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Alto Intelligence Named Vendor of Reference by Gartner: Why Gartner Is Telling CCOs to Invest in Narrative Intelligence — And What That Looks Like in Practice
Alto Intelligence is named as a vendor of reference in Gartner’s latest research that draws a line between traditional monitoring and the intelligence capabilities communications executives and their organizations actually need today.
Seventy-nine percent of enterprises have encountered misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation issues in the last three years. That is not a projection. It is a finding from Gartner's 2025 Readiness for World Without Truth Survey, drawn from C-level leaders at organizations with over $500 million in annual revenue.
For most of these organizations, the tools they rely on were built for a different context. Social listening platforms track mentions and sentiment. Media monitoring tools measure reach and share of voice. Brand health trackers assess long-term perception. These tools do their job — but for many CCOs, the job has changed. Today, the questions that matter most need answers before an organization comes under information attack: Who is building this narrative? Why is it gaining traction? Where is it headed? And is it organic — or engineered?
In a research note published this month — What CCOs Need to Know About Narrative Intelligence — Gartner reinforces the case for narrative intelligence as a critical capability for communications leaders, recommending adoption within the next one to two years. Alto Intelligence is named as a reference vendor in this research, alongside providers including Blackbird.AI, Cyabra, and Alethea.
This is not just a new vendor category. It is a recognition that the threat context has fundamentally changed — and that the organizations best positioned to navigate it will be those that invest in surfacing what others miss.
What Gartner is defining — and why it matters
Gartner's framework clarifies something important for CCOs evaluating their technology roadmap: narrative intelligence is not a replacement for existing monitoring tools. It is a complementary capability designed for a category of threats that those tools were never built to address.
Synthetic bot-driven campaigns designed to manipulate public perception. Short-selling fraud executed through coordinated narrative attacks on investor sentiment. Impersonation and deepfake operations targeting executives and brands. State-actor influence operations amplifying geopolitical narratives across energy, mining, finance, and defence sectors. These are not hypothetical scenarios — they are active, recurring threats that operate outside the visibility of conventional monitoring.
According to Gartner's research, the key capabilities that narrative intelligence adds include detecting and analyzing narratives propagating across external attack surfaces, examining how narratives evolve and flow through information ecosystems, analyzing adversarial intent to classify disinformation attacks, and mapping the spread and identifying the propagators of those narratives.
The distinction is precise. Traditional monitoring tells you what is being said right now. Narrative intelligence tells you who is saying it, why, and how it is spreading — and critically, it surfaces these dynamics before they reach critical mass. For CCOs, this is the difference between being informed that a crisis is underway and having the intelligence to prevent one.
Gartner also makes an important observation: narrative intelligence tools serve multiple functions beyond communications — including CISOs, cybersecurity teams, intelligence units, and risk management. The most effective response to narrative threats requires coordination across security, communications, and executive leadership. For organizations operating in critical sectors with complex stakeholder environments, this cross-functional dimension is not optional.
Five questions every enterprise should be asking right now
Gartner's research includes a framework for enterprise leaders to assess their urgency around narrative intelligence. These five criteria are designed to help CCOs and their cross-functional counterparts evaluate exposure and build the case for investment. They include:
- How susceptible is your organization to "truth decay"?
- How complex is your stakeholder ecosystem?
- How large is your digital attack surface?
- What is the cost of inaction?
- How capable are your current monitoring tools?
We built on top of the criteria in this framework, incorporating additional questions that build on these core areas of importance and represent critical insights that every CCO should have structured and clear access to. They are also, in our experience, an accurate map of the threat landscape that every enterprise security, risk, and communications leader should be evaluating today.
1.
Gartner: How susceptible is your organization to "truth decay"?
Alto: Do you know who is targeting your organization, and why?
Polarization, conspiracy theories, deepfakes, and coordinated disinformation campaigns do not affect every organization equally. Some industries and sectors face persistent, targeted information attacks. Energy companies, extractive industries, financial institutions, and organizations operating in politically sensitive markets are disproportionately exposed.
This is the foundational question: is your organization operating in an information environment where truth is actively contested? If so, traditional monitoring will only tell you about the damage after it has been done.
What Alto delivers: Alto's intelligence infrastructure processes over 700 billion signals annually across 50+ languages and 125+ countries — spanning mainstream platforms, fringe forums, grey-space channels, semi-closed messaging environments, and emerging ecosystems. This is what enables detection at the point of origin: the ability to identify coordinated disinformation campaigns, synthetic amplification, and narrative manipulation where they are seeded, not after they have reached your stakeholders.
Working on top of this infrastructure, Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts operate as always-on analyst capacity — continuously finding, synthesizing, and delivering the intelligence that matters. Aligned to the DISARM framework, they classify threats by tactic and technique, giving teams a structured, operational picture of the information environment. For organizations in sectors facing persistent truth decay — extractives, energy, financial services, defence — this is the intelligence layer that surfaces what conventional tools were never designed to see.
More coming soon on our Narrative Threat Mapper — one of several specialized capabilities within Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts. Reach out to speak with our team and learn more now.
2.
Gartner: How complex is your stakeholder ecosystem?
Alto: Can you track how a narrative mutates across markets, languages and regions?
Organizations with geographically diverse, culturally varied, and politically polarized stakeholder ecosystems face a fundamentally different challenge than those operating in a single market with a homogeneous audience. A narrative that gains traction in one region can be weaponized and recontextualized in another. Information environments differ dramatically across markets, and what constitutes a manageable reputational issue in one geography can become an existential threat in another.
What Alto delivers: Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts operate on this same intelligence infrastructure, built for exactly this complexity. This is not aggregated social listening. It is continuous, granular visibility into how narratives form, travel, and mutate across distinct information environments — enabling organizations to understand threat dynamics at the local level while maintaining a global operational picture. This is the capability trusted by international organizations, multilateral institutions, and public and private sector partners globally to navigate the world's most demanding information environments.
3.
Gartner: How large is your digital attack surface?
Alto: Do you have visibility beyond the platforms you monitor?
Every organization has a digital footprint — the full scope of how it is discussed, referenced, and represented across the internet. The question is whether you have visibility into how that footprint is being targeted, reframed, or weaponized across the full range of digital channels where adversaries operate. This is what we mean by digital attack surface: not just your owned channels, but the entire ecosystem of platforms, forums, messaging apps, and emerging spaces where narratives about your organization are shaped — often before they appear on the channels you monitor. For global organizations in critical sectors, this surface is vast, multilingual, and largely invisible to conventional tools.
What Alto delivers: Alto's infrastructure provides coverage across the full digital attack surface — including semi-closed messaging platforms, fringe communities, and low-visibility coordination hubs where adversarial narratives take root before they reach mainstream channels. Our Virtual Intelligence Analysts work across this environment continuously, synthesizing signals and surfacing emerging threats so your team doesn't have to find them manually. They also extend into a dimension most organizations are not yet tracking: the AI search layer. As large language models increasingly shape how stakeholders perceive organizations, our VIAs identify which public sources AI systems draw on to construct responses about you — detecting misinformation, data voids, and narrative vulnerabilities embedded in the data layer itself. For organizations with large digital footprints across multiple markets and languages, this is visibility that does not exist in conventional monitoring.
More coming soon on our AEO Monitor — one of several specialized capabilities within Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts. Reach out to speak with our team and learn more now.
4.
Gartner: What is the cost of inaction?
Alto: Could you quantify the impact of a narrative attack, today?
Gartner cites World Economic Forum reporting estimating the overall financial toll of disinformation at approximately $39 billion in stock market losses annually, with global financial impact reaching $78 billion. Beyond direct financial losses, the costs of a successful disinformation campaign include regulatory scrutiny, stakeholder trust erosion, operational disruption, and strategic opportunity cost. For publicly traded companies and organizations in regulated industries, the exposure is acute. In an environment where corporate reputations can be impacted in seconds, waiting for a crisis to materialize before responding is no longer a viable strategy.
What Alto delivers: Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts are designed to shift organizations from reactive crisis response to preemptive risk management. They analyze how communications will be interpreted, amplified, or contested before publication — flagging high-risk language and likely points of narrative escalation before they reach the public domain. This shifts the cost equation from damage control to damage prevention, giving leadership teams the intelligence to make decisions with confidence rather than under pressure.
More coming soon on our Impact Predictor — one of several specialized capabilities within Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts. Reach out to speak with our team and learn more now.
5.
Gartner: How capable are your current monitoring tools??
Alto: Are your current tools telling you what's coming, or what already happened?
This is the question Gartner's research answers most directly. Legacy monitoring tools are effective at measuring volume, sentiment, and share of voice. They are not effective at identifying emerging narratives before they reach critical mass, distinguishing organic conversation from bot-driven manipulation, or attributing narrative attacks to specific actors and networks. Gartner is explicit: organizations relying solely on these tools are using an outdated, reactionary approach.
What Alto delivers: This is the gap Alto was built to close. Our infrastructure provides the detection and coverage layer that conventional monitoring cannot. On top of it, Alto's Virtual Intelligence Analysts act as a continuous analytical workforce: they find, classify, and synthesize narrative threats around the clock, delivering intelligence your team can act on immediately. They identify who is driving a narrative and why. They anticipate how narratives will evolve before they escalate. They track how AI systems are representing your organization to your stakeholders. This is not monitoring with better dashboards. It is an entirely different model — built on preemptive intelligence and continuous analysis, designed for organizations that cannot afford to be the last to know.
Expanding the perimeter
Gartner's continued emphasis on narrative intelligence as a distinct technology category reflects what practitioners on the front lines of information warfare have known for some time: the perimeter has moved. The most consequential threats to organizations today do not penetrate firewalls or exploit code vulnerabilities. They manipulate perception, erode trust, and weaponize information — and they operate entirely outside the boundaries of traditional cybersecurity. Gartner projects that by 2029, 45% of CCOs will adopt narrative intelligence technologies. The question for enterprise leaders is not whether to invest, but whether to be early enough to gain a strategic advantage — or late enough to be playing catch-up.
At Alto Intelligence, we have spent years building the infrastructure to detect, analyze, and counter these threats at scale. We call this cognitive threat intelligence — the practice of expanding the security perimeter beyond technical systems to include the narrative environment in which organizations operate. It means understanding not just what is being said, but who is engineering it, how it is being amplified, and where it is headed next.
Our inclusion as a reference vendor in Gartner's narrative intelligence research reflects where we have been operating for years — at the frontier of preemptive threat intelligence, serving multinational enterprises and international institutions navigating the world's most hostile and complex information environments.
That is what we build. That is what we deliver. And we are just getting started.
Want to see what's coming?
Alto's next generation of Virtual Intelligence Analysts is in active development — purpose-built for strategic communications, security, and risk leaders who need preemptive narrative intelligence, not reactive dashboards.
Book a briefing at altointelligence.com to get early access and understand how cognitive threat intelligence can expand your security perimeter today.
#cognitiveintelligence #narrativeintelligence #expandingtheperimeter
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