As with everything in life, it’s important to understand the positive side, the negative side, and the nuances in between when we talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI), in order to anticipate the impact it can have on something essential for those of us who work in strategic communication: corporate reputation.
This is an intangible asset that in most cases takes years to build, but can easily be threatened. A company’s ability to build and maintain relationships with its stakeholders is fundamental to its long-term survival, and at the center of that, corporate reputation is driven by people’s perceptions and attitudes toward the company, which in turn influence their decisions and subsequent behavior.
In a context where misinformation and deepfakes —false content generated with AI— can quickly alter the perception of a brand or organization, it’s essential to understand how generative AI platforms can reproduce that information. That’s why it’s critical to design strategies so that, in these spaces, corporate reputation isn’t threatened but rather reinforced in a positive way. It’s no longer enough to think about content aimed at media outlets and content creators; we also need to consider the logic behind the algorithms that are increasingly becoming intermediaries influencing the consideration, comparison, and validation stages of a brand.
The other side of the coin has to do with how AI-powered platforms offer new capabilities to measure, monitor, and protect reputation in real time. At Eureka&Co., AI is part of our daily operations at different levels. Internally, we use AI tools to speed up context and audience research, identify patterns in media coverage, generate first drafts of content that the team then refines with editorial judgment, and analyze narrative performance across different channels. What used to take days of work is now done in hours, which lets us spend more time on what really matters: strategy and professional judgment.
Given this paradigm shift, it’s worth highlighting that, beyond the role of AI or any other technological tool, corporate reputation will always be fundamentally tied to how consistent organizations are with the values they claim to uphold. It’s simple: the smaller the gap between what a brand promises and what users actually experience, the greater the trust it inspires — and that trust is, in turn, the most important element for maintaining its reputation and navigating any situation that might threaten it.
Even so, organizations need to adapt to a changing environment, and the brands that understand this are redefining how they manage their reputation: with real-time intelligence, with the ability to anticipate, and with agencies that operate at the level of this new standard.
The gap between what a brand promises and what its users experience remains the most decisive factor in its reputation. The difference today is that this gap is now measured, monitored, and managed with tools that didn’t exist a decade ago. Organizations that take advantage of this will have a real edge. Those that don’t will keep reacting once it’s already too late.