By Business & Finance 
Hind Ziane, Founder and CEO of Genpo, spoke at the Dublin Tech Summit 2024. Her session topic focused on using tech & AI during times of political crisis.
Almost two years ago, I boarded a plane from Paris to Dublin to speak at the Dublin Tech Summit on a rather unusual topic: tech and AI during times of political crisis. It was 2024, a year everybody predicted would be a major year for global politics, because of the number of elections and disruptive events that would take place.
Political crisis here refers to any event that affects the broad public and has an impact on the collective life of the population. It can be post-election instability, social discontent, pandemics, geopolitical instability, foreign threats and destabilisation or natural disasters.
Crisis management can be divided into three key moments: preventing the crisis, managing the crisis, learning from the crisis and building more resilient systems. The most important work happens before the crisis with prediction efforts, where early signs help plan solutions in advance and after the crisis, when it is time to strengthen the system and help it weather future crises.
The evolution of the field in the 2020s
Crisis management in the public sector has a long history of trying to monitor but also manage complex natural and human occurrences. Pandemics, social unrest or geopolitical instability rely on an intricate web of factors that we cannot fully understand, let alone predict.
Although the unfathomable nature of crises still holds today, science can help us map out possibilities by identifying and analysing signs of potential future outcomes. For this reason, technology has become an essential component of public sector work. We can’t exactly predict the future, but we can use big data and AI to help us get ready for it.
A fundamental shift in perception was brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The severity of the crisis, along with the helplessness that followed, made the public sector realise the importance of investing much more in technology to help mitigate such risks.
Data and AI would slowly become a central part of public policy. Not just as an external help, but rather as a part of the public policy process. The central goal is to detect early signs of crises to mitigate them before they become too big to handle. That’s what the ACLED armed conflict probability tool does, and that’s also the rationale behind Google’s Global flood forecasting system.
Responsibilities tech companies still underestimate
Tech-driven public crisis management is a growing market that is in need of new innovative players. Highly adaptable, context-conscious and top-notch quality tools make this market a difficult but very rewarding one.
There are, however, some factors and responsibilities that need to be taken into consideration. Providing technology to the public sector is never innocuous, especially when it is about predicting or monitoring crises. There is a certain sensitivity to such a market because of the nature of the data that is handled and the decisions that can arise from algorithmic suggestions. A protest prediction AI tool can be used as a way to answer protesters’ demands while avoiding violent confrontation, but also as a tool of surveillance and repression.
When algorithms become a central guide of public decisions, responsibility enters a grey area that can be of serious legal danger in case of misuse. The danger of over-dependency on such tools is also of great importance. One should always remember that there is no perfect scientific answer to complex human or nature-based events. Human perception, though imperfect itself, is fundamental in dealing with crises.
Mitigating the risk of misuse
Selling tools to the public sector requires a different mindset that takes into consideration political and geopolitical contexts. The lack of a deep understanding of specific country or community frameworks poses a serious threat to any company seeking to build an enduring presence on the market.
The risks of tech-driven crisis management are serious: surveillance, repression, political manipulation, geopolitical destabilisation. Transparency is of the utmost importance as it helps ensure those tools are used for legal purposes. It also reassures the population and helps reinforce trust in public policy and the tools used in the interest of all.
Accountability when making decisions while using these tools is also essential, as it encourages public policy players and technology providers to follow rigorous procedures when building such tools and dealing with the aftermath of the decisions that result from this use.
Public sector crisis management is a dynamic market that allows helping build safer and more stable nations. The risks of these highly sensitive tools have to be faced with transparency and rigour to prove that these tools are essential for the common good.
About the author: Hind Ziane is the Founder & CEO of Genpo. Based in Paris, Genpo develops technology that helps businesses and governments better manage and measure their operations. She is also a TV analyst and regularly appears on national and international networks to analyse French, European and American politics.
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