When a crisis hits, the first casualty is rarely reputation. It is logic. That was the opening position of Affiong Edet, Senior Corporate Communication Analyst, CMC Connect LLP, whose presentation at the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) Lagos State Chapter Monthly Clinic set the tone for a conversation that was as urgent as it was instructive.

Edet was represented at the session by Theodora Akpunku, Senior Business Analyst (Digital) CMC Connect LLP, who delivered the presentation under the theme “Crisis Management in the AI Milieu: New Threats, Smart Responses.” The clinic, held in commemoration of International Women’s Day and sponsored by CMC Connect LLP, brought together public relations professionals to interrogate how artificial intelligence is reshaping crisis communication.

The presentation opened with a quote that arrested the room. “Crisis triggers emotions before logic gets a chance to be present. Control the panic and you have mastered the problem.”

Akpunku argued that crisis management is not fundamentally a communications exercise. It is a psychological one. “Most stakeholders during a crisis situation operate from a place of fear or confusion,” she said, urging PR professionals to reposition themselves not as reputational guardians focused on delivering statements on time but as crisis psychologists whose first instinct is to restore safety before attempting to restore trust.

Theodora Akpunku, Senior Business Analyst (Digital) CMC Connect LLP

To illustrate the cost of getting this wrong, she referenced the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria’s suspension of medical practitioners and the response from Euro Care Medical Center. “There was no atom of empathy,” she noted, describing how the hospital’s statement read more like a defence of its doctors than an acknowledgment of public concern. She also cited BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, where a senior executive publicly expressed that he wanted the crisis to end so he could return to his normal life. “It sounded very insensitive and we do not want to come off as being insensitive,” she said.

The presentation then shifted to artificial intelligence and the question Akpunku said every PR professional must answer honestly. “The question is no longer if you should adopt AI but whether you understand it well enough to use it before a crisis forces you to learn it.”

She described AI as having a dual nature, functioning simultaneously as a crisis accelerator and a crisis management supertool. On the accelerator side, she explained that AI compresses crisis timelines dramatically. “It takes 30 minutes for AI to push a crisis. All it requires is three seconds of audio and a decision has been made even before your phone rings.” She added that the algorithm does not fact check. Once engagement happens on a piece of content, true or false, the algorithm distributes it. “By the time you want to push out that this is fake, people are already seeing the damage.”

On the positive side, she noted that the same technology becomes a supertool when deployed strategically. Social listening tools such as Google Alerts, Meltwater, Brandwatch and Brand24 can scan for unusual sentiment shifts and synthetic content in real time. “By the time it shows you different mentions, you can check the sentiments around the conversation and mitigate it before it becomes a crisis,” she explained.

She cited the case of Sterling Bank in the United Kingdom, where fraudsters cloned customers’ voices from as little as three seconds of social media audio and used them to deceive family members into transferring money. The bank’s response was instructive. It used AI driven social listening tools to understand public awareness levels, discovered that 46 percent of people did not know voice cloning technology existed, and launched a safe phrases campaign encouraging families to establish code words for financial requests. “The same tool that caused the problem was what they used to mitigate the problem,” Akpunku noted.

She closed with a message that was equal parts warning and invitation. “AI is not a threat to public relations. It is an invitation. Becoming a PR professional who understands how to operate AI is where your value increases and cements your place at every boardroom table. Build the protocol, learn the tools, and make sure that when your clock starts, you are already ahead of it.”