top of page

By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 8:58:38 am

Your First Impression Is Delegated

A prospective partner called your office last week. You do not know his name. You were not told he called. The phone rang four times before it was answered, he was asked to repeat himself, and he was promised a callback that arrived two days later as a message with no greeting. He formed an opinion of you in under three minutes. You were not in the room, and you will never know that opinion existed. Most founders believe their personal brand begins when they walk into a meeting. It does not....

Your First Impression Is Delegated

A prospective partner called your office last week. You do not know his name. You were not told he called. The phone rang four times before it was answered, he was asked to repeat himself, and he was promised a callback that arrived two days later as a message with no greeting. He formed an opinion of you in under three minutes. You were not in the room, and you will never know that opinion existed. Most founders believe their personal brand begins when they walk into a meeting. It does not. It begins at the first point of contact, and in any business of real size, that point is almost never the founder. It is the assistant who manages your calendar. The sales executive who sends the first proposal. The person who handles your WhatsApp, the receptionist, the coordinator who confirms the meeting. These people speak for you every day, in your name, using your reputation, and most of them have never been told what that reputation is supposed to feel like. Many are loyal, hardworking and capable. That is not the issue. The issue is that nobody ever showed them what a first impression of this founder should feel like. Here is what a prospective client experiences. They do not separate you from your team. They cannot. To them, the speed of a reply is how seriously you take them. The tone of the first email is the tone of your leadership. A proposal with a spelling error, a late response, a careless "will check and let you know" becomes evidence about the person at the top. If this is how the organisation presents itself while trying to win my business, they reason, this is how it will treat me once I have signed. And they never tell you. They simply go quiet. The deal that stalls after a promising first call. The partner who becomes "busy". The client who chooses a competitor and offers a reason that has nothing to do with the real one. Across a year, that is every enquiry that stalled, every proposal left unanswered, every introduction that never became a meeting. This is a personal brand problem, not a staffing one. A founder can spend years refining how they present in a room and still lose the room before they enter it, because the impression was formed by someone else, in a conversation the founder was never part of and never heard about. The founders who avoid this are not the ones with the most polished staff. They are the ones who have made their brand legible to the people around them. Their team knows how the founder speaks, what the business stands for, what warmth looks like in a reply, how a delay should be explained and how a client should feel in the first thirty seconds. The team is not following a script. They are carrying a standard, because someone took the time to define it. When did you last experience your own business the way a stranger does? Not a test call arranged with your team's knowledge. A real one. Send a first enquiry from a number nobody recognises. Notice how long it takes to be answered, what the tone is, and whether you would want to do business with whoever replied. Then ask yourself honestly whether that person sounds like you, and whether you would be proud to be represented that way. If the answer is uncomfortable, it is worth acting on now. Every week of that experience is a week someone forms a verdict about you without your knowledge. Your personal brand is not only what you say. It is everything said on your behalf. If you have a suspicion about how your business is being experienced before you ever walk in, that suspicion deserves a direct, focused brand consultation, not a casual chat. Book yours here: https://www.calendly.com/divyaaadvaani/founder-brand-audit — Divyaa Advaani, Personal Branding Strategist (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

Who Will Edit AI?

Writer: C.S. Krishnamurthy
C.S. Krishnamurthy
1 day ago
3 min read

Imagine a newspaper office ten years from now. At 10 am, the editor arrives with his coffee. Before he takes the first sip, his AI assistant announces: “Good morning, Sir. I have selected the top stories, rewritten 63 reports, checked 1,173 facts, suggested 127 headlines, and prepared your editorial.”


The editor looks impressed. Then comes the final sentence.  “I have also analysed your productivity. You took eleven minutes to finish yesterday's coffee.”


“Excellent,” the editor mutters. “Tomorrow, it may recommend my retirement.”


Well, the joke may not be entirely futuristic. Artificial intelligence is already changing newsrooms. But if machines can write, rewrite and recommend news, a more important question arises: Who will edit AI?


AI can summarise documents, transcribe interviews, translate reports, correct grammar and generate headlines in seconds. The Associated Press (AP) permits several such uses, subject to journalistic review and verification. Its standards keep editorial judgement and accountability with human journalists.


 Journalism is not simply the art of arranging words. It is the responsibility of deciding which words deserve to reach the public.


A minister criticises an opponent. An AI tool proposes the headline, “Minister Attacks Opposition.” An editor pauses. Was it an attack, a rebuttal or a perfectly ordinary political disagreement inflated into a verbal boxing match?


Machines can produce sentences. But editors must understand their implications.


Consider a breaking-news situation. A video appears to show a prominent leader making an inflammatory statement. Within minutes, it is circulating on social media. An AI system summarises the video, generates a headline and drafts a report.  Everything looks professional. Alas, the video is a deepfake!


AI can make falsehoods sound authoritative because fluency and truth are not the same thing. A fabricated quotation does not become authentic merely because it is presented in impeccable English. Putting a silk tie on a bull does not turn it into a gentleman.


This is why verification must precede publication. Who originally shared the video? Is the source credible? A responsible editor asks these questions before the rumour acquires a newspaper's trust.


Also, AI can reproduce biases embedded in the information on which it was trained. A report may appear objective while quietly reflecting a distorted picture of society. A human editor must examine not only what the machine says, but also what it overlooks.


The editor’s most valuable word may increasingly be “No”. No, the source is unreliable. No, the headline is sensational. No, the photograph is inappropriate. These refusals could save it years of credibility.


Say, an editor rejects 99 of 100 headlines generated by AI. The machine asks, “Why did you reject so many?”


“Because,” replies the editor, “you were optimising for clicks. I was trying to avoid complaints from lawyers, readers and the truth.”


The distinction is not that humans are often right. Editors make mistakes, harbour prejudices and sometimes mistake confidence for wisdom. Human oversight must therefore be rigorous. Merely asking a person to approve an AI-generated report without checking it is like asking a traffic policeman to supervise a signal while wearing a blindfold.


Editor 2.0

The future editor may spend less time correcting commas and more time questioning algorithms. Less time shortening paragraphs and more time examining sources, bias, and context.


AI can be an excellent assistant, provided it remains an assistant. It can widen the range of possibilities, but it should not automatically determine which possibility becomes public truth.


Readers, too, have a role. In an age of synthetic photographs, fabricated voices and instantly generated explanations, a little scepticism is a healthy habit. The first version of a story is not necessarily the truest. The most popular version is certainly not always the most reliable. When information becomes abundant, credibility becomes scarce. When content becomes cheap, judgement becomes expensive.  Technology may reduce the newsroom tasks, but responsibility cannot be delegated to a machine and forgotten.


Returning to our newsroom, the AI assistant produces another hundred headlines. The editor examines them, rejects a few, corrects several and finally approves one.


“Anything else, Sir?” asks the machine.  “Yes,” says the editor, reaching for his coffee. “Next time, check the facts before checking my productivity.”


Perhaps that is the future of journalism in one sentence: let machines improve the speed of the newsroom, but never allow speed to become a substitute for judgement.  And if AI eventually learns to write editorials, one question will still deserve a human answer: Is it true?


(The writer is a retired banker and author. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page