Tom Mueller: 0:06

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On this podcast, we share stories from the front lines of crisis communications. I'm Tom Mueller. Quick shout out to our listeners who have helped the podcast be named to the top 10 best management podcast in Texas, as rated by the good folks at SpeedSpot, which is a content aggregator and a media rating firm. So we're very thankful for that recognition of our efforts here at the podcast. And we're sort of steadily climbing their ratings system over there. On today's show, we're going to dive once again into the realm of artificial intelligence in the communications and crisis management space. As you know, we like to dive into AI issues here on the podcast when there's something new and exciting evolving here. And if you read the FT or the Wall Street Journal, you know there's always something interesting going on in this space. So today, no exception. Our guests with us are founders of a company known as I'll be.ai, which focuses its efforts on helping communicators be more efficient and impactful using AI tools. So our guests are the founders of that firm, Chris Hamilton and Peter Hennigan, both of whose careers are just steeped in digital comms and leadership roles. So, Peter and Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Hamilton: 1:38

Thank you.

Tom Mueller: 1:41

Hey, I'll get into your backgrounds a bit more in just a little bit, but I want to just kind of open it up right away. What's the top-line sales pitch for albi.ai for those communications professionals out there today.

Peter Heneghan: 1:56

Chris, did you want to kick off?

Chris Hamilton: 1:58

Yeah, sure. Well, you I think you you started to get at it, Tom, uh, in your great uh intro there. But really, we're targeting uh corporate affairs and communications teams. Uh, and what we want to do is really help them harness AI, but in a strategic, safe, um, but also swift way. So, in other words, really trying to accelerate teams at the moment, they're in a really often in a very experimental or pilot mode with AI. There's been so much noise, so much talk about it. There are a lot of people out there offering a lot of services. Often it's quite kind of long-term and theoretically based, and we're really trying to help people in a very practical way um learn how to the best ways to to to um try out AI, to embed it in the ways uh of working, and really start to understand how strategically over the longer term it's going to be helpful and change the way that we work. Because that's something that we believe very fundamentally about AI is that you know it's not the same as a lot of the technology uh revolutions that we've seen, even just in our careers, relatively short as they've been, including obviously the rollout of the web, social media, um obviously the ubiquitous nature of um smartphones and similar technology. You know, AI is sweeping through everything, and it's going to sweep through corporate affairs and corporate communications, absolutely no doubt about that. And people have got to get their head around it, and we're here to help them with that. And we do that by combining expert advisory, so we'll come in and talk to leadership, to teams about what AI means for them. Training, learning, and development is our is our big pillar, and then what we're really excited by uh is our purpose-built AI platform, our the Albi platform, which really helps teams uh modernize how they how they create, how they align, and how they respond. And you you touched obviously, and we know that a big focus of of the podcast is on crisis comms, and that's that's really important to us and a really key part of our platform. So maybe we'll get stuck into that in a little bit. But in short, we make communications faster, smarter, uh, and better, and help teams become more confident in in the AI era which we're now entering.

Peter Heneghan: 4:16

And uh Tom I'd add that where we're coming from is we've got deep expertise, domain expertise in communications. You've got people who are out there who are AI experts, or people who have communications, we bring both of them sort of seamlessly together. And I think where a lot of communications people we go on and speak to, they haven't quite clicked that this isn't just an evolution. When we talk about the web, we talk about the smartphone, we talk about social, they had time to grow. Like the web took a long time to really get going. All that infrastructure is now in place, and we're now plugging in intelligence into that, and then that's the kind of lightning bolt moment where it all comes together really quickly. And I I'm excited and a little bit worried about our profession because we know what we're good at, but we're not quite tech technology focused. We hope we can help communications teams bridge that gap, and our specialism is communications. We're not trying to go off and do operations and HO or other areas, we're sticking in our lane, and I think that's why we'll we should have some success in that space.

Tom Mueller: 5:20

Yeah, that's one of the fascinating things as I've researched your company a little bit, is your focus on communications. And of course, that's where I spent my career. And Chris and I bumped into each other at BP in different types of comms roles uh over time. Uh but you both actually have very interesting backgrounds to me. And uh it uh I think the thing that struck me is that you both worked at 10 Downing Street in digital communications leadership roles there. Uh that to me sounds like crisis communications every single day, right? When you're and just in a high stress, high pressure type environment, there's always something going on. So it just strikes me you've got really, you know, sort of great backgrounds for that. And Chris, I know you've um you know spent time at BP in very senior digital comms role. Tell us a little bit more about your background.

Chris Hamilton: 6:17

Yeah, sure, Tom. So uh I started out in journalism actually. Um, and in fact, my very first job was with a news agency called the Press Association, which is a big, probably the big national agency here in the UK. So think of it like a kind of Reuters or an AP, but mainly focused on on UK domestic coverage. Uh and then in 2000, I remember seeing an ad for uh that the BBC had put in the print edition of Media Guardian, um, where a lot of media jobs were were advertised back then for reporters to join its then uh fledgling online news service, the BBC New BBC News Online as it was known, exciting. And I thought it would be a great place to take the skills I'd learned at PA and apply them in this new media, and and especially when it came to, for example, storytelling using images and graphics and data and um animation and had different ways of telling stories in this new media. It was it was amazing, it was an amazing experience. And I stayed there for 14 years in a variety of different roles. I ended up running the social media operation um as social media was becoming a really big thing. I did a short time at an ad agency, and then this role came up at at 10 Downing Street. Um, and I thought, well, that wasn't part of the career plan, but what a place to work, right? For us in the UK, I mean, or globally, that black door, which is so famous, you know, what it would be like to be walking through there as your place of work. And I just wanted to get that experience, and and I was up for the challenge. So in I went. Um and yeah, I mean, I remember within uh just a few short weeks, uh, one uh an absolutely awful tragedy uh which still resonates uh in the UK to this day was um it's called the the Grenfell Tower disaster. It was this huge tower block uh went on fire. Um, absolutely uh horrible story. Horrible story. Um I was pitched into that for the first time in a non-journalist role. I was kind of on the inside, if you like. Uh the government stood up a gold command uh communications operation, which I was part of. Um, and that for me, that I mean, talk about in at the deep end again in terms of being on the inside of a crisis like that. And there were several other over uh experiences of that over my time in 10 angst, and we can dive into some of those. But yeah, that was like you say, uh you certainly that sort of high pressure, kind of crisis-like uh environment that was there most days, um, was something that I learned a huge amount from and was a was a huge part of my career. And then, yes, went on to BP, where I met you, of course, Tom. Um, and again, a a different take on crisis um and that the the the approach that company takes, that in-depth approach that it takes quite rightly to crisis response, incredible learning experience there. And then my last part of my career was at AstraZeneca. Um, they just come out of the pandemic when I joined, lots of lessons learned from that. Uh, and then yeah, a few months ago, uh joined up with uh with Peter, and we've just launched our new business at Albi.

Tom Mueller: 9:13

Okay. Peter, give us a quick thumbnail of your experience. It's led you to this point in our evolving universe.

Peter Heneghan: 9:21

Yeah, um, I think myself and Chris, there's quite a lot of parallels. So I I I was grounded, I studied journalism, but I didn't become a journalist. I went to the BBC, worked in communications, corporate, and then I got an opportunity to work directly with the um the news team during the 20, the 2008 financial crash. And it was the BBC were breaking all sorts of stories at the time. So although I was wet around the years, as they say in Ireland, um I learned I learned very quickly like what great journalism looked like. Um and during that time also, the BBC, and then I subsequently went on to a place called Channel 4, I was causing crisis for other people because our journalists were unlocking stories about you know the good and the great doing things they shouldn't have been doing. So I was able to see it from both sides what a crisis like to the BBC, but then when you do on to others, true journalism, fact check and all the rest, the impact of that. So crisis has always been there or thereabout, but my big obsession has always been where is the future of communications going? So I was a very early adopter of social media. Um, I remember getting really excited about Twitter when I first arrived, thinking, oh my god, this is bringing people together in new and interesting ways. Um, and then I got approached by BuzzFeed. So I'm actually in New York. We're on our first I'm on my first international trip with Albi. And uh BuzzFeed's office were just around the corner, actually, from here, uh near uh the Flat Iron District. And uh I remember going in there. In fact, you may not hear, but there's a fire um engine going past at this moment in time, so there may be an actual crisis somewhere nearby. Um but I I learned so much about how to storytell in new and interesting ways, and that's kind of where um Chris got back involved. He said, Will you come in and speak to the team about how do you enable social media in an environment that was during the Brexit situation the trees of make the government? And sadly, we weren't able to get anything off the ground at that time, but when he was leaving, I applied for the role, and then suddenly I thought they were gonna say, Yeah, yeah, right, mate, you're not getting that job. Suddenly I'm in charge of a 40-person team. We have a rapid response missing disinformation unit, we've got um content creators, it's an incredible setup. And I remember Chris saying, Look, handing over to you now, but things are gonna get a lot easier. Four months later, my boss rings me up and says, Peter, I need you in the office now. We're locking down the country. COVID. So we spent a whole time through COVID, uh, and I could get onto that later maybe. But the one thing for me that really, really stood out was as I was leaving government, this thing called social um called AI, and I could just see it was utterly going to transform how we communicate and the speed at which we operate, and that's where I've kind of focused the last three years of my career, working with all sorts of interesting organizations like the United Nations, the AGIO, uh, and many others in between. So that's kind of where I've come to so far. But I'm obsessed with the future of communications and also how do you deal with a crisis as fast and as effective as possible.

Tom Mueller: 12:36

Well, this yeah, it's fascinating to hear your journeys uh because you're you know climbing the ladder of AI, technology, and knowledge along with the rest of us. But this to me is like a fast-moving train going by. And you guys with your venture now have sort of grabbed on to that train and are rolling with it and then trying to leverage that now to bring value for others who may not be quite at that knowledge and experience level with it. And of course, you know, anybody tells you they've got the answers on AI, you know, they're fibbing to you, right? It's all evolving, we're all trying to figure it out. But now you guys, you guys have put a stake in the ground with your venture, Albi.ai, and um, and it's fascinating to see, and I I just love to see entrepreneurs, you know, diving into the deep end and grabbing hold, and let's see where we can go with it. So what um as you're talking to organizations out there and kind of selling your services, where do you see the main, or where do your clients typically see the most value in what you guys are bringing in? And I'm curious if they're skeptical or clamoring for help. Uh Peter, when you're talking to clients, what are you what are you hearing from them?

Peter Heneghan: 14:02

It's kind of twofold. It's either some big organizations, their their C-suite has basically said, get on board or else, right? They're the perfect client because they've essentially been mandated to get on board with AI. Um there's more of them coming about, but uh we're still seeing a lot coming the other way where it's very much they're in the awareness. So we have this kind of road to 2030 mapped out, and most people are in the the awareness and experimental stage. We're trying to get them to is the redesign of their communications function to take advantage of the technology. Um a lot, so we're either being brought in on high to say, can you audit and help us do the whole lot? Which we love. And by the way, we're we're global by default as well, so we can work anywhere, we can work in multiple languages. Um, and then the other thing we we do is more tactical. Can you come in and do a workshop with our team or a short audit? We're happy with that as well because that's a stepping stone up, so it's awareness, experimentation, and then they might they might be ready then to take that leap, or they may not be for another year, we don't know yet. But the fact is you have to win over people's trust, it's also a cultural thing, it's work culture and technology combining here. Uh and if you don't get the work culture set up right, the whole thing can fall apart because staff won't go with you on that journey. So I'd say that is, but Chris, you jump in, I may have missed some stuff as well.

Chris Hamilton: 15:28

No, no, I think I think what you said is is exactly spot. I just pick up actually, Tom. You mentioned, I thought it was a great point you made about uh, you know, no one knows the answers yet. And obviously, we know some of the answers. Um, and we we hope that our position, our experience in terms of our backgrounds, you know, Peter touched on that point that we're both communicators and kind of and we've got that AI digital expertise, puts us on the front foot, but absolutely no doubt. And this is one of the things we stress, and I think one of the what where people you talk about where people see value when they work with us, it's that we are approaching this from a, you know, we're going on a journey with them. Um, we don't come in with a mandated, you know, this is how it's going to be, you should use this tool, this is the process you've got to, you know, what the when we work with people, we want to find out how do they work, what are their priorities, what's their strategy, what's their mindset like when it comes to technology uh and and AI in particular, and let's work with you on that. And then the other thing I think which is very much allied to that is you know, the human-centric approach. Like, yeah, we've both been, you know, it you know, what did you want to call it, dabbling in technology, you know, innovators, you know, driven by um by the where where our profession is going, but we are very, very mindful of both the human uh role that needs is absolutely paramount paramount when it comes to AI, um, and that is human-led. It's unfortunate that Microsoft have are using the term copilot, right? Because copilot is a great term for what AI should be. It's a copilot, it's a co-intelligence, it shouldn't be something that that takes over by any means. So I think it's really important uh to stress that. And then again, the final point on this, but also sort of ally to all of this, is that that you know, we talk about how everything's changing, you know, we talked talked about AI sweeping through, and and and you know, and it is, it's it's going to affect every single part of the profession, everything we do. But at the same time, nothing changes. And what we mean by that is that the fundamental principles and approaches that have uh been absolutely core to communicators, whether that's you know, accuracy, trust, the ability to empathize, to build relationships, um, all of those things uh are still absolutely fundamental. And we're not these kind of tech AI, you know, evangelicals who are saying basically you can get rid of your entire function, be replaced by robots. It's the antithesis of that. And I think again, going back to a question, that's where people see value and they work with us that that that is our approach, and we're not uh coming in and making these grand claims about what AI is and how it's going to take over everything. I think it's really, really important.

Peter Heneghan: 18:05

I should add, um, myself and Chris were utterly horrified. We saw this advert uh billboard um which was in New York, and I'll get on to it next, but uh it basically said you've employed your last human. I walked past, Chris, I haven't even told you this, I walked past it yesterday. No, it's still out there. Yes, it disgusted me. It's like, no, this is an augmentation of your work. Like, Tom, your work in crisis that you have expertise on in. You using AI technology will enable you to be like at least 2x, maybe 4x, your ability to do that at the pace you need to do it at. But if you didn't have those years of grounded experience, the technology ain't gonna compensate. It may kind of, but you'll know your gut feeling will tell you whether what the AI is reading out should be said. Like in some crisis, the first thing you do is nothing. It may be, I don't mean do nothing as in don't plan anything, it's the opposite. You may say nothing. Because there may be 50 other companies who are being impacted by the same cyber attack, and whoever blinks first and speaks becomes the news story. You'll know that because you're a comms crisis expert. I won't.

Tom Mueller: 19:17

So I love that analogy. This is great. Um, yeah, because there's a lot of judgment that goes into you know, and nuance to you know what is our you know, positioning need to be on this. This is a very sensitive issue. And you know, we can throw it over to the AI tool and you know get some help with a statement. But uh, you know, boy, those are far from perfect at this point in time.

Chris Hamilton: 19:45

And um, you know, to the I was just gonna just to jump in, I was gonna say, you know, it's a small point, but one of the things you know, most people are probably aware by now that you know a lot of the AI tools we use are by default, they are designed to please us, right? So they're designed to you know, people have started to spot this. This is one of the reasons why you have to be careful, for example, when you know relationship advice is something that that people are starting to use AI for a lot more. And you have to be careful because the AI is in a nutshell, it was always gonna take your side, right? You know, it's very seldom is it gonna say, well, you're but you know, what about the other side of the story? Um, but uh anyway, getting away from the relationship side, the point I was gonna make is that um often we find when you're using these products to help with uh campaign with crisis response, because they default to wanting to please you, they will also default to action, right? And as Peter just said, and as we all know, and I Tom, you will certainly know more than anyone, you know, action is one option, right? As in pro act pro action, proactively saying or doing something in response to a crisis. You know, staying silent, planning, getting your ducks in a row, doing everything you need to do, absolutely do all of that. But AI will often default to put this statement out, you know, say say this thing, go public with this. Um, and obviously, yes, you're right, it can definitely help you with crafting that, and we maybe we come back around to what our product helps you with in that space. But yes, it's very important that you know the kind of um doing nothing, at least publicly, is in the mix, and AI is not necessarily geared to that.

Tom Mueller: 21:21

So let's do Chris, let's circle right back to the product now and uh you know, walk us through a little bit of you know how you see, and and maybe we start with, you know, you go into a client and um uh you know what's what are you what are they looking for? What are you bringing? Where's the real value there once again?

Chris Hamilton: 21:41

Yeah, well, look, I'll I'll let uh Peter take up the reins in a second because um he's been working on the product even from before I joined and knows it inside out. What I will say is when we go in, the first port of call is that you know we're not necessarily saying that Albi platform, although we are very proud of it and we think it's uh fantastic and is absolutely best in class, um, is always gonna be the solution that you know a lot of big companies are gonna be able to take on right off the bat, right? Because uh whether you're you know you might be uh baked into whether it's uh a copilot or you know the Google workspace workspace platform. Um uh and so obviously we're not gonna come in and say we're gonna be able to replicate that. And there are many things that Copilot, Gemini, Claude can do, um, which they're very, very good at, uh, and it's the right right road to take. But I think there is risk in, and if we sometimes do see this, in, but hey, we've got Copilot, why do we need anything else? Right? And of course, what we'll need to remember is that those are very powerful general purpose tools. And as we all know, general purpose tools are very good at general purpose activity, but when it comes to specific activity and s and and and process sets, you really need to be thinking hard about whether you've got the right uh tools in your arsenal. And we all know about um, you know, specific tooling that that we need. I think one of the things, just before I hand over to Pete to talk a bit more specifically about the AWI platform, one of the things that we're very conscious of is you know, the comms tech the comms tech market is is pretty immature, right? So if you think about it, and we've we've done a little bit of research on this, and we've got a chart that shows, you know, there are thousands of Martech, you know, marketing technology products out there, right? They've got an absolute you know feast of options to choose from when it comes to tooling and technology. In the comms space, it's much, much smaller, it's tiny by comparison. And I think one of the things that AI is bringing in that that comms professionals really need to kind of get on board with and be aware of um is you know, we're probably not gonna catch up with with the Martech world, but you know, comms tech is gonna become much more of a thing. And we think we're really well placed in that. We think a lot of what the functionality and what people are gonna get out of the AWI platform um is really gonna make a difference and is something that can work alongside a copilot or a Gemini really effectively. But yeah, Peter, do you want to talk through a bit more about you know when we're engaging with clients what they're looking for?

Peter Heneghan: 24:01

Yes, yeah, and I think before I get on, like Chris mentioned there, if your chief technology officer says you can only use co-pilot, we will make that work for you because we want to be agnostic in that respect, so we know how to use all the main core core tools, um, and there may be good reason, or there may be bureaucracy that you can't get beyond that. But at the same time, we've been building out the Albi platform, and essentially what we've done is we mapped out every aspect of a communications role. And a lot of this was in inspired actually by our time in um during COVID. During the COVID pandemic, we brought together a COVID communication resilience hub, and we had media relations, we had uh social media and digital, we had Bayful Science, um strategic communications and others, and there was a team of about 200 people. We're essentially trying to turn that into a single product, so it will help you write your press releases and your briefings, it will do you know some sentiment analysis, but not not at a high, high level, but sometimes you only need to touch on that. It will do some of your media monitoring. We've now started to build agents which will help you do a crisis plan, uh, but it's built on the best in class government frameworks and behavioral science. So if you gave me any crisis right now, I will come back to you in five minutes with a 15-page document. What to do in the first few minutes, what to do in the first 48 hours, holding line statements. It's it's eight, it's the twenty we call it 2060-20. 20% human, 6% AI. That final 20% is utterly crucial. That plan is fantastic, but it's not the finished product, and that's when it's back over to you. Say, like Tom, if you you were using our tool, you would finesse it, change it, but you're then going into your your kind of crisis meeting fully prepared, as opposed to you've just got a phone call, can you get into the office now? And you're you're kind of still trying to get your your act together. This will get there much quicker. The same with strategy if you have a campaign, whether it's a tactical campaign or a major campaign, we can spend half an hour using our products, you will have your entire plans, maybe even some of your creative, ready to go. So that whole point of the speed at which you can now do this, built on frameworks and communications at its best, is is what we sort of aim at.

Tom Mueller: 26:26

Yeah, that's it's truly amazing the the time that you can save with tools like this, right? That you could, if we've got a specific incident that's developing now, we can plug in some of those criteria and parameters and output a recommended plan or strategy within a couple of minutes. That's uh that's a little scary, actually. Maybe you don't need that whole comms department anymore.

Peter Heneghan: 26:53

But I don't know. I I'm the opposite. I think it allows if you have a team and they're more generalist. So I did a I did a conference in Chicago about four months ago, and it was full of communications leaders from the university sector. It just happened that you know, after the Trump admit administration had come in, the DNI stuff, there was just almost this perfect storm of stuff happening, and the teams just were not ready for it. So they were desperate to learn how AI could help them better. It's too like what we're building would enable really good generalists to become near experts at what they do rather than it replaces them. I think that's that's the main thing. We're not we don't encourage losing losing team. What we encourage is become better at what you already do.

Chris Hamilton: 27:42

I I think the value, just to jump in there, I think the value, yes, obviously, you know, there are cost pressures um that where we can see that, right? It's really clear what's going on. But I think if you look at it in the longer term, I think the sense approaches to see AI as something that can a free your people up to do what they're really good at. So that's building relationships, pitching, negotiating with people, um, ideating. Um, you know, one of the things communicators have, and this is almost unique in a in a lot of businesses, right, is that 360 view of what's going on. That's the external environment, you know, the knowledge they have internally is absolutely huge. Those corridor brush buys with the C-suite, picking up information, knowledge of campaigns and activities, right? There's a whole load of inputs there, like let's call it data inputs, right? And AI is never going to be able to replicate that, it just doesn't have that same exposure to all of those different inputs. Whereas your your uh you know cons professional team we have there is is get is much more able to um uh to to integrate all of that and then use the AI to help. And I think freeing people up to spend more time with the C-suite, to uh spend more time with the materials, to spend more time meeting journalists or stakeholders, um, spend more time on the ground at events and so on. That's I think ideally is where leadership should be thinking about it. And rather than great, I can you know get rid of half of my team because AI is going to do it. I think that that to me is would be would be extremely risky.

Tom Mueller: 29:17

Right. So you've got um, yeah, clearly it's uh you know, I come back to the the co-pilot term that um Microsoft uh seems to have captured so well, but I think you're right, they've they've got that uh that name down. And ideally, you know, if you're a comms professional or comms VP, you want to have some type of an AI tool that's helping your teams be more effective and work faster. Now, when uh when you guys knock on the door of a potential client, um clearly, you know, there's just uh boy, there's a lot of potential value here. What are some of the concerns or the The maybe misconceptions that people have about this. We talked about, you know, hey, I can downsize my team, I can save cost. But aside from that human element, what are some of the you know the misconceptions that you're seeing out there about tools like this?

Chris Hamilton: 30:17

Uh shall I go first, Peter? Yeah, I mean, just just generally speaking, to start with, I think hallucination does come up a lot. And I think for comms people, that's I mean, I think everyone is kind of aware of this, but you know, considering our our craft, our our trade, I think that it's unsurprising that's something that comes up a lot, right? Trust recognition, it's kind of at the heart of what we do. And the fact that we're being, you know, I think there's a bit of a feeling of, oh, we're being told to use these tools, yet when I've used it, you know, it's spat out this nonsense. It doesn't know who our CEO is. It's, you know, it's made up these facts.

Tom Mueller: 30:51

Yeah, there are some very real examples of that out there. With uh uh, well, there was a court case here in the in the US a few months ago where the the judge or one of the staff used AI to help prepare briefs, and the AI tool made up court cases to cite as part of this brief. And so, yeah, the hallucination thing is real. But again, that's a vote in favor of keeping those humans involved and exactly.

Chris Hamilton: 31:19

And you know, that by the way, that that example you talk about, we we talk about that example. Uh so yeah, with that that made its way across the Atlantic. It's something we're aware. There's another example recently that a lot of comms folks are aware of, uh, which was one of the big four consulting firms prepared a report for the Australian government, and it was covered because it turned out they had to give some of the money they'd been paid for the report back because there were mistakes in the report, driven not by the use of AI, and that's one of the things that kind of irritated me about the coverage of this story. That shouldn't have been the framing, in my view. It wasn't the fact they'd used AI. I'd want them to be using AI. The problem was they didn't use it in the right way, they didn't deploy a 2060-20 star framework where the human looked over the final report and double-checked the sourcing of some of the citations that were made in the report, and that was the problem. They'd used AI, and it it had hallucinated as apparently some of the some of the facts made in the report and even sourced them. And of course, as humans, we're rushed, we think AI can do everything. We see a very credible looking, whether it was a quote or a data point, there's a little footnote number down at the bottom of the page, it has the footnote, it all appears very credible, right? Whereas in fact, what you need to do is check those kind of things um to make sure that they're right. So that hallucination is something uh that comes up. And I think our answer to that is um one, the kind of the bad news is we are gonna have to get or we we need to get used to it because unlike uh most of the tools that we've been kind of trained to use, whether it's Google or a lot of the products we use in in our work and our home life, um, they you know, there is it's not a kind of binary, you know, it doesn't know AI doesn't know anything, right? It's based on probabilities around the you know uh framing, the the ordering of a series of of words. It doesn't know whether something is right or not. Having said that, obviously it's in the companies, you know, whether it's open AI or Metro or anyone else, it's in their interest to try and reduce the instance of hallucination. But there's a lot we can be doing, right, in terms of the prompting that we do. So the more detailed the prompt, the better response you're gonna get, the more context you add. And this is something we talk to teams about all the time, you know, have your and your report, have your strategy documents, have your tone of voice, have your have your um a style guide uh as part of either built into your tooling, and that's something that the Albi platform absolutely allows you to do, or upload it to the prompt as you're making it, and that way you will always get much more uh much high quality results and much less instance of hallucinations.

Tom Mueller: 33:55

Okay, so yeah, so hallucination is a big one. Any other uh sort of issues, questions?

Peter Heneghan: 34:02

Peter, what's what do you what do you I think uh the other thing is staff um often feel under undermined or worried or anxious, and I think I would say, and I say this with sincerity, I think one of our strengths is we're taking a human approach. Um other AI companies who are coming from an AI first rather than a communications are basically going, all right, this will replace all your staff, you know, you're gonna save a load of money. You you may lose staff, you may decide that you don't need as big a team, you can streamline in certain areas, but that's not the reason for doing this. You want the ultimate goal here is that your communications protects your business or promotes your business. That's where you want to be playing in that space. And if that requires a few less staff working more smartly with technology, so be it. But that's we're not here to do that. But until you get people over that hurdle, um, that's the problem. And the other thing I think staff always think that they know best. And why wouldn't they? They've been doing a job for many, many years. But when you show them how to use AI effectively and they already have that deep ingrained expertise in communications, that's the perfect solution. Because they if you get a junior member staff who still has to learn the ropes, give them the AI tool, suddenly they think they're they've jumped three or four grades. They haven't, so there's a false sense of uh ability. Well, it's almost the opposite with the more senior people, but once they learn those key basics, how to prompt more effectively, plug in the right data, they're off to the races. They really succeed after that.

Tom Mueller: 35:42

Okay, yeah, it's fascinating. I I love your your comment there, Peter, about a junior staffer suddenly feeling very empowered with this. And the fact is the experience uh you know in the room still counts for a lot when you're dealing with communications issues, external facing issues, and particularly around crisis communications, right? Let's let's kind of turn and focus on the crisis communications aspects for a bit, because there's you know, there's always some key factors here around uh you know communicating in a crisis, and of course, measuring sentiment from what's happening in the external world is a part of that. Um, but also getting the tone of your statements, press releases out appropriately is is there. So, how do you frame albotai in in the crisis realm here now? What's the where do you see the real value uh when we're dealing with crisis?

Peter Heneghan: 36:43

Yeah, I'd I'd say so we've built an agent specifically on best in class government crisis. So a few years ago, the the the dictionary uh word of the year was perma crisis. I don't know if you remember that. So myself and Chris had basically worked through crisis after crisis after crisis. Even after COVID, we had two monarchs, uh, a monarch and uh the Duke of Edinburgh passing away. Major moments for our country, a crisis um in that we plan for years to do this. So we we are well versed in how to deal with a crisis. The UK government has frameworks, we we added in behavioral science as well. And the behavioral science comes in. How can you put out a message which actually is empathetic in understanding of the situation based on the severity? So I think our product allows you to put in any crisis. I always joke about the recent one of that company where the Coldplay concert and then the chief executive was caught on KissCam with the HR lead. Like you can't make that up. Like you would not, you couldn't say, I've got a top dust down a book, and it's like, right, here's how we deal with our CEO Kiss and HR later at a Coldplay concert that's gone viral. R2 on the other hand, because it's built off of frameworks, it very quickly enables that plan to be written out. What we couldn't do, which is where there's limits, is and this is where creativity comes in. Whoever taught Gwen and Paltrow fronting their um advertising after the event genius. We are looking at that and going, is there a way of getting all the best and can line award-winning work into a model and also saying as a kind of curveball, would you consider this? We haven't got there yet, but in terms of a first draft crisis plan, we can get you there in a matter of minutes, which is a starting point to build off of never the end product.

Chris Hamilton: 38:46

Just to be clear, Tom, what we're talking about here is a product that's you know most uh big companies, right, would uh certainly should have a their own uh crisis response framework. I'm sure that's one of the things you talk to, you know, when you're when you go when you're talking to your clients, right? Have a plan ready to go. Um the idea is that uh the Albi platform can take that plan um and have it sitting there in the background along with information about the company, as much as you want. And then whether it's you're running a scenario, an exercise, or of course the real thing, you can come to the platform, the framework's already in there. So everything that you need in order to respond to a crisis, whether that's your initial draft statements, the team, the response team you want to set up, the um spans of control, the reporting lines, the authorization, all of those pieces are already in there and are just sitting there waiting. Uh, you know, there's no kind of, as Peter says, the kind of reaching for the shelf, right? And sort of blowing dust off the off the off the book, and then, oh no, hang on, this hasn't. I mean, obviously, you still would still need to keep the framework updated, but it's much easier to update, right? And you you take it down, you can just put in literally one line about what the crisis is, whether it's the cold play example Pete just referred to, or whatever it is, a sudden um hit to your profits, or some kind of uh accident, it doesn't matter what it is, you can say this has just happened, how should we respond? Now, remember what we're saying is you wouldn't take that, and by the way, it's mind-blowing. I'm still every time I see we we give a demo, you know, we did a demo just last week to a group of comms leaders, and you know, they were literally jaws dropping as they saw the detail and the speed and the depth of the response that that came out of the product. And I think they were just immediately imagining what that would be like in a real situation. We're not saying you're gonna take that report, you know, kind of ping it off in an email or print it out if that's still, you know, go into a call with the C-suite and say, here I've got my plan. You're still obviously going to want to look at that, make sure it's up to scratch, and put your own experience and and creativity into it. Uh, but in terms of getting you through those first few hours of a crisis response, absolutely incredible.

Tom Mueller: 40:54

You know, as you talk to comms leaders out there at various levels, I um you know, I can't help but feel a little bit depressed about the change that's coming, the speed of change that's coming, and you know, trying to grab it and and run with it. Um boy, there's a just a psychological impact on this. And I guess you see that when you're talking to groups of people with jaws dropping and seeing that.

Chris Hamilton: 41:25

But um, you know, what's yeah, I mean, I I I I know what you mean, and I suppose I feel that I've been through that several through several cycles, right? You know, I worked back at the BBC when the the web was coming in, and we had you know people who were absolutely steeped in the highest quality, you know, broadcast um skills and experience and as a profession. And there was a lot of, you know, as the as the sort of power and the the implications of the web became clear, I think that sort of you know, anxiety was is palpable. And one of the things we talk about when we go into teams is and we we confront head on, you know, we're very open about, you know, it's not surprising there's anxiety, but I think there are ways to to mitigate that. And I do think a lot of there's a lot of onus on leadership, and we've touched on some of this already today, but a lot of onus on leadership on in handling it in the right way. And I think it's important to be positive and proactive about AI, but also be clear with your teams about what's involved and what the expectations are. Um, I think that's one thing. I think it's you know incumbent on leadership to help people to through this. I think it's also incumbent on individuals, you know. One of the it's a it's a massive cliche, but still think it's true, which is that AI is not going to take our jobs, it's someone who knows AI better than us. So I think there is it's a mindset shift around um, you know, in the same way that we've, you know, in our careers, right, how many big technological shifts have there been? It's been massively accelerated compared to you know the decades preceding. Um, and you know, we've we've got to deploy that same sensibility and that same curiosity while you know guarding what we're good at and what experience has taught us about what's important and making sure that we deploy those in the right way when we're integrating that technology into our into our work life.

Tom Mueller: 43:10

All right. Well, Chris, Peter, appreciate you guys coming on and sharing your growing expertise in the AI realm with our listeners here. This is clearly a space we're all going to keep watching as time goes by. And uh, we certainly wish you guys the best of luck with your venture. And uh would love to have you back on the podcast again the whole year from now, just to see where you are and see what's the latest tech that's happening there. So thanks for joining us today.

Chris Hamilton: 43:38

Not at all, Tom. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been great uh to be on. Thank you for giving us the opportunity. And yeah, love to be back. Um, we'll see you next year.

Tom Mueller: 43:47

And that's gonna do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Um, if you'd like to email the show, you can drop me a line at Tom at Leadinginacrisis dot com. And we'll see you again soon on another episode. Take care.