Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have permeated our everyday lives, enabling us to use home devices effortlessly through speech recognition, find TV programmes we are almost guaranteed to enjoy on streaming platforms, and use facial recognition to securely approve financial transactions.
Forbes predicts that by 2025, more than 95% of customer interactions will be managed by AI. Google and Microsoft are among the global brands that have already reshaped their business operations to focus on AI research and adoption, and AI is now used in a wide range of their products including Google’s search engine, Google Maps, and Microsoft Office 365.
AI and the psychology of trust
In today’s heavily digitised world, businesses are focusing on digital transformation and reassessing their brand and online reputation management strategies. This now involves much more than simply moving traditional operations to a digital environment. To truly enable and grow their business, companies must also focus on prioritising user privacy and ensuring they adopt AI in ways that don’t result in reputational damage.
AI can enable a company to scale up quickly by automating processes, analysing data, and managing customer engagement, all of which are impossible to achieve manually once a company reaches a certain size. However, in the rush to keep up, important considerations can be neglected, leading to reputational fallout further down the line.
Many successful start-ups which have harnessed the power of AI have become household names, with app-based fintech, cloud and delivery services leading the way. Some established technology companies, such as Intel and Siemens, have revolutionised their products to increase their market share. But other brands, in growing at such an unforeseen pace, have suffered severe reputational damage. Platforms within the Meta group, for example, have been accused of relying on biased algorithms and moderation, unwittingly resulting in unfair censorship of certain groups on social media, while failing to eradicate hate speech on their platforms.
The two sides of the AI coin in reputation management
For better and worse, AI has revolutionised online reputation management for companies and individuals. AI can add value by processing large amounts of data and recognising patterns much faster than the human brain. Advanced AI and machine learning can enhance the speed, precision and effectiveness of human efforts, and are applied in multiple business tools including decision support systems and intelligent retrieval systems that complement and enhance human capabilities.
But AI can also be used maliciously to harm a company’s reputation in efficient and aggressive online attacks. Facilitated by AI and machine learning programmes, false rumours can be shared widely through automated attacks by competitors, ideological opponents or even disgruntled former associates. The AI-enabled creation of manipulated videos and images can add weight to any false story. And vulnerabilities in AI programmes can be exploited in cyber-attacks and breaches – with a considerable impact on consumer trust in a company’s data handling.
How can AI support online reputations?
AI can be a valuable and sophisticated tool in helping to meet online reputation management challenges. Used in sentiment analysis programmes, AI can understand and differentiate the tone of voice in website copy, reviews, social media posts and press releases, flagging harmful content that can negatively impact a brand’s online reputation, and enabling the brand to take remedial action.
AI-enabled online reputation management software can lead to a better understanding of customer needs. By suggesting the most effective types of content, products, or services that match users’ queries, it can help create valuable content while avoiding negatively perceived topics.
It can also add intelligence to existing products and enhance digital marketing solutions. Combining the use of big data and AI to help monitor key online channels such as social media profiles, magazine publications, forums, blogs, and review platforms, AI-based software can help track brand mentions, discover potential influencers, and improve brand management.
However, the reputation of an organisation is complex and multi-faceted, and while AI can have a huge impact on a company’s growth, it has limitations. AI can be trained to develop intuition based on large masses of data, but only as far as the rules and parameters of a situation are known. Creative thinking, out-of-the box ideas, decisions driven by empathy and emotions, self-imposed assumptions, as well as intuitive and conscious decision-making will always differentiate humans from machines. Humans are too unpredictable, complex and emotionally-driven for AI to replace the human touch altogether, and it must be seen as a tool to work alongside human expertise and intuition, rather than a replacement for it, in the online reputation management space.
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We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email webrequests@digitalis.com
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to webrequests@digitalis.com