Does the advent of Generative AI change how we need to think about influence and what a ‘stakeholder’ means?
Shareholders, customers, employees, regulators, media, community groups…
Your stakeholder list is probably much longer than the above, but does it include Claude, Ernie, Siri, or any of the other Generative AI tools?
Developers of many GenAIs are giving them human names, most likely to encourage users to engage with the tools as if they were speaking to another human being to build a sense of ‘connection.’
But is there now a case for treating GenAIs as ‘stakeholders,’ regardless of how personalised the name?
Most organisations map and seek to manage their relationships with stakeholders, the key groups that affect reputation, licence to operate, and ultimately a business’s success. The keyword is ‘influence.’
So, what happens when GenAI systems begin to influence how others understand your organisation?
GenAIs may not be stakeholders in the legal, traditional, or human senses, but they are on the way to influencing credibility and shaping perceptions.
In reporting on the extreme volatility in share prices just experienced on the ASX during earnings season, the AFR noted that, “With the help of their bankers, [ASX companies are] running draft releases through AI systems to determine how they will be interpreted by AI-based analytic platforms…”.
Unlike traditional search engines, GenAI doesn’t just provide a person seeking information about you or your organisation on the web with a list of links from which they can explore various options to curate a view. It gives an answer about who you are and what you do. This marks a fundamental shift from machine discovery to interpretation.
GenAI’s role as an information interpreter gives it significant influence over reputation, credibility, and trust as it synthesises information into a singular answer, based on multiple human-generated sources and content. Your organisation’s visibility is no longer determined solely by whether it appears in search results. It is determined by how it is described. The GenAI summary is increasingly the first thing people see, and people can and do take AI-generated answers at face value without independently verifying them.
We are heading in a direction where GenAI has the potential to shape reputation at scale. This has significant implications for corporate communications, investor relations, and reputation management.
Historically, organisations focused on managing relationships directly with stakeholders and indirectly through intermediaries such as journalists, analysts, and search engines. SenateSHJ’s Future of Reputation 2030 report describes AI as both “sentinel and saboteur” – it can surface risk faster than any human team, but it can also consolidate inaccuracies and scale distortions globally in real time. In an environment where trust must be demonstrated through behaviour, how AI systems interpret your organisation becomes a live test of whether your purpose, conduct and governance are truly aligned.
If GenAIs are becoming stakeholders in their own right, businesses will need to focus more on developing clear and consistent messaging and active reputation management to influence how these systems interpret and present them.
GenAI is well on its way to shaping how others see and understand your business. So, how are you shaping how GenAI understands your business? My colleague Jon Cookson will discuss in a perspective article in the coming weeks.
