Multi-Agent Based Automation of Public Relations and External Comms Drafting

Manual drafting of press statements and customer notifications creates critical delays during an incident, extending reputational exposure and regulatory risk. A custom agentic workflow ingests validated incident facts (severity, impacted systems, data types) and generates first drafts in under 60 seconds using pre-approved legal and brand templates. This compresses the communication cycle, allowing PR and legal teams to shift from drafting to high-value review and strategy.

Ad-hoc communications risk non-compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or SEC disclosure rules. The workflow embeds compliance agents that cross-reference incident details against regulatory frameworks (e.g., data types involved, jurisdiction) and inject mandatory legal language, required timelines, and data subject notification triggers into the draft. This creates an auditable, rule-bound process that reduces the risk of omission and strengthens the legal defensibility of all external messaging.

Email threads and document chaos slow down approvals and create versioning nightmares. The architecture routes the AI-generated draft through a structured review loop in platforms like ServiceNow or Jira, automatically notifying and collecting feedback from legal, PR, and executive stakeholders in sequence. All comments, approvals, and edits are logged, creating a single source of truth for the communication's evolution and final approval—critical for post-incident audits and regulatory inquiries.

A major breach or outage often requires tailored notifications for different audiences (customers, partners, regulators, press). Manual scaling is impossible. The multi-agent system can generate parallel, audience-specific drafts—a technical deep-dive for regulators, a customer-facing FAQ, a concise press release—from the same core incident data. This orchestration layer ensures message consistency while handling volume, a capability that directly translates to operational resilience during large-scale crises.

Isolated communication tools create data silos and manual handoffs. The custom workflow is built as an integrated module within the broader SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) architecture. It triggers automatically from a validated incident ticket in ServiceNow or a SIEM alert, pulls context from the central incident case, and, once approved, executes the distribution via integrated channels (email platforms, CMS, social media APIs). This closes the loop between detection, response, and communication.

The business case extends beyond time savings. By quantifying the reduction in mean time to public disclosure (MTTPD), you directly tie the workflow to lower brand damage and potential regulatory fines. Furthermore, it reallocates senior PR and legal personnel from reactive drafting to proactive crisis strategy and stakeholder management. The implementation ROI is calculated through reduced overtime costs, lower external counsel fees for drafting, and the mitigated financial impact of faster, more controlled public response.

This workflow directly reduces the time from incident confirmation to a controlled, compliant public statement from hours to minutes. By automating the initial draft, it prevents the costly vacuum of silence that can lead to market speculation, reputational damage, and regulatory scrutiny. The operational upside comes from standardizing the messaging process, ensuring legal and brand guardrails are applied consistently, and freeing senior PR and legal staff to focus on strategic review and stakeholder management rather than first-draft composition.

The workflow is orchestrated by a central controller (e.g., using LangGraph) triggered by a validated incident from the SOC/SOAR platform. It coordinates three primary agents:

1. Fact Extraction Agent: Ingests structured incident data (severity, affected systems, data types) and unstructured notes from war rooms to build a coherent incident summary.
2. Template Selection & Drafting Agent: Matches the incident type and severity against a library of pre-approved communication templates (customer notification, press statement, regulatory filing). It populates the template with the extracted facts, adhering to tone, required disclosures, and jurisdictional phrasing rules.
3. Compliance Check Agent: Runs the draft against a rule set for regulatory keywords (e.g., 'breach' vs. 'security incident'), required legal statements, and internal brand voice guidelines, flagging any deviations.

Credibility requires the workflow to pull data from authoritative sources. Key integrations include:

• SOAR/SIEM Platforms (Splunk, Sentinel): For the incident trigger and technical context.
• CRM & Customer Systems (Salesforce, ServiceNow): To identify affected customer segments for targeted notifications.
• Legal & Compliance Databases: To retrieve the latest approved disclaimer language and jurisdictional requirements.
• Document Management (SharePoint, Confluence): To access the library of pre-vetted communication templates and past statements for consistency.
• Collaboration Tools (Slack, Teams): To post drafts into designated review channels for the PR/Legal war room.

Automation here is about acceleration, not replacement. The drafted statement is never auto-published. The workflow enforces a mandatory review loop:

1. Automated Routing: The draft, along with the source incident facts and compliance check results, is routed simultaneously to pre-defined reviewers in PR, Legal, and Executive communications via their preferred channel (email, task in Asana).
2. Collaborative Editing Interface: Reviewers can suggest edits or request clarifications within a controlled interface that tracks changes and maintains an audit trail.
3. Approval Sequencing: The workflow can enforce sequential (Legal then PR) or parallel approval based on incident type. Only upon receiving all required approvals is the statement released to designated publishing channels.

A pilot implementation focuses on a single, high-frequency incident type (e.g., data privacy incidents) to refine the agent logic and review process. Key steps:

• Template Library Creation: Legal and PR must codify and pre-approve a base set of templates, which becomes the system's source of truth.
• Agent Fine-Tuning: The drafting agent is fine-tuned on historical communications to learn brand voice and structure, but its output is strictly constrained by the template library to prevent hallucination.
• Exception Handling: Clear rules must be defined for when the workflow should not auto-draft (e.g., incidents involving nation-state actors, extreme severity) and instead escalate immediately to human teams.
• Audit & Retraining: All drafts, edits, and approvals are logged for compliance. The system is periodically retrained on approved human edits to improve future draft quality.