you know, the 52nd, you go like, why are we doing this stupid thing? But actually, when you have a fire, you know why.
Shel Holtz
Ten percent of organizations never test their plans at all, according to your report. What happens to these organizations when they’re confronted with a Black Swan event? mean, can you wing it these days?
Philippe Borremans
It’s a good question. Can you wing it? Some organizations wing it and then suddenly they go through it and are like, wow, how did you… But that’s more luck than anything else, I think. Now, black swan incidents, of course, are interesting because those are the ones you cannot prepare for. Well, you cannot plan for, you can prepare for. Because if you build actually that agile muscle around crisis management and crisis comms. You are already much better prepared than somebody who doesn’t have that agile muscle, who is strictly following protocol and old school plans and then suddenly is confronted with a black swan incident.
And that’s why I’m a strong believer in working much more, again, you need plans, you need protocols, fully agree, but you actually need an agile communications team. We know things go very fast, they come from every single corner. You need that mindset. You need that agility muscle in there. And then teams are actually ready to take what comes and move at the moment.
And I do see a link. Another thing which is very difficult for communicators from my generation because we were trained like that, at least I was at PR school, I was trained that you do not communicate until you have all the facts. It took me a couple of years to switch that. When I work for the UN agencies during the pandemic and other epidemics, you actually need to communicate without having all the facts. And it’s very uncomfortable. It’s very contra training. But that’s what everybody in communications today should have that skill, because most of the time you will not have all the facts, and the facts will change day after day after day after day. So you need that muscle again, that agility. That’s the most important thing I think today.
Neville Hobson
I would agree with that view, Philippe.
Shel Holtz
The last question I have before we get to our traditional final question. You got a PR manager in a company who wakes up tomorrow morning, finds your report, reads it and realizes they’re part of the 77 % with no AI protocol. What should they do? What are the first steps they should take to update their crisis plan?
Philippe Borremans
I think if they don’t have a protocol now, it means that it hasn’t been on the agenda or not on the radar. They’ve heard a couple of things. So first of all, get informed about what it actually means. What is a deep fake? What are the different things that could happen? And then see, okay, how relevant is that for our organization? And then translating that into a couple of very basic steps, the monitoring, the protocol setup, and the what if exercises.
What if this tomorrow happens? What would we actually do? What would it mean for our audiences, for our executives, for our stakeholders? And how do we translate that? Not in a big plan and a long, you know, SOP, but simple steps. And most of the time it will not be a, you know, a communications team of 25 people. It will be one, two, maybe just split up the rows.
What do we do if tomorrow there’s a deep fake popping up? How will we do the triage? Because you don’t have to react to everything. And if we decide to react, who are the first people that we need to inform? Sometimes it’s getting really the very basics in place. It’s already much more than 90 % of the other people that are actually not looking at this for the moment.
Neville Hobson
Sound advice. And of course, we now come to that point of the question we didn’t ask you, that you wished we had or hoped we would. What would that be if there is one?
Philippe Borremans
That would be, “Philippe, when do we have another drink in Brussels?”
Shel Holtz
Not soon enough.
Neville Hobson
I like that. That’ll do. I like that one. Yes. It was a long time since we had that drink in Brussels, Philippe, so we ought to.
Philippe Borremans
Or when do we meet face to face again? Because it’s been that’s been a very long time as well. So yeah.
Neville Hobson
Well, you and I are in Europe, so that’s easy for Shel to come over here. And in fact, going to the States these days isn’t a very attractive proposition, I think, to many of us over here. But it’s been a terrific conversation, and I think you’ve shared some great insights for our listeners. Where can people get hold of you? How would people find you online?
Philippe Borremans
Well, the main I mean, if they’re interested in the topic, it’s it’s maybe a good idea to subscribe. So I’ve got a free newsletter every week. I talk about risk crisis and emergency comms and AI. And that’s at wagthedog.io. And if they need support before during or after crisis, it’s my corporate website, which is riskcomms.com.
Shel Holtz
And you’re also on LinkedIn, I presume, and sharing your insights there as well. Philippe, it has been terrific. Thank you so much for the time.
Philippe Borremans
Sure, definitely. No, thank you. It was really great seeing you again and we definitely have to find an excuse this year to meet.
Shel Holtz
I would love that.
Neville Hobson
Thank you.
The post AI risk, trust, and preparedness in a polycrisis era appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.