In this conversation, Christian Pott walks through how AI is reshaping both the threat landscape and the toolkit for crisis response, why the old "ridiculousness scale" for dismissing bad-faith attacks no longer works in a disinformation-saturated internet, and how he decides whether a brand should respond with a founder's face or a written statement. He also shares two crisis stories from his own career, one involving a departing salesperson and a book of business, the other an altercation at a company event, that reveal how thin most companies' playbooks really are once something genuinely unexpected happens. Topics Discussed Why crisis preparedness means mapping every vulnerability vector (human, cyber, data, operational) before anything goes wrong, not afterHow AI has changed both the threat side of crisis comms (search surfacing old, out-of-context information as "new") and the response side (sentiment modeling, messaging scorecards, stakeholder-perspective simulations)Why the internet's "dead internet" dynamics make logic-based responses less reliable, and how to engage with audiences who may not be responding in good faith or may not be realHow to decide whether a crisis response needs a face (founder, executive) or can come from the brand itself, based on whether the audience's relationship is with a person or with a productTwo real crisis case studies: an insurance salesperson who left with a client book, and a workplace incident at a company event, and the playbook gaps each one exposedWhy going direct (X, Reddit, owned channels) is often more effective than traditional media routes when speed and audience specificity matterHow brands like Cracker Barrel and McDonald's handled public backlash differently, and what separates a response that lands from one that doesn't Comms Lessons for Founders & Leaders Prepare by staying paranoid, not by finishing a plan. Christian frames preparedness as an ongoing habit of asking operational, legal, security, and HR leaders what keeps them up at night, not a binder you file away. Match the responder to the relationship, not the org chart. If customers have an emotional bond with a founder, the founder should speak. If the bond is with the product, a brand statement works. Getting this backwards undercuts the response. Meet the backlash where the relationship actually lives. Christian's critique of image-conscious rebrand responses: if your audience knows you through Instagram, a Business Wire press release isn't reaching them, "the logic is going to carry with it. But more importantly, the emotion is also going to be there too, because it's not." Build the playbook for the scenario you hope never happens. The lesson from his most unusual crisis: leave room in your tabletop exercises for the low-probability, high-attention situations, because when they hit, they hit hard and you won't have time to build the response from scratch. Use AI as a stakeholder simulator, not just a drafting tool. Christian runs messaging through UiPath's own orchestration tools to test how a story will land with different audiences (developers, CEOs, CTOs) before it goes out, treating AI as a scenario-planning partner rather than a shortcut.
