Crises don’t ruin your reputation, hesitation and inefficiency do.
In today’s chronically online environment, communication is likely to crack under pressure. By the time your team is internally aligned on messaging, the narrative on the outside is already taking shape.
Since crisis communication moves in minutes, your response should too.
With 50+ years of hands-on experience in various corporate communication teams, we’ve built a platform that combines human expertise with the speed of AI. This way, you can take and keep control when a crisis occurs.
From the first alert to the final press release, FirstHour.ai ™ reduces your reputational risk to the max. We do this by enabling communication teams to:
With 50+ years of hands-on experience in various corporate communication teams, we’ve built a platform that combines human expertise with the speed of AI. This way, you can take and keep control when a crisis occurs.
From the first alert to the final press release, FirstHour.ai ™ reduces your reputational risk to the max. We do this by enabling communication teams to:
Crises don’t ruin your reputation, hesitation does.
In today’s chronically online environment, communication is likely to crack under pressure. By the time your team is internally aligned on messaging, the narrative on the outside is already taking shape.
Since crisis communication moves in minutes, your response should too.
With 50+ years of hands-on experience in various corporate communication teams, we’ve built a platform that combines human expertise with the speed of AI. This way, you can take and keep control when a crisis occurs.
From the first alert to the final press release, FirstHour.ai ™ reduces your reputational risk to the max. We do this by enabling communication teams to:
FirstHour.ai ™ offers a platform that mirrors how experienced crisis teams operate when time is ticking and stakes are high.
When a crisis occurs, keeping sensitive information in a secure environment while managing your communication is key. With the FirstHour.ai ™ platform, you can store sensitive data in a vault-like environment based in Europe.
Built by people who understand the need for confidentiality, FirstHour.ai complies with all legal requirements to handle sensitive and non-public data, offering enterprise-grade security through the platform.
Trained by proven crisis communication workflows, FirstHour.ai ™ generates core materials that are essential in the first stage of a crisis. From holding statements, press releases, messaging and internal communication to channel-ready social media content and board reports.
Every document is tailor-made and therefore fully aligned with your tone-of-voice and the given corporate narrative. Bypassing review cycles and back-and-forth communications, potential errors are eliminated and speed is ensured.
By tracking every step of the process, we can accurately review how it was handled afterwards. FirstHour.ai ™ offers reaction time-tracking, communication strategy reviews and analysis of message consistency and effectiveness to turn every crisis into measurable data as a source for improvement.
No fluff, expert-led and secured communication that moves fast. Tailored to your audience and your media reality.
Co-founder
Peter Otten is a highly skilled crisis and communications expert who helps organisations safeguard their reputation when it matters most. He started his career as an in-house journalist at Belgium’s largest newspaper, Het Laatste Nieuws. He directed the Belgian PR and Corporate Communication teams at Hill & Knowlton Brussels, after which he led offices for Ketchum in Brussels and Amsterdam for more than 10 years.
Prior to co-founding FirstHour.ai ™, he revitalised the PR division at TBWA Belgium, marking over 3 decades as a corporate communications professional.
With his extensive operational and strategic expertise guiding companies and their C-suite through media and stakeholder crises, Peter offers deep strategic insights and a calm, hands-on energy to every challenge.
Co-founder
Laurent Winnock is a seasoned strategic communications professional who has been helping organisations and their leaders communicate with clarity, credibility and impact for more than 2 decades. Trust and transformation are key pillars within his strategic repertoire and have led him to senior roles in political and government communication, and corporate leadership.
He has led major communications and reputation transformations at ING, bnode group and AXA to name a few. For these projects, he pioneered with integrated newsroom models to strengthen the organisations’ reputation and to accelerate decision-making in crisis situations.
Co-founder
Peter Otten is a highly skilled crisis and communications expert who helps organisations safeguard their reputation when it matters most. He started his career as an in-house journalist at Belgium’s largest newspaper, Het Laatste Nieuws. He directed the Belgian PR and Corporate Communication teams at Hill & Knowlton Brussels, after which he led offices for Ketchum in Brussels and Amsterdam for more than 10 years.
Prior to co-founding FirstHour.ai ™, he revitalised the PR division at TBWA Belgium, marking over 3 decades as a corporate communications professional.
With his extensive operational and strategic expertise guiding companies and their C-suite through media and stakeholder crises, Peter offers deep strategic insights and a calm, hands-on energy to every challenge.
Co-founder
Laurent Winnock is a seasoned strategic communications professional who has been helping organisations and their leaders communicate with clarity, credibility and impact for more than 2 decades. Trust and transformation are key pillars within his strategic repertoire and have led him to senior roles in political and government communication, and corporate leadership.
He has led major communications and reputation transformations at ING, bnode group and AXA to name a few. For these projects, he pioneered with integrated newsroom models to strengthen the organisations’ reputation and to accelerate decision-making in crisis situations.
FirstHour.ai is an AI-powered crisis communication platform that helps organisations prepare for and manage 360° reputation crises. Built by communications professionals with 50+ years of combined hands-on experience, it brings detection, drafting, approval and multi-channel publishing into one secure workspace. From the first alert, teams spot early warning signals, draft an aligned response in minutes, route it through structured approvals, and deliver consistent messaging across media, employees, customers, regulators and social channels. All from a single, audit-ready system hosted in Europe.
Speed comes from removing the bottlenecks that slow most teams down: scattered tools, unclear approvals and manual coordination. FirstHour.ai centralises the entire response so communication, legal and leadership work in parallel instead of in sequence. Early-warning monitoring flags an issue, the platform drafts a response aligned to your tone of voice and corporate narrative within five minutes, structured approvals keep legal and leadership in the loop, and messaging goes out across every channel almost simultaneously. The aim is a coordinated response within the first hour, before the narrative hardens.
A crisis communication platform is built for the teams who carry reputational risk: corporate communications, PR, legal and compliance, and C-suite leadership, across companies, institutions and governments. FirstHour.ai is designed for any organisation that needs reliable crisis workflows, verifiable accountability and audit-ready control when time is short and stakes are high. It's especially valuable where several departments must align fast: legal needs to vet the wording, leadership needs to approve, and communications needs to publish. All inside the same critical window.
The first hour is when the narrative forms. Within those opening minutes, media, employees, customers and regulators begin deciding the story; often while the affected organisation is still aligning internally on what to say. By the time a response is written and approved, the public version of events may already be set. Crises rarely damage reputations on their own; hesitation and poor coordination do. That's why FirstHour.ai compresses detection, drafting and approval into one fast workflow, a tailored response in five minutes, so you can respond before that gap opens.
Security matters most precisely when a crisis hits and sensitive information is moving fast between teams. FirstHour.ai stores all data in a secure, vault-like environment hosted in Europe, with role-based access, structured approvals and a complete audit trail, so every action stays accountable and traceable. Teams collaborate in real time without sacrificing confidentiality, and your crisis data never leaves a controlled, European environment.
Crisis communication moves in minutes. Your response should too.
Firsthour ™ 2026
Crisis communication moves in minutes. Your response should too.
Firsthour ™ 2026
