Launching Unruly Notes!

An exposition on how to use AI to win in an unruly world

Hey Everyone, I’m back!

After 68 issues of GeoLegal Notes, the writing and launching of my book Unruly: Fighting Back when Politics, AI and Law Upend the Rules of Business, and the spin-out of our geopolitical AI company into The Unruly Corporation, I took a haitus from writing.

Some of it was motivated by intellectual exhaustion: I felt like I had covered the heck out of GeoLegal risk, warning at every twist and turn what could be ahead.

But a bigger part of it was that we woke up in an Unruly nightmare of ever grander proportions than I could have imagined. Yes, my book and Substacks warned about an erosion of rule of law, about the weaponization of technology, and about politics that would manipulated by AI. But suddenly we were living in a world where it was all really happening. And at scale.

As a result, mainstream media had picked up the torch to write about geolegal risk and other forms of unruliness in real-time because it was our everyday life. Piling on might get clicks, likes, and quotes in the press but that’s not what people need today.

What business leaders really need today are tools to actually manage the storm around them. One day that storm is in Venezuela. The next it is the entire Gulf region. Tomorrow it may be in Cuba. And then Taiwan.

We are lucky because at the precise moment the world has spun out of control, AI technology has armed us with ways to track, act and potentially anticipate. That’s the really interesting story.

So, what I am going to do here is catalog the journey of those building the future of AI to understand and manage geopolitical risk. You will learn a huge amount about the substantive risks the world is facing and about the challenges we face in using technology to wrangle it.

If you are a CEO, head of strategy, head of corporate affairs, head of government affairs, head of threat intelligence, general counsel or many other roles you need to be aware right now of the advances that AI is making to support your business. Or else you will remain exposed and vulnerable while your competitors gain advantage.

Let me be clear: I am building in the space and I am proud of what we are building at The Unruly Corporation. So, yes, I will track our own experimentation and output, giving a platform to my colleagues to talk about how they solve extremely cool geopolitical challenges in real-time.

BUT, I have a very big tent philosophy when it comes to preparing companies for political risk. The more builders in the industry working on solutions, the better that is for client readiness. And, if more clients choose to transform, that means an even more fertile ground for everyone building tools to help them.

So, I am making two commitments here.

First, what you read here will not be bland content marketing. It will continue to be thought provoking approaches to how we manage the world around us, experimenting in plain view.

Second, I want to interview and shine a light on founders in the space who are doing amazing things that you may never have heard of. In the process, I’ll build out the market map for geopolitical AI which can help you with choosing who you want to work with.

If you were a subscriber to GeoLegal Notes, I added you here. If you want off this bus, just pull the cord. If you’re glad to be here, tell a friend.

-SW