The use of artificial intelligence to make PR teams operate more efficiently is quickly becoming part of everyday communications work. This should include crisis communications work.
When a crisis hits a brand, two seemingly contradictory things are true: one, a fast response is essential; and two, a thoughtful response is equally essential.
Used correctly, AI can assist teams on both fronts. Its ability to summarise vast amounts of data can help by providing the information you need to respond quickly, and in doing the time-intensive task of review, AI offers a PR team the space to determine the appropriate response.
Pattern identification
Artificial intelligence is able to process a vast amount of material quickly, detecting patterns. This can be extremely useful to communicators in the identification of pockets of discontent, where trouble may be brewing.
Having time to prepare, respond, and potentially cut off a crisis before one even starts has long been the ideal of media monitoring, and it is now a reality.
Using AI to analyse traditional and social media can help PR teams spot problems before they become crises, and this in turn can make monitoring for problems more efficient and productive.
When PR teams have the time to examine and address problems, monitoring is at its fullest value. This is one of the primary reasons PR monitors media in the first place: to detect problems early.
Filtering crisis content
Not every crisis can be headed off by monitoring. When a full-blown crisis hits, AI can help PR teams to manage large volumes of information. Specifically, AI can be used to assess crisis content, separating it from other news. This allows a crisis team to get the analysis they need, while also ensuring that other news and issues are not ignored.
Any organisation that has been through a prior crisis has likely observed that “regular” news does not stop when a crisis hits. Although a crisis can consume most of the media’s attention, that does not mean that “regular” news and monitoring stop.
This is perhaps most easily illustrated by using a business-to-consumer product example. In a product safety recall situation, crisis communications will generally centre on messaging to the consumers and the general public. However, there’s a whole network of product distribution to businesses that must also be considered, retail impacts, and the potential for regulatory problems as well, along with standard communications on products that are not affected by the recall.
Professional communicators can now use AI to run separate analyses for each of these areas, which is a distinct advantage for companies, particularly those with smaller communications teams. Previously, a crisis tended to be an “all hands on deck” situation wherein standard communications would typically be set aside to effectively deal with the crisis.
Now, other issues need not fall through the cracks.
You may even find out that some of the topics you typically monitor are more important for you to assess. Things such as how your competitors respond when your organisation is in the midst of a crisis is actually valuable planning information. However, you are not going to siphon off resources to conduct competitor messaging when you are trying to resolve a current crisis.
That task can be done later, and what AI can effectively do to help is to filter the information you need to see immediately, separating it from your more typical monitoring efforts.
By segmenting and summarising crisis-relevant information, you can address crisis work now, whilst still allowing routine monitoring work to continue. This will help prevent gaps in your analysis.
Tailoring responses
Depending on the types of crises your organisation may face, AI can be used to design and deliver appropriate responses and provide critical information when it is needed quickly.
For example, a multinational company may need to set up automated phone response systems to address concerns from multiple countries, in multiple languages.
In this situation, you are using AI to improve the response time of getting crisis messages out and ensuring the messages reach the right audiences.
A University of North Carolina Chapel Hill study adopted this approach using AI chatbots to deliver test hurricane messaging to the public. Messages were designed to use culturally adjusted language, and the study tested “a variety of communication styles for the generative AI chatbots.”
The ability to adjust and modify responses to meet the cultural and language needs of different audiences can be a tremendous asset to organisations operating in multiple regions or countries, but communications teams would need to establish and test such programmes well ahead of deployment.
What AI cannot do
This leads directly to an important point to remember. There are things that AI cannot yet do, and one of those is to exercise judgement.
Human beings are still necessary to review content before it is pushed to a chatbot in a crisis or to determine how to proceed with a media inquiry, for example.
AI should be considered as a means to be more efficient in a crisis by parsing data, analysing coverage, and streamlining processes. It should not be given the responsibility of making key decisions for the business. In a crisis, even small decisions may have long-term ramifications on the reputation of the organisation, its employees and leadership. The last thing a company in the midst of a crisis needs is a secondary crisis caused by delegating decision-making authority to AI.
The use of artificial intelligence to sort and analyse information during a crisis can be transformative when used correctly. It can give you valuable time to plan and respond and potentially even avert a crisis before it is fully developed; all of which can make your communications team operate smoothly when dealing with unanticipated media challenges.
