The Semantic Arms Race: Ben Hunt on AI and Narrative

In an environment where AI can generate messaging faster than any human can write it, and institutional trust sits near historic lows, business leaders face a widening gap between what audiences are told and what they actually believe. In this episode of the Infosys Knowledge Institute podcast, Jeff Kavanaugh speaks with Ben Hunt, co-founder of Perscient and creator of Epsilon Theory , about how narrative and artificial intelligence are reshaping markets and institutions. Hunt explains why unstructured data, the stories and language that surround facts, often shapes decisions more than the facts themselves, introducing the common knowledge game to describe how crowds shift once everyone knows that everyone else has seen the same signal. He also explores how Perscient uses AI to trace more than 5,000 recurring narrative scripts across global news, tools that can defend against manipulation as easily as they can be used to create it. Ultimately, he argues that leaders who learn to see the structure behind storytelling, rather than simply producing more content, are the ones who earn lasting trust.