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When I started telling friends and colleagues earlier this year that we were launching a new AI SaaS company for public affairs, many reacted with shock. “Aren’t you disrupting your own, existing company?”
That’s exactly what we’re doing and here’s why: Keyword search is dead — not that it ever worked well for public affairs pros anyway — and generative AI killed it. Public affairs teams are overwhelmed with information, stretched thin across a growing range of stakeholders, jurisdictions, and issues and expected to respond faster than ever before with fewer resources.Â
This reality is due in part to every tool prior to generative AI relying on users to input a set of keywords to surface results. Go too wide to ensure you capture everything and get overwhelmed, go too narrow and miss critically important information. And in both cases, you already had to know every single keyword that could impact your interests.
To stay ahead, public affairs professionals need tools that surface all the right insights to move with greater speed and precision, and the capabilities of generative AI make that possible in new and exciting ways. AI isn’t going to take public affairs professionals jobs—it’s going to amplify their ability to do their work faster and with greater precision.
We’re launching this new AI-native company to build the future of public affairs intelligence because I truly believe we are at a major inflection point in how public affairs and advocacy is conducted. To tell you why this is true, we need to go back 20 years to 2004.Â
Working on President Bush’s reelection, we had video trackers fedexing mini digital cassettes of campaign events back to DC for us to watch and transcribe manually. We had to mail DVDs to persuadable voters hitting John Kerry’s foreign policy record. “eCampaign” staffers were talking about “weblogs” that were going to take over the internet, while most Americans were still on dialup modems.Â
Fast forward just four years to 2008 and there had been a massive digital and mobile revolution. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the iPhone all completely reordered how we conduct campaigns, for both candidates and causes. Today, no one would run an advocacy effort or public affairs operation without these tools in place.Â
The same massive shift is happening now with AI. Four years, eight years, 20 years from now no one will run an advocacy effort or public affairs team without AI-native tools.Â
Right now, though, we mostly just have the raw materials for this revolution. Foundation models are like the iPhone and social media networks. They’re just a platform to build on. Most public affairs teams will find it challenging to build their own toolset because straight out of the box, LLMs require significant fine tuning and customization to work correctly for sector-specific applications and lack access to the key datasets we in public affairs need.Â
I expect a lot of innovation in the next few years to build AI-native tools for public affairs professionals. And like the social and mobile disruption, the most impactful tools are more likely to come from within the industry than newcomers from the tech world. There will certainly be a place for effective prompt engineering and other direct interactions with AI models, but I believe the real future of public affairs work will be enabled by sector-specific agentic workflows and AI assistants working in concert behind the scenes of new AI-native tools built specifically to support public affairs teams and their needs.
There’s a lot of pressure on public affairs leaders to leverage AI, but most don’t know where to start. At the same time, there’s a lot of hype and accompanying skepticism about the promise held by AI. These conflicting views are not surprising. As Amara’s Law tells us, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”Â
More quickly than we realize, skepticism of AI will fall to the reality of its inevitable adoption by organizations. Those who think through its responsible and ethical use, identify opportunities to amplify their teams’ efforts, and partner with the right tools and tool developers will see exponential impacts to both their team’s productivity and their bottom line.
Jeff Berkowitz is founder and CEO of Delve, a competitive intelligence firm that helps companies navigate political and reputational risks. He also co-founded Delve Deep Learning, an AI-native enterprise SaaS startup. Before forming Delve, Jeff spent more than a decade in politics and government, leading research and messaging operations at The White House, the U.S. Department of State, major presidential campaigns, and national industry and advocacy organizations.