One of the greatest values of public affairs professionals is knowing how to interpret signals. The challenge is that these signals are never in the same place and take different forms. They are scattered across parliamentary session diaries, official gazettes, regulatory initiatives, reports, and hearings, but also in impromptu press scrums at the exit of an event, interviews, tweets, judicial rulings, and hundreds of simultaneously evolving conversations that, on their own, mean almost nothing.
However, understanding how a public decision evolves requires knowing how to connect those dots, understanding how they relate to one another, and reconstructing the context that explains why an issue begins to gain relevance, why a regulatory initiative changes course, or, ultimately, why an apparently secondary debate ends up becoming a political priority.
Since our beginnings as Acento and now as H/Advisors, our work has focused on helping organizations better understand the context to make better decisions. Interpreting where the institutional, regulatory, and political environment is moving and transforming that understanding into an action strategy: deciding when to intervene, whom to do it with, what arguments to build, what scenarios to prepare, and how to participate in a decision-making process to protect business interests or drive the changes our clients need.
Ultimately, what is changing is our ability to carry out this mission. For the first time, we have technology capable of analyzing huge volumes of institutional, regulatory, parliamentary, media, and public information in an integrated way to discover relationships, identify patterns, and provide an evidence base that was impossible to build just a few years ago. This is the true potential of artificial intelligence applied to public affairs.
With this conviction, we have developed COMETA, an artificial intelligence infrastructure designed specifically for public affairs. And we have done so hand in hand with our partner YN+, belonging to the Séntisis Group, one of the leading companies in Spain specialising in data engineering for analysis.
COMETA combines a new generation of regulatory monitoring based on intelligent detection networks and alert systems with advanced institutional, prospective, and predictive analysis capabilities. It integrates information from multiple sources, identifies patterns, builds scenarios, and assists our teams in better understanding how public decision-making processes evolve. Based on this analysis, it also facilitates the creation of working materials and helps structure advocacy strategies and plans on a much broader and more consistent evidence base.
The enhanced human factor
Not because it writes reports, which it does; not because it compares regulatory texts, automates regulatory monitoring, summarises documentation, or generates working materials, which it also does. The true value of our new technological infrastructure at H/Advisors lies in the fact that it expands our capacity to understand the context, connect signals that until now remained scattered, and reduce uncertainty.
However, technology only solves part of the problem because understanding the context, on its own, has limited value. What is especially relevant is how to act based on that knowledge: when to intervene, with whom, what arguments to build, and how to participate most effectively in a decision-making process. That will continue to be the space where the knowledge, experience, and judgment of our consultants make the difference.
As an ultra-specialised firm in public affairs, we believe we must also develop ultra-specialised capabilities for this discipline. Incorporating artificial intelligence is not about adapting our work to generalist technology, but about adapting technology to the reality of public affairs. Experimenting, learning, and leading the way is part of the responsibility of those who aspire to lead the evolution of this profession. That is why we developed COMETA.
In public affairs, the advantage has never been in accessing information first. It has always been in detecting early the signals that anticipate a change, understanding what they mean, and deciding how to act. COMETA was born precisely to help us look further and offer our clients advice with more context, more evidence, and a greater capacity for anticipation. The judgment will remain human. But, starting today, we have a new way of detecting the signals that set the course.
Read the original release in Dircomfidencial
Contact
Carlos Ruiz, Associate Managing Director
Madrid
[email protected]