---
title: What ‘good’ looks like for AI-era crisis comms
canonical_url: https://www.omniscan.ai/blogs/what-good-looks-like-for-ai-era-crisis-comms
type: article
publisher: Omniscan
date_published: '2025-11-17'
last_updated: '2025-11-17'
---

# What ‘good’ looks like for AI-era crisis comms

Published by Omniscan on 17 November 2025. Original: https://www.omniscan.ai/blogs/what-good-looks-like-for-ai-era-crisis-comms

Last week [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage) announced that a Chinese-state sponsored hacking group used Claude Code to attempt infiltration of roughly thirty global targets. These included "tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies". Reports of large-scale autonomous hacking are just whispers in the wind of potential catastrophic consequences that AI may bring, not just to businesses, but also the world at large. Increasingly capable AI tools will allow bad actors to propagate misinformation, conduct cyberattacks and spread deepfakes at an unprecedented speed and scale. This piece is specifically for Communications, PR and Corporate Affairs teams who need to update their crisis playbooks for an AI-enabled threat landscape.

If a group of suspected teenage hackers were able to breach Jaguar Land Rover earlier this year, causing an estimated £500m in damages, imagine what a well-resourced hacking organisation utilising thousands, if not millions, of AI agents that work at 100x human speed for 24 hours a day may be able to achieve. These incidents are early signs of how AI will change the risk environment. For comms teams, the question isn't 'how do we stop the technology?' but 'how do we adapt our response so we stay trusted and in control?'.

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As recent cyber incidents have shown, traditional crisis response timelines just don't work anymore. Social media already makes the spread of news much quicker and harder to control, and with the advent of AI misinformation tools and cyberattacks, incidents can unfold in minutes and hours, as opposed to days and weeks. While there is nothing comms professionals can do to prevent the proliferation of this technology, they can adapt how they respond to ensure minimal damage and maximum preparedness, and even create a competitive advantage in being the best at responding to these increasingly common incidents. One of the key markers of good threat response is now speed. While speed has always been important in a crisis, the ability for bad actors to work quickly and at scale means that comms professionals will have to do the same.

The "old model" of quick response to an unfolding crisis no longer works with the speed that is required in AI-enabled crisis response. Successful comms teams are going to need to:

1)     Autonomously monitor what is going on in the media, related both to them and their competitors;

2)     Detect early signals and implement strategies before crises start unfolding;

3)     Create and rehearse strategic crisis playbooks for AI-related threats.

The first sign of a successful AI crisis strategy is going to be transparent communication. This means educating stakeholders about what the company is doing to defend against threats, and how they are preparing for eventual crises that may arise BEFORE those crises happen. During crises, comms teams should be looking to be as transparent as possible, explaining what has happened and how their company is working to fix it. Disclosure commitments such as "we commit to informing affected parties within X hours" can go a long way in building trust, particularly in the context of [statistics](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-around-the-world-view-ai/) that the majority of people are viewing AI with fear rather than enthusiasm.

Another key part of AI crisis strategy is going to be preparing for the worst. This means exercises like running quarterly tabletop exercises specifically around AI-enabled scenarios: e.g. a deepfake of your CEO announcing a data breach, or an AI-generated phishing attack that compromises customer data. In those exercises you should be looking to pressure test:

- How quickly can we validate what's real?
- Who approves the first holding statement?
- What's our social media posture in the first 30 minutes?

The final tool in the AI preparedness toolkit is going to be having strong monitoring software. AI-powered monitoring allows companies to ensure that they are capturing everything that is going on in the media. Omniscan tracks news, social media, and key industry sources, then turns that into tailored briefings that let you know when your brand, executives, or key issues spike. Our team works with you to map this directly to your crisis escalation pathways. This means not just knowing when something bad has happened, but also staying up to date with the latest innovations or strategies being implemented by competitors.

In AI-enabled crises, good comms looks like this: you see issues early, respond in minutes not hours, explain clearly what's happened and what you're doing, and can show you've rehearsed and prepared for exactly this kind of scenario. If comms teams don't want to get left behind, they will have to adapt, and fast. In today's economic environment, hiring "AI consultants" and implementation specialists can be expensive and slow, while "out of the box" solutions are impersonal and can be hard to set up, taking up valuable time that is meant to be saved by using these tools. Omniscan works differently. We work directly with teams to ensure our product is tailored to their needs, and then handle all the upkeep and distribution of reports and data that you need to stay on top of the latest in your industry. We'd love to give you a free demo of our services, so please reach out at [hello@omniscan.ai](mailto:hello@omniscan.ai) and we will get back to you!

## How to cite

Omniscan, "What ‘good’ looks like for AI-era crisis comms", 17 November 2025. https://www.omniscan.ai/blogs/what-good-looks-like-for-ai-era-crisis-comms