Comms leaders warn of 'contaminated' information ecosystem

As communications firms invest heavily in AI-powered listening and measurement tools, concerns are growing over the reliability of the information feeding those systems.

Discussions at the AMEC Global Summit in Dublin this week repeatedly returned to the problem of data quality, with exhibitors warning that both internal communications datasets and the wider online information ecosystem are becoming increasingly difficult to navigate reliably.

Stella Bayles, director at PR reporting tool Coveragebook, said the industry’s challenge lies less in measurement techniques themselves than in the structure and organisation of the underlying data companies hold. Bayles said many communications teams still approach measurement reactively, analysing campaigns after completion rather than using data to understand developments in real time or anticipate emerging issues.

At the same time, she noted that more organisations are attempting to build measurement capabilities internally as external services become harder to afford.

The result, she suggested, is that many communications teams are attempting to deploy increasingly sophisticated AI tools on top of fragmented and poorly maintained datasets, describing the problem as one of “dirty data”.

Concerns over information quality extended beyond internal communications systems. Rostislav Petrov, head of content and data strategy at media intelligence company A Data Pro, warned that the broader information environment itself was becoming harder to trust. “The information landscape has never been more varied or less reliable than now,” he said, adding that the industry was confronting a source base that is “increasingly contaminated”.

Petrov pointed to the rise of so-called “pink slime” journalism, referring to websites and publications designed to advance political, commercial or state-backed agendas while posing as independent news outlets. He argued that source intelligence should increasingly be treated as a foundational infrastructure issue for trust rather than simply a monitoring function.

As communications firms continue to expand their AI capabilities, and invest more heavily in AI-integrated measurement tools, conversations at the summit suggested the communications industry is confronting two problems simultaneously: disorganised internal data structures and an increasingly unreliable external information environment.