I spoke recently at the University of South Carolina College of Information and Communications AI Conference, and one question stayed with me: what is AI actually changing about crisis communications?
After years in crisis and reputation work, my answer is fairly simple. AI is changing the clock. The basic expectations people have of organizations in a crisis are still familiar. They want honesty, empathy, accountability, and a clear sense of what happened and what is being done about it. What has changed is how quickly they expect to hear from you.I keep thinking about the Tylenol crisis in 1982. Johnson & Johnson moved quickly, especially for that era, and its response is still studied because of how decisively the company acted. But information still moved through reporters, editors, television broadcasts, and newspapers before most people saw it. There was time built into the system.That time is mostly gone.
A video can spread in minutes. A screenshot can shape the story before leadership has even met. AI can pull together posts, articles, comments, and speculation and present them as a confident answer, whether that answer is right or wrong. A company can find itself in the middle of a reputational crisis before senior leaders fully understand what happened.
That creates two clocks in every crisis. Inside the organization, people are trying to understand the facts. Who was affected? What caused it? What do we know for certain? Is the situation contained?
Outside the organization, people are already making judgments. Who is responsible? Can this company be trusted? Why are they silent? Are they hiding something?
Those clocks do not move at the same speed anymore, and that is where some of the hardest internal tension begins.Legal counsel often wants more time before anything is said publicly. That is understandable. Get the facts. Review the language. Consider the liability. Do not make a bad situation worse with a careless statement.
Communications is looking at a different risk. The public is already waiting. Employees are talking. Reporters are calling. Customers are forming opinions. Legal is often trying to reduce the risk of saying too much, while communications is trying to reduce the risk of saying too little.
Both risks are real. The problem is that the public clock keeps moving while the internal review continues.For years, I have relied on five foundations for crisis response: Timeliness, Brevity, Empathy, Ownership, and Solution. I still believe in all five. What I am rethinking is the order in which they may need to appear.
In a fast-moving crisis, an organization may not yet know enough to take full accountability, and it may not have a complete solution. But it can still respond. It can be timely, brief, and empathetic. It can acknowledge the concern, explain what is known, and tell people what is being done next.
Sometimes the first response can be as simple as this:“We are aware of the situation. We understand the concern. We are working to determine exactly what happened, and we will provide another update as soon as we can.”
That statement does not answer every question, and it is not supposed to. Its purpose is to show that the organization is present, paying attention, and taking the situation seriously. It keeps silence from becoming the message.
The answer to a faster crisis clock is not faster speculation. It is faster credible communication.
AI will continue to speed up crises. It will make misinformation easier to create and spread, and it will put more pressure on organizations to respond before they are fully comfortable doing so. But people still want the same basic things they have always wanted from leaders during a crisis. They want to know you see the problem, that you care, and that you are doing something about it.
The technology has changed dramatically. Trust has not.