PR Week - AI tops Global Risk Advisory Council list of corporate risk
PR Week - October 6
By Jeremy Sodergren
AI has become a “clear and present danger to public confidence for many companies,” according to a report from Global Situation Room’s Global Risk Advisory Council.
In its Reputational Risk Index for Q3, the council outlined the top 10 reputational challenges facing companies. AI has topped the list four times in less than two years.
The council, which comprises more than 150 former government ministers, C-suite executives and public affairs leaders, noted that “misinformation now spreads faster than it can be corrected, and that AI ‘slop,’ impersonation and deepfakes make it harder for organizations to control how their own voice and reputation are represented.”
Fifty-eight percent of council members rated AI an eight out of 10 or higher on its severity scale, with 37% of respondents citing AI as their single largest risk area.
“This is a major wake-up call for communicators. This is an urgent need to remove, reduce and rethink the use of artificial intelligence in content,” said Brett Bruen, president and CEO of Global Situation Room, in an email. “Consumers are saying they want more authentic and fewer artificial interactions with brands.”
The release of the report follows a number of high-profile security incidents in which frontier AI models created by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic “escaped the lab,” raising concerns about the danger posed by advanced models.
The council recommended three actions companies can take to mitigate AI-related reputational risk: eliminate artificially created content from public-facing platforms and publicly commit to human-generated content, reintegrate humans into automated customer service processes and establish an informational infrastructure to verify authentic company communications.
These insights come as AI companies call for tighter regulations of frontier development and PR agencies grapple with advising clients on best practices for optimizing AI search.
Behind AI, the council identified the largest reputational risks as child safety and harm, privacy, fraud, business management, consumer protection, executive controversy, intellectual property and copyright, labor issues and product and service quality.