Allstate PR asked to delete execs quotes

Victor Tangermann of Futurism writes about how Allstate public relations representatives pushed it to take down quotes from an executive in The Wall Street Journal about how it was using artificial intelligence in claims emails.

Tangermann writes, “To be clear, it’s not out of the ordinary for spokespeople to reach out to journalists to dispute factual claims, sometimes resulting in corrections. We’re all human, after all (or, at least, those of us who aren’t writing Allstate’s claims emails still are.)

“But it’s an entirely different matter when a company requests that direct quotes by its executives be deleted wholesale. And frankly, we were baffled: Jeevanjee is the company’s CIO, so you’d expect that he’d know exactly how its employees were using technology. And his quotes — the ‘claim agent still looks at them just to make sure they’re accurate, but they’re not writing them anymore’ — weren’t remotely ambiguous.

“Flummoxed, we replied to Allstate seeking some clarity. Were they saying that Jeevanjee was lying when he made the remarks to the WSJ? Or that he was confused? Is he now claiming something different?”

Read more here. The quotes were not removed.