Frequently Asked Questions

You bet! You should have expert relationships in place. But ask yourself: how much of what you’re paying for is actually strategic judgment versus purely operational execution?

Our experience learns that the majority of crisis communication can be distilled into predictable patterns. FirstHour.ai ™ can take care of that executive work instantly, so your agency relationship becomes focused on the part where senior strategic judgment genuinely matters. Many of our clients use our platform alongside an existing partnership; they get faster response times and lower overall costs.

We understand your concern, that’s why we built FirstHour.ai ™ the way we did. The integrated AI agent handles speed and consistency: drafting statements, checking compliance, and coordinating approvals.

The true human judgment comes from your team and, when you need it, from Peter and Laurent. Our co-founders with 50+ years of combined experience advising national and multinational companies and organisations are ready at all times to consult in the heat of the moment. The platform amplifies your team’s capabilities; it doesn’t replace their judgment.

Every output goes through your approval workflow before it is released; nothing ever goes public without human sign-off. The AI agent provides a strong first draft in minutes rather than hours, with built-in compliance checks. Your team reviews, adjusts and approves. If anything feels off, you escalate to us for strategic review. The AI accelerates your response; it doesn’t act autonomously.

Every company believes their situation is unique, and in the strategic details, that’s often true. But the communicational patterns are remarkably consistent: holding statements, stakeholder notifications, Q&A documents, media responses. What varies is the content and tone, which the AI tailors to your company’s voice, your industry context, and the specific situation. The platform learns from your previous communications and your crisis manual to produce relevant drafts, not generic templates.

For example, too often empathy is left out of a statement because everyone is dealing with the facts, not with emotions. Our IA agent knows when to insert an empathic reaction.

That’s the best time to prepare! FTI’s annual resilience barometer for example shows that more than 80% of businesses anticipate a crisis in the year ahead, but less than half feel adequately prepared. The companies that manage crises the best are the ones who’ve built their capabilities before they needed them. Our platform allows you to train that muscle at a fraction of the cost of a traditional agency retainer. So, when something does happen, you’re ready to respond in minutes instead of scrambling to get your act together.

Let's put this into context: a traditional agency retainer needs a team of 2 to 4 consultants to properly manage the content part of a decent crisis. Our platform can save considerable costs as it needs fewer resources to get the same job done, it’s much faster and access to senior strategists is included.

More importantly, with FirstHour.ai ™, you strengthen your in-house capabilities since your communication team will be able to manage the crisis communication with our platform more easily.

Those are excellent tools, but they tell you merely that something is happening or is about to happen; they are not built to respond. FirstHour.ai ™ picks up where the monitoring ends: once you know there’s a (potential) crisis, we help you draft the response, check compliance, coordinate approvals, and distribute across channels. We’re not replacing your monitoring stack; we’re completing the workflow.

This is a legitimate concern. That’s why we built an integrated automated human approval flow in our platform. Your legal team still has final sign-off. In fact, many compliance teams prefer this approach because it creates an auditable trail and ensures nothing slips through the cracks while the team is performing under pressure.