AI Powered Visual Risk Intelligence 101: How It Works and Why It’s a Business Imperative

It has been more than two years since countries around the world went into COVID-19 lockdowns. During this period, many business resiliency strategies have been put to the test. Beyond the pandemic, physical, cyber, brand, climate, supply chain and economic risks are also occurring with unprecedented frequency and, in many cases, unpredictability. 

Due to this evolving risk landscape, organizations now face a myriad of multidimensional challenges, risks and opportunities. And many of those challenges come down to not having enough information—or not having it at the right time to make important decisions quickly. This is why enterprises need more than ever an early and clear line of sight into an emerging crisis, with additional context to inform their decisions as an incident unfolds.

Risk Intelligence alerting solutions, like Zapoj Visual Risk Intelligence, do just that. Through our Risk alerts, organizations receive the earliest indications of high-impact critical events and emerging risks. This allows them to deploy well-informed response plans via Zapoj Incident Management , so they can better protect their employees and assets. Having the earliest possible indications of potential risks also gives organizations more time to assess and direct the right resources quickly and efficiently.

Who is Risk Intelligence alerting for? 

AI Powered Risk Intelligence information benefits all organizations, regardless of industry, age and size. It ensures both security and business leaders receive the necessary information, in real time, to:

• swiftly assess whether a potential crisis will impact their organization
• determine the safety of employees, customers and assets
• gauge any enduring impacts on business continuity
• quickly seek the right course of action

Not only does this enable security leaders and teams to stay ahead of crises and threats, it all but eliminates the chance that senior leadership will find out about potential crises or threats before they do. The worst scenario for any security team is to learn about a risk or event after it has occurred, causing delayed reactions or forcing the business to scramble to recover. And as critical events often trigger multiple layers of internal processes and triage, having Risk Intelligence information ensures better outcomes.This is true for security operations of all types and scales—small and nascent, large and established, centralized or decentralized.

How does Visual Risk Intelligence alerting work?

To understand how  alerting works, let’s take a look at our Risk Intelligence alerting solution, Visual Risk Intelligence. Think of it as your first layer of crisis response. Here are a few quick facts about what Visual Risk Intelligence is and how it works:

• Uses an industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform to process billions of units of public information daily
• Leverages hundreds of thousands of public data sources, including social media, news outlets, blogs, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, the deep and dark web. 
• Has a diversity of global, regional and hyperlocal data in Multiple languages and multiple formats to ensure our Risk Intelligence alerts are as relevant and actionable as possible 
• Detects a vast range of early indicators of risk that are often difficult to manually search for and identify
• Delivers alerts in close proximity to the time at which events occur or risks emerge, often within seconds or minutes of an occurrence 

The goal of our Risk Intelligence alerts is simple: to help you discover and contextualize the earliest, most comprehensive signals about high-impact events, threats and emerging risks. They are a catalyst for your security workflow, enabling you to maximize the time needed to assess risks and accelerate responses in critical, time-sensitive situations. In addition, the alerts are tailored to your industry, business needs and priority assets, so you receive only the most relevant information. 

But that’s not all there is to Risk Intelligence alerting. What makes Zapoj CEM Platform  even more valuable is its geovisualization and collaboration workflow capabilities that help you operationalize and act on the alerts you receive.

Through geovisualization, security leaders and teams can use rich visual data to determine when risks are occurring near their personnel, facilities, assets and supply chain—and seamlessly visualize their global footprint to better assess the full scope of potential business disruptions. With this visual context, teams can take action faster and more proactively. For example, when managing extreme weather events and mitigating their impact over time.

With our collaboration workflow capabilities, security teams can coordinate cross-functionally and throughout their company to plan for, simulate and activate rapid responses to high-impact events. These collaboration tools also provide clear customizable playbooks and processes for a variety of incidents to make sure everyone is on task at the most critical time.

Here are some examples of how Risk Intelligence alerts work

Over the course of the pandemic, many businesses—particularly retailers—struggled to remain in compliance with a sometimes conflicting patchwork of local, state and federal health mandates. Zapoj CEM Platform delivered Risk Intelligence alerts on new mandates within seconds of official public announcements, helping organizations to stay informed of the latest policies so they could enforce rules accordingly.

Between March and July 2021, through various public data sources, Zapoj CEM Platform  sent dozens of alerts to loss prevention managers so they could quickly track and react to the use of bank ATM skimming devices. As a result, customers were able to narrow the time gap between discovering skimmers and re-securing transactions.

Another example of Risk Intelligence alerting in action is when Zapoj CEM Platform notified customers about the series of deadly tornadoes that struck the U.S. Midwest in December 2021. As the events unfolded,  more than 200 Risk Intelligence alerts were sent, enabling businesses to effectively protect their personnel by tracking tornado paths, directing facility closures and avoiding blindspots in their disaster response. 

Why is Risk Intelligence alerting a business imperative?

As businesses look to strengthen their security posture to prepare for future crises, security leaders and teams must always remember that an unexpected event can happen anywhere, at any moment, significantly affecting people and business operations.

Forward-thinking companies understand the importance of Risk Intelligence information in  staying ahead of and mitigating such unexpected events and unforeseen risks. They also recognize that Risk Intelligence information is the catalyst for their business continuity functions and workflows.

We know that the risk landscape is expansive and ever-evolving. About 95% of Zapoj CEM Platform’s public data sources didn’t even exist when the company was founded in 2018. In the next decade, one can only imagine the number and types of public information sources from which we’ll be able to extract data. 

To keep pace with the changing information landscape, it’s vital that you have the right technology—which ensures you have access to Risk Intelligence data pulled from new public sources as risks and events occur and unfold. Learn more about Zapoj CEM Platform  and how the Risk Intelligence alerting it provides helps security leaders and teams detect the earliest indications of high-impact events, threats and other business critical information so they can respond with speed and confidence.