AI. Misinformation. Trust.
Something is wrong with the information around you. You can feel it.
It is getting harder to know what is real, or who to trust. This is how information is manipulated to move people. What you are up against, why it works, and how to see it before it decides for you.
Advisory. Speaking. Briefings.
Wilf Dinnick, co-founder of AskLaura.ai, has spent three decades inside the rooms where information is shaped. He has worked with governments on mis- and disinformation, advises C-suites on the same questions inside their organizations, and co-founded AskLaura.ai to build the infrastructure for trusted information.
He has also spent a career covering conflict zones for CNN, ABC News, and Al Jazeera, where the deliberate manufacture of false reality was a weapon, not a marketing problem.
Wilf is a third party. Non-aligned, non-partisan, and unsentimental about the stakes.
AI is settling beneath the communications layer. Copilots draft. Agents act through MCP. Model outputs stand in for source material.
For any organization whose value rests on trusted data, brand equity, or stakeholder confidence, this represents a step-change in risk exposure. This is not a future risk. It is a present one.
The risk surface is expanding along three vectors.
Distribution
The system that pulls outside data into your customers' AI agents (MCP) delivers it straight through. So do the consequences of contaminated inputs. At scale, most teams have no visibility into where the data came from, who touched it, or how it was shaped before it reached the model. This isn't a data problem. It's a chain-of-custody problem.
Inputs
Hallucination and bias get all the attention. Upstream manipulation is also a real concern, and one too often ignored. Adversaries, coordinated networks, and synthetic content are engineered into the pipeline before any model touches it. This isn't a theoretical threat. It's active, well-funded, and already inside the systems most organizations rely on.
Verification debt
AI is delivering real productivity gains. The verification layer, where content, policy, and ideas take shape, hasn't kept pace. Decisions move up the chain on signal no one has stress-tested.
A report pulled together in minutes. A recommendation built from summaries of summaries. A response drafted by an agent reading a feed someone with an agenda has already shaped. By the time it reaches a decision-maker, the provenance is gone. This isn't a tooling gap. It's a trust one.
The skills required have shifted. Recognizing synthetic content. Identifying coordinated reputational attacks. Distinguishing real engagement from manufactured engagement quickly.
It does not need to fool everyone. It only needs to fool one person inside the organisation, or one agent acting on what looks like clean signal.
The patterns are old. The speed is new. The consequences are unlike anything we've seen.
You already know more than you think. What works on people hasn't changed. What's changed is how fast it moves and how little you can see. Fast and opaque, faster than anyone can check.
People leave able to spot the patterns at the new speed. Repetition. Emotion. The look of consensus. They name what they're seeing and act before it carries them somewhere they didn't choose to go.
They know what to escalate, what to verify, and what to ignore. They become a check where content and decisions take shape. Most organizations have nothing watching that layer, and missing one signal is costly.
Best of all, they see how the machinery works. What felt fast and opaque becomes clear.
Available as a keynote, a Q&A, or a working session.
The Pattern Recognition Playbook.
A boardroom story. A balance-sheet story. A national-security story. And one that reaches every person in your family.
Wilf has spent decades on camera, in war zones, and running newsrooms. He brings the people behind the headlines, the moments behind the decisions, and the detail that only comes from being there.
Most people take information at face value. Wilf sees how it was built, and who built it. He knows the techniques because he has watched the people using them, sometimes from across a border, sometimes from across a table.
Audiences get a reporter's instinct for story and a strategist's read on consequence. They leave ready to see it coming.
The Plays
The set techniques used to manipulate what you believe. Manufactured urgency, borrowed credibility, the fluency trick, the screen and the blitz.
The Tells
Questions that cut through it. What is the story, who is the source (who benefits), what is it doing? Once you learn to ask the questions, you can spot the patterns.
The Response
Most rooms still treat this as a comms problem. It is bigger. A risk to every system that runs on trusted information. Catching it after the fact is too late. The work is seeing it coming, before it makes the decision for you.
Tailored for the room.
How to see what's shaping what you believe.
For audiences who sense something is off but cannot yet name it.
A common assumption is that being smart or skeptical is enough to stay clear of it. It is not. The techniques slip past those defences, and they are improving faster than our instincts can adapt. Reading the pattern is a skill and it can be learned.
The outcome is the words to explain what is happening, the confidence to question what lands in front of you, and the instinct to catch it before the damage is done.
Keynote · Fireside · Public Q&A
The existential case for information integrity.
AI is delivering real productivity gains. Verification is not keeping pace.
The harder question is not whether to use AI. It is whether the information reaching your decision-makers can still be trusted, and whether the people analyzing it are reading it cleanly or through biases they have not surfaced.
This is not a comms problem. It is operational risk. For now, it is existential. The outcome is a clear-eyed read on the exposure and a frame for the next quarter.
Executive briefing · Board session · Keynote
The players, the threat, and the decisions being deferred.
The players are real. The techniques are documented. The targets sit inside the institutions citizens count on most.
A common assumption is that sovereign AI and closed ecosystems put regulated sectors on safer ground. They do not. No model is truly air-gapped. Even sovereign systems ingest external data and inputs shaped upstream by someone with an agenda. Closing the system does not close the pipeline.
Most policy frameworks have not addressed that gap. Leaders must know the players, recognize the patterns, and make the calls they have been deferring. The threat surface is not waiting.
Policy briefing · Keynote · Fireside
Trust as operating infrastructure.
Trust is not a brand attribute. The old playbooks for defending it were not written for AI. AI is dismantling them in real time. No one is rewriting them.
Corporate affairs has always been expected to hold the trust line. For years that meant message, narrative, and reputation. Now it means watching what is reaching your stakeholders, your people, and the AI tools acting on your behalf, sometimes without anyone in the room knowing. Doing this work well keeps a company in the conversation and out of the worst headlines.
The outcome is a frame for what corporate affairs now must own and what it can no longer treat as someone else's problem.
Keynote · Leadership offsite · Fireside
Formats.
When the briefing is the start, not the end.
A keynote can name the problem and equip a room. It cannot stand in for the work that follows. For organizations where recognition needs to become operating practice, we bring decades of strategic communications counsel earned with governments at home and abroad, with brands and corporations, and with international NGOs. That experience closes the gap between knowing what is happening and being ready when it happens to you.
Issues now move faster than most organizations can respond. A reputational threat that once developed over weeks can land in hours. Synthetic content, coordinated narratives, and AI-driven amplification compress every timeline a leadership team is used to working in. The work has to be done before the moment, not during it. Spokespeople have to be ready before the camera turns on. The narrative has to be in place before the question gets asked.
Strategic Communications
- Crisis preparedness and spokesperson preparation
- Executive visibility and positioning
- Stakeholder messaging and narrative architecture
- Internal alignment briefings for leadership teams
- Standing counsel for ongoing engagements
This is not communications as it has been practised. It is the operating layer underneath a reputation, built so the organization can act on what it sees, before what it sees acts on it.
Advisory work is delivered through Mission A Communications.
Book a keynote, a briefing, or ongoing counsel.
wilf@asklaura.ai
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