What CEOs Need to Know About Deepfakes, Disinformation and the New Rules of Brand Defense

Can your crisis management team keep up with a convincing CEO deepfake that goes viral? Can your reputation (and enterprise value) weather a coordinated cyberattack designed to blow up in public? 

Today’s brand threats aren’t easy to identify or predict. They can come from hacker groups, state actors and foreign adversaries, or even just a troll with Claude and a vendetta. 

A few years ago, brand reputation risk was much simpler. A stronger competitor. A recession. A product recall. Wars didn’t paint brands as legitimate cyber targets. Coordinated disinformation, leaks and deepfakes weren’t the norm. Today, these are the tools of influence, and corporate reputation is their target.

Add to that the power of AI, which allows false narratives to go global in seconds. When those narratives become embedded in answer engines, they can shape how millions of people perceive your company.

The only way forward is brand resilience. Defending against evolving threats is no longer an IT issue or a crisis communications exercise — it’s a leadership responsibility. 

The problem is that most enterprises were never built to manage reputation this way. They have crisis plans, communications teams, cybersecurity infrastructure and brand strategies, but little infrastructure for continuously understanding and protecting their reputation across search engines and AI.

CEOs must invest in building the infrastructure to protect their reputation before a crisis occurs.

It’s when, not if

“It can’t happen to us.” Famous last words.

With digital attacks, AI abuse or deepfakes, the question isn’t if it will happen. It’s when. The biggest brands and leaders are, ironically, easy marks for disinformation, extortion and theft.  If someone with an AI account and a smartphone can taint executive credibility and even harm enterprise value, imagine what a sophisticated adversary can achieve.

It’s already played out in the headlines. A cyberattack against Stryker splashed across headlines worldwide after an Iran-affiliated group targeted the healthcare giant. That attack wasn’t targeting infrastructure as much as brand credibility and market trust. 

Stakeholders were left wondering, “Can I trust Stryker and its leaders with my information?”

What about the Warren Buffett deepfake scam? This time last year, several videos supposedly featuring Buffett were posted to TikTok and YouTube, most notably one with the deceivingly convincing title “Warren Buffett: The #1 Investment Tip For Everyone Over 50 (MUST WATCH).” 

The deepfake used Buffett’s image, voice and reputation to make crypto scams appear credible. The result was serious damage to Berkshire Hathaway’s brand credibility and the legacy Buffett had spent decades building.

AI accelerates attacks and damage

Generative AI search tools ingest all the available information about a subject. This means during reputation incidents or brand attacks, AI boosts the damage and reach. 

It hands attackers a megaphone, reaching social media users with critical content, flipping and remixing scandals into instantly viral narratives. When the LLMs scan the content, it’s hard to course-correct, and the lifespan of any controversy is lengthened.

When you lack owned content or have next to no digital footprint, your brand is at the highest risk. You can’t push back on damaging narratives. That lost authority leaves you at the mercy of coordinated attacks and ensuing noise.

You could call it algorithmic vulnerability. When your brand hasn’t proactively laid a foundation of verified, AI-readable truth, platforms like AI Mode and ChatGPT will default to the dominant narrative. The one controlled by your adversaries. 

Agility vs. the establishment

Beyond narrative threats, there’s also a major market shift happening fast. Agile, tech-savvy companies now pose a direct competitive threat to risk-averse legacy brands. 

Anduril ($61B valuation), Revolut ($115B valuation), Anthropic, Canva and OpenAI are challenging the status quo across defense, banking, enterprise software and digital infrastructure.

Establishment players, including tech brands like Apple, face new volatility from new competitors on top of the AI-driven one.

Leaders must shift to a proactive mindset and adopt new priorities — like positioning and narrative, digital defense and the asset landscape. It’s the only way they can mitigate the next inevitable controversy, attack or competitive challenge. 

In short, reputation management has to become a fixed enterprise capability, not something activated when a problem appears. 

Let’s talk about how to achieve this.

Own your narrative: Resilience for CEOs

Brand resilience rests on owning your narrative in the spaces that matter most: AI search and organic search. It’s also about planning before a crisis strikes. Here’s how CEOs can take action.

1. Map the threat landscape

First, you need to know where you are. Analyze, manage and monitor your brand’s digital spaces, including sentiment, gaps, vulnerabilities and opportunities.

Identify the big issues first, like negative news cycles or online attacks. Then get a full picture of existing sentiment and find the gaps that have allowed problems to emerge. This analysis reveals insight into overall brand health, preparedness and resilience. 

2. Build proactive, controlled visibility

Begin getting ahead of the news cycle, cyber actors and competitors. Create and launch content assets to build a strong digital presence that can withstand sudden, coordinated smear campaigns. 

For example, publish consistent, high-quality thought leadership. This shares brand expertise and builds leadership credibility and the assets needed to drive your true narrative. It also builds your reservoir of trust, increasing controlled visibility that you can rely on when controversy strikes.

3. Deploy and scale to engineer narrative ownership

Deploy technology to monitor and scale your digital footprint faster than adversaries can manipulate it, building a consistent, authoritative narrative.

But scale shouldn’t mean mass-producing AI content. AI-generated errors and hallucinations can create reputational risks themselves, and Google penalizes “scaled content abuse.” Instead, prioritize human-led content production, augmented by AI.

Together, these efforts create a digital moat that absorbs reputational shocks, strengthens brand resilience and prevents third parties from drowning out your own narrative.

Choose resilience, not complacency

AI came, AI saw, and AI transformed how brand and leader reputations are created and destroyed. 

Proactively creating, managing and protecting your brand’s narrative isn’t some marketing fad — it’s a critical requirement for enterprise survival.

Leaders can adapt to the rapid change by investing in their future or risk everything and succumb to complacency. I do not recommend the latter.

Can your crisis management team keep up with a convincing CEO deepfake that goes viral? Can your reputation (and enterprise value) weather a coordinated cyberattack designed to blow up in public? 

Today’s brand threats aren’t easy to identify or predict. They can come from hacker groups, state actors and foreign adversaries, or even just a troll with Claude and a vendetta. 

A few years ago, brand reputation risk was much simpler. A stronger competitor. A recession. A product recall. Wars didn’t paint brands as legitimate cyber targets. Coordinated disinformation, leaks and deepfakes weren’t the norm. Today, these are the tools of influence, and corporate reputation is their target.