The AI Solution for Navigating Reputational Risks

Doug Downs (00:04):

In 2008, musician Dave Carroll had his guitar broken by United Airlines baggage handlers. During a flight after months of frustration, tried to get compensation, Dave took matters into his own hands. He wrote a song,

Dave Carroll (00:26):

You broke My Guitar

Doug Downs (00:31):

And posted it on YouTube. The video started slow, but eventually went viral, gaining millions of views and causing significant damage to United Airlines reputation. A single story when amplified and already matched to a stereotypical theme we can identify with, can reshape public perception and even impact a company's bottom line

Dave Carroll (00:54):

Guitars.

Doug Downs (00:55):

If United Airlines had been aware of the narrative forming around them early on, they could have responded differently, possibly preventing the PR nightmare that followed, but who can read everything on the internet to be able to follow artificial intelligence can. A new tool by Blackbird AI is helping organizations navigate the complex landscape of public perception by identifying potentially harmful narratives before they go viral today on stories and strategies when the power of narrative strikes a chord, because sometimes it's not just broken guitars that can rock a company's world.

(01:48):

My name is Doug Downs, and just as we get started here, we are launching a listener feedback series where I want to ask for about five minutes of your time with me on a Zoom call. I want you to tell me what you think about this podcast. Five minutes. I'm paying $50. You can't beat that rate unless you're a high price lawyer paying $50 for five minutes of your time on Zoom directly to you. There's a link in the show notes, and I'm going to remind you again at the end of this episode, first 10 people, they get involved because we want to understand our audience. My guest this week is Dan Loudon, joining today from New Jersey. Hey Dan. Hey, Doug. How are you? Great to be here. Great to be with you. How are things in Jersey? It's a beautiful August day, so can't complain.

(02:35):

Yep. And here we are, show publishing 1st of September, but you and I, of course recording a week or so in advance and the weather will just carry over. We won't have the leaves on the trees just yet, I hope. Dan, you're the CMO at Blackbird ai leading strategic marketing efforts with over 20 years of executive experience. You've served as CMO for several notable companies including human security, digital shadows, and invincia. You hold an MBA from Rutgers and a bachelor of Science from Ryder University. So Blackbird AI has developed a narrative intelligence platform, which called Constellation. Tell me what Constellation is, how it works, and why is narrative intelligence so important?

Dan Lowden (03:23):

Yeah, I mean, those are great questions to start this off. I mean, let me first say a narrative is any assertion that shapes perception about around a person, place, or thing across the information ecosystem. And if you watch social media, the news, everything that's going on in the world today, narratives and harmful narratives are pretty much impacting every organization across the planet. National security, interest, elections, wars, you name it, right? So it's very, very important. The World Economic Forum named it as the number one global risk for 2024. A matter of fact, we were just a black hat last week around, it's a big cybersecurity show that's in Las Vegas, and NATO gave a big talk about how important narrative attacks and how harmful attacks around misinformation and disinformation are really filtering through everything. And it's something that the world needs to be aware of and to be able to make sure as information flows their way that they question it, that they make sure they feel like they're perceiving it as it should be, not as it is being influenced by others.

(04:41):

So because of that, Blackbird several years ago created Constellation. It's a narrative intelligence platform that enables you to look at narratives and it's leveraging AI to do massive computational work to be able to pull these narratives that are spreading across different networks, whether it's social media, the news chat, you name it, dark web and be able to say, Hey, here are the top 20, here are the top 50 narratives that are impacting your organization or this topic, and actually gives you a risk score based off of lots of different signals and parameters. And when we share this with organizations and the details behind it, they're able to understand what the narratives are, who's behind it, what's being said, how is it being influenced so that way they can really understand what's truly happening out there with real data instead of guessing. So that way they can make better strategic decisions. And it's critical because it could have massive financial impact. A group could be trying to cancel their brand, so is brand reputational impact. It could impact their operations, it could impact executives or employees of the companies. So it's become a very, very important topic, and we call it a new threat vector that the world and organizations need to be aware of and be prepared for so that they can minimize the impact of these type of narrative attacks.

Doug Downs (06:12):

Narratives count, because I have my mind already made up and something helped make up my mind, and that was the narrative in the end. It doesn't matter about the facts, it doesn't matter about the great key messages, the narrative trumps all of that, so to speak. Exactly,

Dan Lowden (06:28):

Yeah. A single post can blow up to be watched by millions of people. For example, there was a post that came up that showed the Eiffel Tower on fire, and there were millions of people that saw it. Is this real and people believed it. There's lots of examples we can go into more detail about, but that changing the perception around anything is what a lot of people, I would say everything from fraudsters to cyber criminals to nation states are trying to do to influence

Doug Downs (07:02):

Us. Okay. I'm going to spend 30 seconds here on the techie part of all this. I'm going to ask you how Constellation works about the technology. Man, I put you on the spot to keep it to 30 seconds. I know darn well there's lots of folks going, I don't care. Does it work? What is the technology that you're using?

Dan Lowden (07:22):

The technology? It's ai. We've been an AI company from the beginning, and it summarizes billions of different conversations and thoughts that are out there and pulls together them into what we call narrative influence. It can say, here are the most popular narratives or the narratives that are growing the fastest. And it does that by giving you visibility into what those narratives are. It shows you the influence behind it, like who's the ones who are instigating it or talking about it, what networks it spreads across. Is it social media only? Is it news? Does it pass back and forth? Is it dark web? Is it bot influenced? Are they using bots to spread the word even further? And what are the cohorts and communities? They could be hyper agenda driven threat actors. They could be nation states, they can be all different types of groups that spread it further and influence it further. So if you have visibility into that, that's how it works. So the technology behind it gives you a dashboard to see all of this, so that way you have visibility into these narratives and the risk score behind it.

Doug Downs (08:35):

Okay. Tell me a little more about how you decipher between a positive or neutral narrative and a potentially harmful narrative. I assume this is the work you do with the client upfront. This is the stuff that will hurt us.

Dan Lowden (08:47):

Exactly. Right. And this is where it's definitely, we use AI to do all this great calculations and give us the data, but human in the loop is critically important. So we work with customers and we say, what's important to you? Or what are you worried about the most? Right? And we look at thousands of different signals, but those signals can represent everything from is there toxic language, is there anger, are there threats? Are there protest? Are there boycotts? As part of the narrative, there are also positive narratives out there, and we want to show there are a lot of positive narratives about a certain initiative a company is putting in place or an organization is putting in place. So it can work both ways. That's the beauty of this. But it really is up to the client to decide, Hey, is this misinformation? Is this disinformation?

(09:40):

Who is behind it? And then from there, they can decide how they react to it, and then they can choose the parameters that are most important to them. It's up to them to decide, Hey, this is what's important to us. We want to pick up the narratives based off of these parameters. And then that way it's really their own footprint that they want to look at, so that way they can look for the things that are most important to them. Okay. Give me that real world example. Give me that case study. Well, there's a lot of examples. Let me just say that. And the one thing I'll just say, we created a Raven blog. Raven is our narrative intelligence and research team, and we publish research all the time. One of the big ones that I'm a huge fan of is the Olympics. And we posted a blog that had 29 different narratives, and there's many, many more just around the Olympics.

(10:30):

And it was everything from boycott the Olympics, or there were threats about the Olympics or swimming in the river or the beds, the cardboard beds. There were positive narratives and there are a lot of negative narratives and it can impact an event from happening. So this is something that we wrote up, we shared with the International Olympic Committee because we're big fans of the Olympics. That's just one example. Another example I would just say is CrowdStrike, the crowd CrowdStrike incident that just happened and that impacted so many different organizations. There were a lot of narratives of, Hey, is this a cyber incident or is this a breach? And the answer? And that was spreading like crazy, those narratives across the internet. And we quickly were able to show, no, those are all false. Those are being spread by people who are trying to drum up trouble.

(11:28):

And we came to the support of CrowdStrike because we wanted to show, Hey, these are things that are being said out there. We want to make sure you're aware of it so that way you can have a narrative out there that tells the true story. And that's where a lot of cybersecurity companies came together to help CrowdStrike to try to solve this issue. And that was the talk of Black Hat. Another example is Taylor Swift. Our CEO was on a lot of news outlets because there was all of these narratives spreading around Taylor Swift being a psyop and being an influencer of elections and all these types of things, and all these harmful narratives were spreading around her. So we published information around that to make people aware of these are the narratives that are being spread and the people who are behind it and they're not true.

(12:18):

It's again, up to you to decide, but there's plenty examples. And then one final one I'll share was a big beverage company that launched a marketing program. They lost billions in dollars in revenue and market share. And it's all because of a marketing program they put in place and narratives spread by a lot of different influencers and even nation states to do harm to that organization. So the more you're aware of these narratives that are impacting your organization and who's behind it, then you're able to respond better to it to reduce the risk, reduce the reputational risk and the financial risk. And that's why this is important,

Doug Downs (12:57):

And you help them find it sooner. To use a forest fire metaphor, you help find the fire before the fire is out of control. Yeah,

Dan Lowden (13:06):

That's the goal. If we can share these narratives are growing, they're harmful, be aware of it, make sure you're ready to respond to them, then you're better prepared to respond when you want to do it. And when that happens, you can reduce the risk substantially.

Doug Downs (13:21):

You mentioned a lot of industries and sectors there. The next question I wanted to ask was what industries and sectors would benefit the most? It sounds almost limited, but I'll ask that question anyway.

Dan Lowden (13:31):

Yeah, I mean, right now we have a lot of customers already, but inbounds from the global 2000 are all worried about they don't want to show up in the news the next day. They don't want to be attacked from a narrative perspective. They don't want to be canceled, they want to be prepared. So another example was Silicon Valley Bank. So when that happened and the bank quickly fell apart, social media and narratives accelerated that. So because of that, all the banks want to be aware of these narratives before the next bank run and to be prepared for them. So financial institutions is definitely a big sector for us. Same thing with pharmaceutical. Everything around Covid and all of the narratives that we're around Covid in that timeframe, pharmaceutical organizations wanted to work with us to really make sure they understood the discussions that were going on out there, travel and entertainment, everything from insurance to critical infrastructure to energy. These narratives are impacting every sector, and that's where we have customers from pretty much every sector and national security as well. As I mentioned, NATO gave a presentation at Black Hat and we were featured in eight of their slides of the data that we provide to them. So it's really impacting everyone. Those are organizations, but it could impact individuals as well, and people can be canceled very quickly, whether it's an executive, a board member, or an individual person just because of what they've said publicly.

Doug Downs (15:09):

So risk in its simplest form comes in two parts. One is the likelihood of the risk, the other is the catastrophic level of the risk. I want to ask you a bit about the latter part. How you measure the potential catastrophe talking with your clients is one way of helping to measure that. And the big companies, the banks are going to have whole risk departments and blah, blah, blah, but the medium sized companies don't necessarily have experts in the art that risk management truly is. How well can your tools can constellation, help measure the catastrophic level of a risk?

Dan Lowden (15:49):

And it could be for any organization, and we work with a lot of nonprofits as well. So that's the beauty of this. You don't need to be an expert. We have Constellation as a dashboard. Once we quickly train you up on it, you're able to understand what the narratives are, and we're making summaries what we call narrative feed to be able to feed into Constellation. So it summarizes each one of the narratives into a simple paragraph and says, this is the narrative and here's a summary. And then you can easily share that with your management team, your leadership team, your board, or if you're a small company, now you can understand it. So it can go as technical as you want and constellation as deep as you want. But then we have these AI based summaries that make it super easy for anybody to understand and to be able to take action from.

(16:42):

The other thing I'll just say, we have another product called Compass by Blackbird ai. You can just go to our website and sign up for it. You put in any URL, whether it's a video, audio, text, and if it looks like something doesn't look right, like the Eiffel Tower is on fire, you put that URL in Compass, it'll come back and say, no, this is not true based off of these reliable sources. And it does it in a matter of seconds, and it comes from sources all over the world that we work with. So really valuable in a way that anybody can understand it. And then if they understand what the narrative is, then they can make better decisions.

Doug Downs (17:24):

Just generally speaking, political parties are going to be interested in this. From just a strictly general perspective, how would your tools potentially help, not a political movement, but a political party involved in an upcoming election?

Dan Lowden (17:42):

Yeah, so it's a great question. I mean, we don't work with any political parties directly. We don't just choose not to. But we have published a lot, and again, in our Raven blog about elections across the globe, and we're seeing the same type of things happen across election after election, whether if it's deep fakes, whether it's video or audio, where it looks like someone who's running for office is saying such and such a thing, but they're not, that is happening across the globe. So DeepFakes is something that is AI based that people can easily create and create narratives that can really influence these elections. So it's something for people to be aware of. There's a lot of bot influence in elections. If there's a certain topic, they'll push the bots, and instead of a thousand people talking about it, a million bots are talking about it.

(18:36):

And people can't tell the difference on social media. In the UK elections, there was an AI candidate written in. So there's all these type of unique things that are kind of happening out there. There's claims of voter fraud and narratives that are going out there that are, once they're shown what's being said about them, it's not true. And then finally, there could be some key initiatives like climate control, harmful narratives can be spread about that because one candidate believes in it, and that could again influence someone's perception and their vote. So the elections, there's elections happening across the world, and narrative attacks are in the middle of it. Trying to impact these elections, we need to be aware of it.

Doug Downs (19:23):

I can't help but think stock markets would also, not the markets themselves, but the analytical companies. My son studies finance in college, he wants to be a stock market well analyst and then kingpin, according to him, he's nervous as you know what, that by the time he gets out of college, he's not going to be needed because AI is going to take care of all of the analysis. So I'm asking you on behalf of my son, basically, are tools like this or your tools specifically, are they capable of helping with stock analysis?

Dan Lowden (19:57):

I mean, I think understanding what's going on out there in the world that people have been in organizations and technology has been trying to do that for years. This is just the next evolution of that. I still feel it's very important to have the human in the loop. We do that. We have, to me, one of the most advanced narrative intelligence platform out there, but we also have what we call our Raven narrative intelligence team that's out there doing deeper dives, deeper investigations. So I think AI is going to do the more trivial, hard computational tasks, and then it's still going to require humans to make a lot of the right decisions or bring context out of it so that the right decisions can be made. But certainly AI is going to impact every industry. We are not sure how yet our goal as a company is to protect civilization, protect organizations that are important to us and governments. So if the bad guys are using AI and have no rules to follow, they do whatever they want. That's what we worry about every day. So we use ai, good AI to fight bad AI in circumstances like stock manipulation. I will tell you, there are organizations that are trying to manipulate stock by putting out a harmful narrative that says the company's been breached, or the executive said this, right? There's lots of type,

Doug Downs (21:25):

And then they short it. Oh,

Dan Lowden (21:26):

Wow. Yeah. So that's definitely a concern, and that's why a lot of companies are trying to pay attention to these narratives ahead of time.

Doug Downs (21:34):

That's outstanding. Really appreciate your time today, Dan. Thanks for this.

Dan Lowden (21:38):

Yeah, my pleasure, Doug. Great questions and a lot of fun on.

Doug Downs (21:43):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Dan Louden, we've got his contact information in the show notes, stories and strategies as a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. We're launching a listener feedback series, and I want to use up five minutes of your time and pay you $50 for it in a Zoom call and just ask you some questions. Not so much about this episode in particular, but about the podcast. Are you a regular listener to the podcast that you just discovered? How did you discover the podcast? That's five minutes of your time is worth $50 to me. There is an email right at the top of the show notes. Click the email and you and I will be in touch and that way we can meet for that Zoom call. I would really, really appreciate it. Someone else, I appreciate Emily Page, our producer of this podcast. Lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.