Alethea's founder and CEO Lisa Kaplan sat down with Jane Randall of Comms Collectiv for an episode of the "If I Only Had 10 Minutes" podcast, covering everything from Alethea's origins to where she sees online risk headed next.
Kaplan traced Alethea's roots back to a 2018 Senate campaign, where she first built out a risk mitigation approach to mis- and disinformation before launching the company in 2019. She described a landscape where the ease of spreading false or synthetic content has outpaced most organizations' ability to respond, noting that a claim's accuracy matters less than whether audiences believe it.
Much of the conversation focused on a trend Kaplan said has intensified over the past year: brands and individuals unexpectedly getting pulled into political controversies they had no part in creating, sometimes triggering boycotts or unfounded media narratives before the organization even knows it's involved. Her advice for communicators facing this dynamic wasn't necessarily to issue a denial, but to reframe the story — surfacing who's driving the narrative, what's motivating them, and how it spread — which can shift the conversation from the original allegation to the manipulation behind it.
Kaplan also spoke about Alethea's approach to AI-driven mitigation tools, including how the company is working to shrink the gap between detecting a threat, like a bot network in violation of platform rules, and actually acting on it, while keeping a human in the loop on any decision that could carry real business consequences.
Listen to the full episode here, and below.