Artificial intelligence startup Signal Media Ltd., better known as Signal AI, said today it’s offering a new business intelligence tool that companies can use to gain a comprehensive view of their “external world,” based on real-time data and content.

The company has just announced the availability of its new External Intelligence Graph, which helps map out the relationships between things that modern organizations need to care about but probably don’t understand that well. It’s talking about things like climate change, supply chain risk and competitor intelligence. The new tool uses AI to analyze publicly available data sources in order to highlight how an organization is associated with such topics.

Signal AI said this is an entirely new kind of data offering, which works by helping companies to understand the vast amounts of public, unstructured content that’s available in the world and on the web. The idea is to illustrate to companies how such relationships are changing, while also revealing “unknown unknowns” that surface previously obscure connections to organizations and individuals.

The External Intelligence Graph works by using AI smarts to collect data from millions of news articles, regulatory filings and other documents from around the web each day. Machine learning is then employed to find patterns within that data that might be of use to organizations, who can then run natural language queries against it to find items of interest.

Signal AI reckons External Intelligence Graph can solve numerous challenges facing organizations today. For instance, it can help chief risk officers understand and quantify risk through a “risk radar” that’s trained to understand a company’s external ecosystem.

For chief communications officers, it can help them understand how their company is perceived within the market, the topics it and its competitors are most associated with, and so on. It can also help quantify “unmeasurable” concepts such as a company’s overall reputation and perception.

Investment managers can also tap the External Intelligence Graph to understand which potential investments might do harm to their company’s reputation, Signal AI said.

“Due to the rise of stakeholder capitalism and ESG focus, businesses are increasingly affected by the actions and behaviors of people and organizations in the world outside of the company walls,” said Signal AI Chief Product Officer Clancy Childs. “With our AI technology working at scale, we provide the external intelligence to help businesses cut through the noise and understand the topics and events that are affecting them both directly and indirectly.”

Signal AI said its AI tools serve more than 40% of the Fortune 500, with External Intelligence Graph being put to use by some of the world’s largest companies and governments.

The company promised it will soon be launching more products, with the bulk of the $50 million in Series B funding it raised in December being used for AI research and development.

Images: SignalAI