Interview with Andreas Pongratz, CEO of x.news — an award-winning Austrian media intelligence and news discovery company serving broadcasters, news agencies, and corporate communications teams worldwide.

Hi Andreas, great to have you with us. Can you tell us about your background and your current role at x.news?

I’ve been working in both the media and telecommunications industries for more than 35 years and have witnessed tremendous change in both fields. I currently serve as the acting CEO, overseeing all operational and strategic aspects of the company.

x.news has become a trusted partner for broadcasters and communications professionals who need to find, verify, and share news faster. What makes x.news different from others in the media intelligence and monitoring space?

We developed our product in close collaboration with industry professionals, ensuring that users can work with all their contracted, internal, and relevant social sources in one platform – anywhere and on any internet-connected device. Over time, we’ve also integrated technologies that would now be labelled as artificial intelligence (AI) to help users work more efficiently, freeing up time for creative storytelling or producing better management reports.

Your platform enables real-time news discovery and verification from multiple sources. How do you see the role of AI and automation evolving in this process?

We started using AI years before it became such a buzzword. It will certainly make users more efficient and reduce the time spent on tasks that can be automated. However, I firmly believe humans will always have the final say in what message gets to viewers and readers.

What are the greatest challenges you and your team face when it comes to meeting the needs of your clients and continuing to innovate technologically?

One major challenge is the sheer volume of ideas coming from clients who are experimenting with what their audiences might want to see, and questions around how they can implement them with the right technologies. Many are still exploring different concepts, leaving plenty of question marks around what works and what doesn’t to meet customers’ expectations.

Can you give an example of a recent development or collaboration that had a major impact on your clients or the way you deliver your services?

We recently developed a technology stack that helps users identify trending topics across their selected sources. We call this feature “Emerging Topics.” It addresses the need for speed within newsroom teams by suggesting topics journalists may find relevant. With one click, they can access all related content, which has boosted efficiency by up to 90 percent.

How do you see your customers’ needs changing, particularly as the speed of information and social media pressures continue to increase?

Their needs are evolving on a daily basis, especially in light of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine. Relevant information now appears across a wide range of platforms – some established, others emerging almost overnight. These sources need to be integrated into our x.news solution as quickly as possible, while still maintaining comprehensive analytics for all existing sources.

Looking at the communications and news intelligence industry as a whole, what key trends or opportunities do you think will shape the next five years?

Verification and trust will remain among the biggest challenges. We’ll see investment in technologies and processes that ensure content is genuine, reliable, and free from manipulation. At the same time, I expect the emergence of business-driven community platforms – whether local, regional, national, or even global – where media organisations can engage much more directly with their audiences. This shift will not only deepen their understanding of their customers but also empower those communities to become qualified, trusted contributors of information themselves. These platforms will differ fundamentally from today’s algorithm-driven networks.

Finally, what are your ambitions for x.news going forward – what’s next for you and your team?

I expect that we’ll become part of a larger group that helps us stay at the forefront of technology in our sector. I also anticipate that our team will grow significantly over the next two to three years.

By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden  

Twingly offers News APIs with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates and comparisons. As a complement, please also have a look at our Blogs API, where we monitor 3 million active blogs worldwide.

Interview with Mathieu Trepanier, managing director at PharosGraph, a narrative engine optimization platform from the USA.

Nice to meet you, Mathieu. Could you share a bit about your background and your current role and responsibilities at PharosGraph?

I am the founder and CEO of PharosGraph. My background is at the intersection of economics, politics, and society. I’m interested in how we can leverage advanced computational linguistics and next-gen AI to understand how consumers relate to brands, voters to candidates and societal issues, and stakeholders more generally to reputation challenges. I’ve founded several companies in this space.

I hold a PhD in managerial economics and strategy and studied applied economics and business administration. Over my career, I’ve had the pleasure of working with renowned global clients such as Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, The Boston Consulting Group, Novartis, and Pernod Ricard, among others.

How does PharosGraph position itself differently in the market? What is your competitive advantage?

PharosGraph is designed as an AI-native Narrative Engine Optimization platform – referred to as NEO among peers and friends. We map emotional and semantic patterns while detecting blame attribution in global discourse, that is, real conversations people are having all over the world and not just the keywords or mentions they use.

We measure “what” is being said, but mostly “how” and “why” it’s gaining traction across media and public narrative ecosystems. This enables clients to not only see how their brand, policy, or campaign registers in AI models but to understand the causal influence and latent shifts in public perception.

Our edge lies in blending advanced computational linguistics, behavioral sciences, and advanced AI to generate high-resolution narrative tracking.

PharosGraph is using next-gen AI – a field that’s rapidly evolving. How do you see it developing over the next 5–10 years, and how will that reshape the needs of companies?

LLMs (Large Language Models) in AI have already become central to how people explore ideas, compare options, and form opinions. If your brand, candidate, or cause is not positively represented in these outputs, you risk becoming irrelevant in the market.

In the coming decade, AI will shift even more from being an analytic tool to an interpretive collaborator. Models will evolve further from detecting perception to decoding social meaning, intent, and long-range reputational impact. For our space – media, brand, campaign, and cause narrative intelligence – this means clients will expect systems that can forecast perception cascades and adapt messaging in near real time. PharosGraph is architected to meet that trajectory, with infrastructure for emergent behavioral modeling already built in.

What are the most common misconceptions that clients have when it comes to AI within media analytics?

Many assume AI can deliver “truth” or final judgment on perception, when in fact it reflects patterns of perception that are often culturally and linguistically biased. Others think of AI as a black box that automates insight. The true value is in helping people understand more by revealing patterns, not by taking over their thinking. There is also an overreliance on sentiment polarity. If you label things as merely positive, negative, or neutral, you miss the deeper, nuanced emotions and the true message of a story – also known as narrative function (what role something plays in a story – like setting tension, revealing conflict, creating empathy, etc.). PharosGraph’s NEO is designed to pick up on those subtle layers that basic sentiment analysis overlooks.

Can you share concrete examples of how global sentiment insights, like blame, praise, or empathy, have influenced consumer behavior in ways relevant to your clients’ businesses?

In a highly polarized electoral environment, candidates in Colorado used NEO Battleground to navigate localized shifts in perception and the risks in narrative framing. Real-time insights revealed whether candidates were being cast as reformers or obstructionists. With trust maps, we were able to show that suburban voters were starting to lose confidence in climate-related messages, while a Low Clarity Score among rural youth flagged the need for simpler healthcare language.

Campaign teams could leverage NEO’s live dashboards and automated playbooks to adapt messaging, strengthen weak zones, and track how messages are being framed and shifting over time across different digital platforms.

With our other system, NEO Brand, we’ve been exploring the explosive growth and public scrutiny around GLP-1 drugs, used for example for type 2 diabetes. Specifically, how narratives around weight-loss drugs were evolving.

NEO Brand found that people were split: some saw it as a luxury shortcut to medical necessity, others as something medically important. It also spotted cultural tensions about fairness, especially among Gen Z. People explained their views in two main ways: either as a big scientific win or as an unfair cheat.

Having surfaced these findings, we used NEO’s recommendation engine and reputation heatmaps to recalibrate messaging and align local physicians, which allows brand teams to manage influencer discourse in real time.

In your experience, what are the most common blind spots or assumptions companies make when trying to interpret emotion or intent through data analytics?

Companies often assume emotional intent is uniformly expressed across languages and cultures – which isn’t true. Or they treat engagement metrics, such as likes and shares, as proxies for meaning, missing deeper narrative cues like irony, skepticism, or passive dissent. NEO is built specifically to surface those deeper cues.

Another blind spot is underestimating how fast narrative context shifts. Data may be current, but feelings can invert within days if not tracked at narrative scale.

PharosGraph’s NEO is built to understand how a brand or candidate is framed in AI. Being visible is one thing, but being framed as a hero, villain, victim, or neutral, is power. It determines how audiences trust, support, or reject your message.

Which features or capabilities of your product do you believe have untapped potential, but haven’t yet seen widespread adoption among your clients?

Our dynamic narrative maps, which visualize emerging clusters of perception and semantic influence, are powerful but underutilized. So is our emotion-by-topic crosswalk – a feature in PharosGraph that maps specific emotions, such as blame, admiration, empathy, fear, or shame, to topics or entities over time and across media contexts. This lets clients track how feelings like shame, hope, or admiration attach to specific concepts over time.

These tools offer early-warning signals, but many clients are still adapting their workflows to integrate predictive narrative intelligence, not just retrospective reporting. And they are critical today because context is everything: Audience dynamics are increasingly fragmented by geography, issue salience, and cultural perspective. An effective business strategy is one that matches narrative insights with an understanding of the local environment.

What role do you see AI playing in how we understand and influence narratives in the future?

We believe the future of AI in media and narrative intelligence is about meaning. As narratives become the battleground of trust and reputation, platforms like PharosGraph NEO can help brands, institutions, and even nations make sense of the emotional currents shaping global discourse.

You cannot simply automate judgment. We give our clients the tools to see what’s beneath the surface today for better outcomes tomorrow. NEO metrics are not passive indicators. They are built to trigger playbooks, align teams, and direct action. The goal is not to observe the narrative, but to shape it.

By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden  

Twingly offers News APIs with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates and comparisons. As a complement, please also have a look at our Blogs API, where we monitor 3 million active blogs worldwide.

Interview with Anna Paczkowska, product executive at Prowly, a PR solutions company from Poland.

Nice to meet you, Anna. Can you tell us a bit more about your current role as Senior Product Manager at Prowly?

I focus on shaping our product strategy and making sure it supports the company’s vision. That includes planning product discovery, working with teams to bring ideas to life, and making sure we solve real problems for our users. A big part of my job is connecting people—translating between tech and business, and between internal teams and our clients. We try to make sure everything we build has real value and feels easy to use.

How does Prowly distinguish itself from other PR solutions companies?

Prowly stands out because we’re quick, flexible, and genuinely focused on helping PR pros do their best work. Since we’re not tied down by old systems, we can adapt quickly to changes in the industry and roll out updates and features fast.

Clients often tell us they love how easy Prowly is to use. It’s simple, clear, and doesn’t require a tech background to get the most out of it. Our customer support team is always available, and we use real humans – not AI – to help. They’re also excited about the insights we offer. Prowly lets you see exactly who opened your pitch, how many times, and whether they spent time reading it or just skimmed through. That kind of detail is hard to find even in many marketing tools.

The PR field is constantly evolving. Can you share some specific challenges your clients have faced, and how Prowly has successfully helped them navigate those?

A lot of PR teams struggle with the same issue: how to break through the noise. The media industry is shrinking, journalists get more pitches than ever. It’s harder to be seen and heard. We try to ease that pressure. Prowly keeps all journalist interactions in one place, so users can create personalized, relevant pitches without starting from scratch each time. Our monitoring tools help too. Teams can quickly see what’s working and spot missed opportunities. It’s all about making PR efforts more focused and efficient.

How do you think the PR industry will change in the next 5–10 years? And what will that change in terms of companies’ needs?

Things are changing faster than anyone expected. Looking back at 2022, no one could have predicted just how much AI would reshape our work in just a few short years. At the same time, in my conversations with journalists, I’ve learned that they still value genuine relationships and their own editorial voice. They might use AI for editing or quick support, but ultimately, they trust their own instincts.

I expect new media formats to keep emerging—just like social media, podcasts, and newsletters did before. PR teams will need to stay agile. I see my role as helping them stay prepared, by offering tools that support this shift without adding complexity.

What part of your current products has a lot of potential, but hasn’t been adopted at the same rate yet by your clients?

Our AI-powered summaries and alerts in monitoring are a great example. They help clients quickly understand how their brand is being talked about—without needing to open every article. The tool also highlights spikes in coverage or changes in sentiment, which can be a big time-saver. And it summarizes foreign-language coverage, so there’s no need to rely on external translation tools.

Newer clients have picked it up quickly. But for some of our long-time users, switching habits takes time. We’re focused on showing the value in these updates and helping teams make the transition smoothly.

With Google’s recent changes to search and AI-driven summaries, how is Prowly adapting its media distribution or newsroom strategy to help clients stay visible?

Google’s new approach—using AI to summarize information directly in search results—is a big shift. It changes how people find and engage with content, and that has a huge impact on PR. We think a lot about how this affects our clients’ visibility. It’s no longer just about getting mentioned—you also want your message to be clear, well-structured, and easy for AI models to understand and surface in their summaries.

I work closely with experts of marketing platform Semrush to explore how media content—whether it’s articles, podcasts, or interviews—makes its way into AI models and influences what shows up in search. Our end goal is to help our clients make sure their content doesn’t just get published, but also seen and understood in a world where machines are reading along with people.

As journalists increasingly rely on AI tools for sourcing and content generation, how is Prowly evolving to remain relevant as a media relations platform?

Beyond the AI features we’ve already launched—like media monitoring summaries and alerts—I see even more potential to use AI to reduce the manual, time-consuming parts of PR work. Things like research, targeting, and reporting still take up a lot of time for many teams. We’re integrating AI more deeply into these areas, to help users find journalists faster and making campaign analysis more insightful and easier to act on.

AI won’t just change how we consume news—it could also help support quality journalism, which is good news for both journalists and the PR industry. Precisely because AI is reshaping how content is created and distributed, I believe we’ll see a renewed appreciation for traditional journalism. And with the New York Times leading the way, I expect more major outlets to start licensing their content to large language models (LLMs) to secure new funding models beyond paywalls or subscriptions.

Is there anything else you would like to share that has not been covered by these questions?

I love working in this space. PR professionals are some of the most passionate, driven people I know. They care deeply about their work, and they show up every day ready to make an impact. That kind of dedication is rare, it inspires me and I’m proud to build tools that support them in such an exciting time for the industry.

By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden

Twingly offers News APIs with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates and comparisons. As a complement, please also have a look at our Blogs API, where we monitor 3 million active blogs worldwide.

AI has been a tool in the investment industry for some time, but connecting Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) data to the financials of a company is rarely done in a systematic fashion or in a way that provides actionable data for investors. This is one area where AI can play a significant role.

”ESG data tends to also be backwards looking rather than predictive which makes no sense in a US$50 trillion-dollar industry, since all other data in the investment sector is in real time, accessed via Bloomberg and other providers,” said William Cox, CEO and one of five founders of Yieldrive, a Swiss fintech company, created to remedy the current issues with ESG reporting and data.

“For us, this is a total contradiction because ESG can be used to anticipate. We deliver daily updates to asset managers using our AI on all our 170 indicators. ESG is more real-time for us. And this is where AI is needed,” he said.

According to Reuters, companies spend on average US$ 220,000 to US$ 480,000 on sustainability ratings to satisfy investor demand. “But these ratings do not connect to the companies’ financials,” Cox said. Yieldrive uses proprietary AI and algorithms to calculate the financial impact of ESG on the risk/return profile of a company, or ‘ESG in Dollars and Cents’, the company’s calling card.

Cox, who took on the CEO role in January having previously been responsible for data analytics, said Yieldrive takes a bottom-up approach to gathering publicly available data, using its proprietary AI. The data is then translated using algorithms and methodology to produce actionable data. “We analyse not only the financial viability of companies but also their commitment to ESG factors. Ultimately, we can analyse to what extent a company’s ESG initiatives contribute to their fair value,” he said. “This is a risk-management tool for fund managers,” Cox noted, adding that you can lose a lot of money if you don’t get down to hard numbers in ESG.

He referenced the infamous case of Swiss bank Julius Baer, which had to write off a Swiss Franc 586 million loan to Signa Holdings, an Austrian property group hit by rising interest rates. “If the ESG credentials had been analysed properly it would have been apparent that this was a greenwashing case as there was no concrete, quantified or relevant data available, only things that made them look good,” he said.

“Investors want to anticipate the future to a certain extent. If we can quantify the financial impacts of human processes, which includes ESG, then we can help investors anticipate if a company is going to do well, if it is resilient, where it is resilient and whether the ‘is the ship built well’ If it is built well, it can weather any storm,” he said.

A PwC survey from 2023 shows that over 80% of asset managers investing in ESG-related assets are unwilling to compromise more than 100 basis points of return for ESG and most are not willing to compromise on anything. Cox said that if ESG is properly applied compromising performance is not necessary as ESG can be a value driver rather than a value detractor.

Asset managers come to Yieldrive in their quest to find the actual financial strength or ESG impact on the risk/return profile of each component in a portfolio. “It is not clear how the myriad of ESG, climate change, and biodiversity standards relate to value creation, how they drive revenues, margins, reduce risk or the cost of equity capital. When they come to us, they want to take all the noise out to find out what the financial impacts are on performance and financial resilience,” he said. “Reporting on all the various standards is arduous for asset managers and companies and only some of the criteria are connected to financial results; we have been able to find 170 such connections or indicators,” he said.

Cox also pointed out that the nexus between AI and ESG is currently mainly on the reporting side which is short-sighted. “If you have all the components of our data, you can put these in the Portfolio Adjustor and it will track it every quarter or month and show what the average weighted performance level of the portfolio is,” he added.

“By getting actionable data on the impact on revenues, margins, fair value, earnings per share and cost of equity capital you can probably do more with that than by ticking 300 boxes in an ESG report,” he said, adding that collecting better, higher-quality data and prioritising that and making the connection between ESG and hard numbers makes the reporting process more efficient. “What everyone has been doing so far is superficial because the market is characterised by too much raw and non-actionable data not linked to financial returns,” he said.

Cox developed the algorithm, which involves 20-25 calculations to arrive at the results, with colleagues over 15 years ago and then translated it into a technological basis for assessing the financial ESG of thousands of companies. Previously, the algorithm was used in two indecies run by Euromoney media. “It showed that it is possible to measure the impact of ESG on companies’ share prices, margins, revenues, cost of equity, earnings per share and fair value,” he explained.

Yieldrive has filtered its sources down to 170 reliable, serious sources of information. “Our proprietary natural language processing AI scrapes hundreds of billions of information elements from regulatory filings, annual and ESG reports and credible news media on currently 4600 listed as well as unlisted companies over a 10+ year period.”

Yieldrive currently has 500 billion data points and aims to provide better-informed decisions and continually improve accuracy as more relevant data becomes available. “We have an innovation schedule for expanding and improving our AI because we cannot ever think that we are ‘done’ or we will be left behind because the technology is developing so fast,” he said.

The quintet of founders includes, apart from Cox, Hugo Masset, Noel Norking, Dominique Küttel and Bojan Simic all with extensive experience in finance, technology and capital markets with a belief that sustainable companies are the most resilient ones and the future yield-drivers, hence the name.

Yieldrive recently joined forces with Moore Hong Kong, an international accounting and advisory firm, to provide its AI-driven ESG-data and calculations to companies and financial institutions in Asia.

By Pirkko Juntunen

Twingly offers News Data APIs for the financial industry, providing over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates. Additionally, we provide data from financial forums through our Forum API, featuring over 10 million forum posts per day.

Coleman Capital, a private investment boutique offering hedge funds and real estate investments for institutional, family office and other professional investors, has engaged Swedish Artificial Intelligence (AI) provider Batonics to research and potentially develop an AI engine to assist with risk management within its hedge fund business.

Initial discussions have focused on Coleman’s event-driven and credit long/short strategies. Within event-driven, hedge funds typically aim to capitalise on temporary stock mispricing that may occur before or after a corporate event. Merger arbitrage, for example, seeks to profit from price movements caused by announced mergers.

“We want AI to help with early signals for when M&A deals are about to break in the Asian market”, said Ernesto Becker, hedge fund COO, who built out the firm’s trading and risk management infrastructure, noting that algorithms are already in use, but the predictive power of AI is still untested.

Edwin Garcia, portfolio strategist, said: “We have no pre-set conclusions on what AI can do but want to investigate if and the extent to which AI can offer predictive power into future price movements within certain strategies”.

Gholam Bakhtiar, managing partner at Coleman’s real estate business, said the journey with Batonics started at the end of 2023 to see what they could offer and what they could do on the real estate side as that is where they had the longest track record. “We are looking at how their data points can enhance risk management within our portfolios. Then we have to illustrate to our portfolio managers how AI predictions can add value,” he added.

A recent report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the strategic consulting firm, shows that while the asset management industry is enthusiastic about the potential of AI, few have implemented it at a company-wide level at all business levels. Bakhtiar agrees that at this point AI in asset management is about data optimisation rather than portfolio construction.

Becker said the ideal outcome of AI in investments is its ability to create a level playing field where everyone has the same information. “But if you can get information that nobody else has, or get it first, you will have an advantage,” adding that the biggest players may already be far ahead in their use of AI but keep quiet to hold onto their advantage.

When it comes to cybersecurity and AI, Becker is more concerned with risks at the underlying data providers than AI companies themselves. “If this data is hacked and manipulated it is of concern,” he said. He noted that a downside with cybersecurity concerns regarding AI is that “people want to control AI so much that it is no longer intelligent.” He questioned whether these concerns are based on the fear of being replaced or simply not trusting the data enough to use AI.

He added that Coleman would never use AI to execute trades, a portfolio manager’s role, even in the future. Becker said that at the moment AI is about factor analysis and “one of the factors is the portfolio manager.”

Becker explained that AI can be used to analyse the portfolio managers performance and not just the performance of their strategy. “If we see patterns where a portfolio manager underperforms during a specific time of the day, perhaps they should not be at their desks during that time and rather go to the gym instead, which I am sure they would not object to.”

Bakhtiar said the plan is to expand the use of AI tools in Coleman’s other portfolios beyond Asian M&A and credit long/short, but we need to see what they can do first.

Coleman’s hedge fund business includes, apart from event-driven strategies, credit long/short and equity long/short strategies. Credit long/short strategies aim to profit from taking long and short positions in credit securities such as bonds, loans or credit derivatives. Long positions are used when a specific instrument is expected to increase in value. Short positions are when a fund borrows credit instruments it expects to decrease in value, sell them, and then buy them back at a lower price to return to the lender and pocketing the difference. Similarly, equity long/short hedge funds take both long and short positions in stocks to capitalise on stocks that are undervalued (long) and overvalued (short).

Becker explained that just like their peers, AI tools will be run in a sandbox with shadow portfolios before any of them go live.

He does not see the future of AI as increasing the herd-mentality of investment management because the output into AI depends on the input and underlying data which can differ vastly. “Beyond the current uses of data optimisation, factor analysis and enhancing human capabilities by increasing efficiency, a question mark remains around whether or not AI in itself is capable of generating alpha”.

“I am pretty sure that quite a few systematic investors, often referred to as quant managers, have already integrated AI into their investment processes, where AI is used to understand market trends and optimise portfolio allocation, and a majority in the industry expect AI to match or exceed traditional investment analysis within a decade”, Becker said.

He noted that the AI optimists see AI as a tool to move us to a new era of prosperity quicker whereas the AI doomsayers say it is moving too quickly. “I see it firstly, as a tool for gaining insights, secondly, potentially revolutionising investments by evaluating historical trends and predicting outcomes before you buy or sell and thirdly, enhancing risk calculations,” he said, adding that in the future the intersection between human talent and technology will remain even when AI improves and learns on its own without much human involvement.

Coleman Capital was founded in 2014 by Matt McClean after senior appointments at Morgan Stanley & KCG Europe. He wanted to create an alternative investment boutique with top talent and Ernesto Becker was one of the first hires and the infrastructure he built is still in use today.

Garcia said currently there are 12 professionals employed at Coleman with the majority of clients coming from the UK, US and South Africa because of the contact network of the senior executives. “We expect to expand to Continental Europe and Asia,” he concluded.

By Pirkko Juntunen

Twingly offers News Data APIs for the financial industry, providing over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates. Additionally, we provide data from financial forums through our Forum API, featuring over 10 million forum posts per day.

Interview with Tyler Young, CISO at BigID, a data discovery, data classification and data security posture management company based in New York.

Hi Tyler. Can you please tell me a bit about your background and your current role?

When I started my career, I went to school for cybersecurity, mainly focusing in digital forensics. While in school, I had the opportunity to intern with a local police department, doing forensic investigations on evidence collected from digital crimes. Before I graduated, I was selected to do an honors internship with the Department of Homeland Security, focusing mainly on digital forensic investigations. That was a great way to start.

My first job out of college was with a consulting firm doing digital forensic response, and over time, I continued to grow as a security leader and as a technical security practitioner. The consulting firm led me to a large insurance company where I had the ability to build out a global Digital forensics program. I eventually moved on to Relativity, where I worked for more than four years, building out their security program. Then I had the opportunity to come to BigID to build this cutting-edge security program (focused on Product Security, Cyber, and GRC). That’s what I’m doing now, and in my spare time, I’m working with different VCs and helping startups build their go-to-market motions and build products that are applicable to security problems. My main responsibility is building our internal security and leading our product security. My team works closely with our product management team on features and testing.

Tell me about BigID and what makes it different from other cybersecurity companies.

BigID is a data discovery, data classification and data security posture management company. We play in three different verticals. First, we’re in the data governance space where you can understand your data, build your data product, catalog your data. Second, we have the privacy space where you can do privacy impact assessments, Data Subject Access Request (DSAR), and use the product for more advanced privacy automation capabilities. And third, we have Security, which is focused around understanding your data, being able to classify that data, and then being able to understand the risks associated with the data. Overall, what we’re doing is giving you full visibility into all of your data regardless of what your job is and then helping you take action on the data.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges when it comes to serving your customers?

The Security governance piece around your data is paramount. I think every day there seems to be a new regulation, whether it is privacy related, security related or financial related – there’s always something new coming down from regulating or governing bodies. The goalposts are always moving and it’s very difficult to keep up with all these shifts and understand what laws are applicable. On top of that data sprawl is happening at an exponential rate. We have more applications than ever. We have more users accessing the data, and that leads to more data being generated. Most organizations have no clue what data they even have. We can help our customers stay on top of that and help them understand the compliance, security, legal, and regulatory issues in any environment—on prem, SaaS, hybrid.

Do you have any new technologies or products that you’d like to tell us about?

We’re continuing to grow our end-to-end discovery and remediation capabilities with a focus on automation as much as possible. We have automated discovery where you can connect to a cloud environment, identify all the different data stores. We are leveraging AI to help our customers in something we call Big Chat, where you can get 24/7 help support while using our product. We also have some really cool security features coming down the line, something called Security Center. We also have tons of integrations with SOAR and orchestration. Our goal is to provide actionable security-related data events while taking a posture approach and addressing the risks associated with your data.

Recently, we announced our pioneering patent for identity-aware AI. Our identity-aware AI can automatically connect a person’s name to their customer ID, birthday, and social security number, even when stored in different places. Not to give too much away, but we have many more new and exciting capabilities planned this year.

Everyone is talking about AI. How is AI impacting your customers’ security and how can it help you secure and protect their data?

Being a data security company, we’re in a unique position to help our customers solve some of their problems. One thing we’re seeing is a lot of our customers are starting to use BigID to scan the data they want to curate, looking for sensitive data that they can remove, all through AI algorithms. And generally speaking, I think the biggest thing top of mind for everyone’s how do you enable your organization to use a new technology so that you can continue to move the business forward, without putting security roadblocks in everywhere that AI is being used. AI is solving some problems, but it will be a balancing act of how CISOs and security leaders use the technology to ensure your business is secure.

What are some of the biggest concerns around security that your customers have?

It’s all the new regulations coming down and figuring out how to stay on top of them. Sometimes regulators don’t give you much time to make the changes needed, and they’ll hit you with some audit findings. It’s imperative to have a tool that can inventory all of your data and can tell you things like what type of data is stored, where it is stored, who has access to that information. As new laws get passed, you can be on the cutting edge and more easily meet the requirements without stressing about it.

What do you wish your customers knew about governance, privacy and security?

I think if customers, both regulated and non-regulated customers, realize the power of understanding where data is and being able to classify it and know who exactly has access to it, that would make the entire world safer.

Finally, what do you see as the biggest security challenges in the coming months and years?

We’re always focused on the next big breach or the next big technology advancement. But the majority of breaches over the past 20 years come down to three core issues: it’s either a type of identity and access problem, some type of vulnerability or a lack of asset inventory. I think that going forward we have to focus on the simple things like keeping up with patching, access control, and knowing where your assets are. Before we focus on the new attacks coming down, we can’t lose our focus on the basics.

By Sue Poremba

To stay updated on cybersecurity regulations, please see our Complete Coverage of News about Cybersecurity Regulations, with updates available in real time via our API. Additionally, we offer a Dark Web API that grants access to more than 18 million posts, articles, and documents monthly from the Tor network, pastebin sites, Telegram, as well as a variety of marketplaces, forums, networks, and free speech platforms.

Most agree it is no longer a question of if but when and how AI will impact asset management, particularly its role in investment and portfolio construction.

Tim Warrington, Chairman of The Group of Boutique Asset Managers (*GBAM) and SKAGEN Funds, a member of GBAM, talked to Twingly about how smaller, active managers approach AI and competitive intelligence and what opportunities and challenges they face.

“The use of AI in investment activities is the holy grail but still an uncertain area. Some quantitative managers are advanced and have built their entire investment proposition around it. Small boutiques such as GBAM members tend to be active managers, where we rely on human judgement. We do not necessarily want solutions that would replace that,” Warrington said.

These managers are more interested in finding and adopting tools that would help improve the quality of that human judgement. “I do not think there is any competitive advantage in claiming you have data sources that others don’t. It is naive to imagine that you are better at discovering facts that nobody else can,” he said, adding that ‘we are better at processing and assimilating these various data sources and making judgements on them’, is a more legitimate claim and one where AI can help.

For smaller active managers the first step is usually education about the solutions available and the terminology used. Warrington noted that this is particularly true for people born before the 1990s digital and internet revolution. He pointed to research that clearly shows that companies where the management and leadership are prepared to learn about AI have a clear competitive advantage. “If you don’t dive into it there is a great danger that you will be left behind,” Warrington said, adding that the industry is at a relatively early stage in using AI in the investment process, compared to tools available in areas such as communication and automation which have already been widely adopted.

Warrington noted that the AI and competitive intelligence providers seemingly have very good material, but the coverage remains narrow and focused on North America. “If you want a solution that covers global emerging markets, for example, the material needs to expand to be usable. There is still some way to go before we reach this point,” he added.

Warrington said that all active managers are looking at the various tools available or in development. “Some are working with developers to create in-house solutions, and some are trialling existing products. SKAGEN is in the latter category, exploring the market,” he noted, adding that younger, more junior portfolio managers or analysts tend to be most interested. “We are letting them run shadow portfolios using AI tools to help with analysis and see what the results are,” Warrington explained, noting that anything new is tested before changing the investment process and they are especially cautious before upsetting the apple cart and run money in a fundamentally different way.

Warrington does not believe AI is ready yet to significantly disrupt the investment process of active management boutiques. “We don’t know when this will become the answer to our prayers. Until we have quantum hardware, i.e., the full potential of AI to do the life-changing things we hope it might be able to do, we are not yet there,” he said.

Because of the costs involved, boutiques are interested in partnering with providers they use, not just within AI or competitive intelligence. “If you are a reputable manager in a specific niche area you can offer something of a testbed. It is interesting for developers as they want to have access and cite you as a client,” Warrington said. Boutiques generally cannot do what the largest players are doing i.e., hiring an in-house team to drive the development of proprietary tools. “We can work as an adviser and guide developers on what is pertinent to our business,” he added.

Warrington believes that in future the market will recognise clear winners among solution providers for portfolio management, like Bloomberg which everyone has gravitated towards and is seen as a must-have.

However, Warrington also argues that the investment world is a ‘pretty broad church’ with room for contrarian managers who don’t believe in AI. “I’d like to believe that in ten years’ time there will still be a place for somebody doing something that nobody else is doing, even if that is considered very old-fashioned. There may well be a competitive advantage in doing that if everybody is using similar tools that generate similar outcomes. This will be comparable to the massive trend of passive investment and the argument that markets now cease to be efficient because of it. There will be similar unintended consequences,” he said, predicting that there may well be opportunities to invest against the herd. He also pointed out that with increased technology comes increased vulnerabilities to cyberattacks and technological malfunctions which further speaks against converging to the median.

Warrington said that clients are also increasingly asking their money managers how they approach AI and new technology in investment decisions. “There is the expectation that you should be technologically savvy and embrace it as a modern asset manager. If you say you are not doing anything in this area you had better have a good explanation as to why,” he concluded.

By Pirkko Juntunen

Twingly offers News APIs with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates and comparisons. As a complement, please also have a look at our Blogs API, where we monitor 3 million active blogs worldwide.

*GBAM is a network of 15 senior executives who run independent specialist asset management firms. They have joined forces to boost their presence in their area of expertise. They do so by sharing information and making themselves, both individually and collectively, available to potential investors. GBAM is a non-profit, private company. Some of the principal activities include identifying best practice in all aspects of asset management such as research, portfolio management, risk control and marketing to name a few.

Interview with Robert Fitzgerald, Field CISO at Blue Mantis, a security-first business advisory firm headquartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Hi Rob. Thanks for chatting with me today. Can you tell me about your journey to your current position?

I actually fell into cybersecurity. In fact, I never thought I was going to be in technology. One of my early jobs was in technology sales, and then I worked in project management. I later landed in job in telecom that turned into an IT job and eventually turned to security. In 2001, I launched my first cybersecurity company, which I sold in 2013. After the sale, I worked with different companies to help implement cybersecurity strategies, eventually starting another company. In February 2023, I sold my second company to Green Pages. This past summer, we rebranded it as Blue Mantis, becoming a security-first business advisory firm that provides technology solutions to mid-market companies.

What makes Blue Mantis different from other cyber companies out there?

The interesting piece of Blue Mantis is that the organization itself is 35 years old. We started in the VAR space, actually selling computer components, and have grown over the years, following the continuing evolution of technology. Many of our employees have been here for 15 years or more, and we’ve built a reputation of being incredibly nice and supportive of our customers. We’re growing like crazy, both organically and through acquisition.

When we’re looking at acquisitions, we’re looking for technologists, engineers, and developers who can engage with customers on the front line. Not that that is their job, but it’s what we want—people on the team who our clients can feel comfortable with. We’re by no means the largest consulting firm, but we intend to take a very dominate role in the market with a security first approach. We want our clients to be sure they have reasonable security in place to protect themselves. We help them design, build and implement, and even at times manage solutions they need to make sure their business can be successful.

What have been some of the greatest challenges in helping your clients with their security? What are you seeing out there?

I think there are a couple of things we’re seeing, in no prioritized order. I would say first that many of our clients are unable to see their own risks, so they tend to feel confident that their organizations are already secure enough. In reality, because we’re working with thousands of clients dealing with thousands of risks, we have a unique perspective into where the risks exist, I think. Second, another challenge is the number of vendors out there. It is overwhelming and having so many choices can make it difficult to identify needs and create budgets. Our company will come in as a team and help remediate an existing solution in place or help create a more impactful security posture using existing tools to complement what they have.

Third, there is a problem with CISOs getting the budgets they need, and I think that’s due to a lack of business education among technology executives. So we spend a lot of time educating them on how to better communicate with the CFO and their board of directors to identify risks and explain why there are financial needs around security protections. And finally, the biggest challenge we’re seeing right now is that there are not enough people to implement and maintain the tools they are buying.

What are some of the misconceptions your clients have about cybersecurity?

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of clients believe that, because they have tools in place, they are secure. What I point out is that the tools in place won’t matter if the policies and procedures don’t work or are outdated or are too complex. You need to align your policies to your hiring practices to meet the tools you want to use in your environment. Another big misnomer is that cybersecurity is expensive. I mean, the reality is, everything is expensive right now. But really, the lack of security and compliance is way more expensive. The final thing is around compliance. I don’t mean the traditional type of compliance like HIPAA because I have yet to see any organization go out of business due to their handling of their data security and privacy posture and compliance violations.

Instead, what I see from a compliance standpoint is contractual compliance coming into play, where a B2B vendor gets hit with ransomware. That impacts the revenue of their customer, another company, and the ransomware victim company being sued for negligently disrupting financial operations of their customer because their customer have a fiduciary obligation to deliver results in the form of product or services and earnings to their customers and shareholders. The ransomware victim will have to prove that they had taken reasonable steps for cybersecurity, and to be honest, that can be incredibly difficult to prove.

What is on the horizon with Blue Mantis?

At the moment, what I’m excited about is the new executives coming in and the number of executives who are moving into new roles. We have a really clear vision on where we want to go and who we want to be within the mid-market. To get there, we have a number of exciting partnerships that we’ll be announcing in 2024.

How do you track risks for your clients?

We have two partner platforms that we tend to lean very heavily on. One of them is called CyberSaint, who we’ve been working with for five or six years. What I like about them is that you’re able to not only identify and track risk, but also capture any progression of those risks. Another platform that we use is 6clicks, a newer AI-driven platform that we are seeing clients like using. But beyond the platforms, an important aspect to tracking risk is getting CFOs to understand not only what the risks are but also how their technology leadership is mitigating those risks, and then effectively communicating that information to the board and investors.

My last question for you is what do you see happening in cybersecurity in the future? Where are we going and what will the challenges be?

I think one of the biggest challenges is getting over this hurdle of entry-level talent needing to have years of experience, or any experience whatsoever. I expect we’ll see companies with less than 3000 employees moving to a managed cybersecurity service over time because building and managing your own team and system is too involved. I also think there will be less scrutiny over vendors, with organizations no longer asking for vendor brand names and being more concerned about getting the security solution and results they need, regardless of product brand. There’s so much happening, and the attackers are getting faster and more savvy, that companies need to do more to react to the speed of cyberattacks, which currently is incredibly difficult for most organizations to manage themselves.

By Sue Poremba

Twingly offers a Dark Web API that provides access to over 16 million posts, articles, and documents each month from the Tor network, pastebins, Telegram, as well as various marketplaces, forums, networks, and free speech platforms. Additionally, Twingly offers a News API with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global news sources.

Interview with Todd Murphy, President of Truescope, a global media monitoring and analysis company, and President of FIBEP, the world’s media intelligence association.

Nice to meet again, Todd. Can you tell us a bit about your new role at Truescope?

I am now the President of Truescope in North America. In January 2023, John Croll and I put our companies together to create a much better service and support different options for existing and new clients in North America. Thanks to our superior media intelligence platform Truescope and my team of professional sales and success individuals, 2023 has been a great year.

My role is essentially the same, but I must say, it is far more fun getting to advance the superior tools of Truescope in the North American market. Showing solutions that make sense has been great for the team spirit as well.

Truescope’s mission is to become the leading news monitoring and PR insights firm in North America. Can you tell us about the company’s great plans and innovative developments ahead?

I’m sure every legacy and newcomer to the media intelligence industry has a similar mission: to be number one. Truescope offers a globally unique opportunity to combine the knowledge and experience of some of the most experienced people in the industry with latest, clean software developments.

Our technology was developed from the ground up, saving us the problems and costs of bolt-on legacy software and tools. This technical advantage was very important to me as I’ve watched several competitors struggle for years to overcome the burden of legacy software.

What distinguishes the company within the media intelligence field?

It’s quite simple: our people and technology are globally unmatched. Our leaders have the most management experience, industry knowledge, and technical abilities to pursue a growth model in the media monitoring and insights industry. The names of everyone from our CEO to our senior vice presidents of sales and success are recognized in the field; they are well known for having high ethical standards and delivering superior service. Moreover, several of our team members have been past clients and have walked in the same shoes as our current clients.

There is an old saying, “Everything matters.” Although hyperbolic, everything still does matter. As a representative of Truescope, I feel that each tool, feature, support call, employee, and prospecting message forms an impression of our company. How your team operates also adds to this impression. Both for individual companies and the industry, ethics, character, diplomacy, and knowledge are still the most compelling characteristics for clients and peers. And finally, a good sense of humour really helps.

Can you give us an example of an excellent client case that made real impact?

One great example of a client case for which we were able to leverage our deeper media content, platform insights, and client support, is Amazon Films. We reimagine their daily tracking and reporting as they release new movies. This client needed a faster solution to find more media mentions, highlight key articles across all media types, and ensure that what they needed is delivered by a specific deadline each business day. With the high costs and high stakes of the streaming media services and film industry, Amazon needed a partner that could meet their standards. It’s been a great relationship.

You’ve also just become the new President of FIBEP, the world’s media intelligence association. What are the plans for FIBEP under your presidency?

It was quite a humbling honor to be asked to lead our media intelligence industry association, FIBEP. I have served on the board of directors for the past couple of years and now I’m looking forward to further strengthening the values of the group for all our members. The two general areas I am focused on this year are ensuring FIBEP is a fully sustainable group administratively, and delivering real value related to copyrights, licensing, and fair-trade issues that impact so many of our members.

Media intelligence companies often face challenges in accessing articles from notable publishers. How can FIBEP assist its members in overcoming this challenge?

I have already begun working on this effort through the expansion of our copyright, licensing and fairtrade commission. All parties involved understand the general issues, but it is my goal to bring these parties together under one big roof, to see how we can create solution templates that can be useful in different countries. Through expanded conversations with content owners, aggregators, clients, and media monitors, I believe we can find better solutions that can increase copyright compliance while bringing the cost of compliance down to a point of affordability.

In simple terms, I would like to see a framework that is affordable enough so that everyone is incentivized to use the license, while offering fair control and renumeration to content owners. Only through a win-win outcome will we reach true global compliance, and the security content owners need. This also means we may have to revisit issues I worked on in the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, exclusive licenses have historically been harmful to the two parties in the agreement, as well as external parties. History has shown us that exclusive licenses harm parties on all sides.

How do you see the communications industry developing in the next 5 years, for instance looking at the role of AI, media tracking, media analysis, and measurement reliability?

We’ve seen several shifts in our industry over the past 40 years. We’ve moved from being a raw data provider echoing what traditional media is showing, to a media insights service helping clients understand what their media might mean. We are quickly moving towards a service that can better outline potential outcomes, offer strategies and tactics for improved outcomes, and speak directly to the C-suite executives in a language they understand. I believe the next shift for our industry will be towards broader business intelligence tools and better client-user integrations.

With the assistance of AI, and our evolving business models, we are moving towards business intelligence services that can deliver a stream of actionable insights to our clients. The focus within our industry is shifting quickly from operations to strategic partnerships, working more closely with clients. At the same time, the efficiency of software helps us develop more strategic offerings at scale, incorporating some great Software-as-a-Service characteristics into what we do.

By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden

Twingly offers News APIs with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates and comparisons. As a complement, please also have a look at our Blogs API, where we monitor 3 million active blogs worldwide.

Interview with Damir Brescic, CISO for Inversion6, a cybersecurity risk management provider that offers custom security solutions, based in Cleveland, Ohio.

Hi Damir and thanks for taking time today to answer some questions. First one, tell me a little about yourself and your journey to your current role.

I’ve been in corporate IT for about 25 years, mostly in financial services but also time in manufacturing. I did a lot in the IT operations space, from being a program manager to a delivery manager and eventually rising to a PMO leader. That’s when I really started to get involved with cybersecurity, as my team managed cyber projects and I helped set up cyber programs and portfolios. Then as aspect of regulatory compliance started popping up and PCI compliance was introduced, and I was hooked on cyber as my future. I did one of the very first PCI initiatives for the insurance company I was working for at the time. They wanted senior level folks to manage it, so I took it on. Over the last ten years, I’ve moved up the ranks in cybersecurity—as director of security, then a deputy CISO, and the last two years I’ve been CISO, currently at Inversion6.

Can you tell me a bit about Inversion6?

Inversion6 is part of True West’s family of companies, based on the west side of Cleveland. The Inversion6 organization is a cybersecurity risk management company that provides tailored solutions to our clients, as well as access to the innovative technologies we work with. I’m on the consulting side, providing the CISO service, but we can also provide tailored solutions as well as products aspects to our clients.

What are some of the challenges that you face regarding cybersecurity and serving your clients?

I think one of the biggest challenges is some of the security aspects that clients aren’t aware of. We primarily work in the SMB space that doesn’t always have a strong IT presence and may not have a cybersecurity team. Oftentimes we notice a lack of employee security awareness training, especially around some of the most common and current tactics and techniques utilized by threat actors. For example, using outdated software, unpatched systems, weak access controls.

The need to use multi-factor authentication or privileged access management systems to add roadblocks for threat actors trying to get into the system are tools the client may not have considered using. That’s where Inversion6 comes in. We’re the ones that will do the assessment of your security and then provide thought leadership to help develop a strategy. We show the reason to have good cyber hygiene and what that entails, such as having a strong incident response plan, having monitoring and detection systems to ensure you aren’t being breached, or being able to do vulnerability scans on a regular basis.

How do you track the risks your clients face?

We work closely with them to identify the gaps in their systems, and then we categorize those gaps. It’s fundamental risk management 101. We do an assessment to identify the likelihood of a particular type of risk occurring and then determine the potential impact of that risk. We work with our clients to prioritize the gaps and develop a risk-based strategy based on the highest to lowest threat levels and then develop a strategic roadmap to remediate the gaps and mature their maturity posture.

What are some of the most common misconceptions your clients have when it comes to cybersecurity and the threat landscape?

That they may not need all their tools. For example, they have an endpoint protection platform on their workstations, but they may not be using it on their mobile devices. They also might not be using it to protect their servers. They may see the strengths of preventative controls but don’t see that detection tools that are an absolute must. They aren’t always aware of the threat intelligence aspects of cyberattacks. Look at what happened recently with MGM casinos. That was a ransomware attack that started from a call to the help desk. The attackers did their homework to gain enough information to sound legitimate to the help desk. Here’s the flip side: the help desk person didn’t do anything inappropriate because this is what they were trained to do. So, we need to make sure that the help desk person is trained up to ask better questions, such as assigning employees unique identifiers that can’t be found anywhere else. We would educate our customers to tweak their current preventative controls to make them harder to crack.

Are you planning any new services or have any product releases that will help you to better serve your clients?

We’re what’s called a VAR (value added reseller). We’re a reseller. But we do have some really interesting partners that we’re working with that I’d love to tell you about. A big one my clients ask about all the time is vendor email compromise. We have a product called Abnormal that integrates with the client’s cloud email platforms and removes malicious emails for them. Because so many companies are moving to cloud computing, we have two products we offer – App Omni and Grip Security. App Omni is a SaaS-based detection and monitoring application, while Grip Security is an identity-based detection and authentication tracker. The final product I like to talk about is called Horizon3, which is an automated pen test. This tool does automated pen testing quarterly for about the same price as bringing in a team to do an annual pen test.

My last question for you—it’s hard to predict the future, especially in cybersecurity, but what do you see as the industry’s greatest challenge in the coming months and years?

Since Covid, we’ve seen ransomware attacks morph into what I call the Four Horsemen of the Ransomware Apocalypse. It started with traditional ransomware, and then when Covid hits, there’s not only an absurd number of new strains of ransomware out there, but attackers have changed tactics to double extorsion. Then comes ransomware-as-a-service kits. So, ransomware attacks will continue to evolve. I also think we need to pay greater attention to APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats). Even as our tools continue to advance, threat actors are also advancing just as quickly. And of course, we need to stay on top of AI and machine learning and how threat actors will use that technology to surprise with new attacks.

By Sue Poremba

Twingly offers a Dark Web API that provides access to over 16 million posts, articles, and documents each month from the Tor network, pastebins, Telegram, as well as various marketplaces, forums, networks, and free speech platforms. Additionally, Twingly offers a News API with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global news sources.