Mastering Crisis Sim: How We Got 25 Execs on the Edge of Their Seats
Let's start with the requirements. In this case, they were clear: 1) To have a fully customised exercise focusing on payment risks and cyber threats like fraud, ransomware, and cash-outs. This is the domain expertise of Mastercard, who had no issues creating this in the Immersive platform with our review and guidance. 2) To deliver this on-site in front of 25 senior execs (including the CEO, CTO, CISO, CFO, and numerous heads of departments). It’s definitely not easy getting this many board members together in one room, so we had to make the first best impression! What did we do, and why was it a success? The stakeholders told us that they’d run tabletop exercises before, so this wasn’t new to them. So, how did we turn what they expected to be a routine drill into an edge-of-the-seat experience? What made our approach unique? Realistic AI-generated videos The amazing Crisis Sim content creation team at Immersive Labs used generative AI to create highly realistic videos that felt as though they were straight from a Pakistani news channel. Mastercard provided us with a few scripts and ideas that helped bring the AI videos to life. AI video of a news reporter tailored to resemble the Pakistani news channel. AI video of a news reporter tailored to resemble the Pakistani news channel. Why did the execs jump out of their seats? That’s because we included the following in the videos: Footage of their building on the news and customer dissatisfaction over cyberattack repercussions. News reporters with local accents and dress styles mentioning the bank and stakeholders, and unhappy Tweets flooding social media. A video of their CEO, not his real face of course, but we used his name when it came to an inject where the stakeholders voted for ‘releasing a press statement to the public’. They even specifically asked us to ensure none of these videos leaked! But each video included the message “Exercise use only – not based on real events”. AI video of the CEO giving a press conference. Collaboration This success was a team effort. Getting any presentation done right, especially in person, requires planning and knowing your audience. This is where Mastercard brought their expertise to create and tailor the Crisis Sim exercise while we supported with our guidance and previous customer experience knowledge. Our roles, tasks, and responsibilities were clear. Top tip: If you’re planning an exercise, collaborate with others for ideas and support. Double act presentation Presenting as a team made all the difference. Mastercard’s expertise in engaging senior execs helped animate the session and avoid awkward silences, while I focused on facilitating the exercise. Doing this alone can be tricky – I’ve personally struggled with awkward silences during solo Crisis Sim sessions while juggling scenario questions, multiple responses, feedback, and facilitation all at once. Sharing the load was crucial, especially in a U-shaped room where I couldn’t easily move around. In this case, I didn’t need to worry about moving away from my laptop, leaving the close-up engagement completely for Mastercard to lead on. Image example of the U-shaped conference room this took place in. The feedback The feedback was overwhelmingly positive – they said it was their first experience with such a tabletop exercise, a stark contrast to their initial expectations. The AI videos sparked significant interest and curiosity. The collaboration between Mastercard and Immersive Labs successfully delivered an educational, engaging, and tailored exercise. The bank expressed interest in running a wider crisis drill in 2025 with multiple banks. So look forward to hearing about that in the future! Finding AI video scenarios in our Crisis Sim Catalogue If you clicked on any of the AI images above thinking it was a video, I’d like to apologise. They were just screenshots as the actual videos included sensitive, bank-specific details like names and locations that we can’t share externally. If you’d like to explore AI video scenarios in our Crisis Sim platform, check out titles like: Boardroom Betrayal: When Deepfakes Strike the Top Puppetmaster’s Revenge The Walls Have Ears – Part One The Walls Have Ears – Part TwoFeature Focus: Introducing the AI Scenario Generator
In this blog, we’ll cover what this feature is and how you can use it. For this release, we’ve made creation as easy as possible. Just click Create with AI, add a title, and select options for organisational sector, attack vector, threat actor, and scenario size. This will generate a full scenario, from the briefing to the epilogue. You can even make a cuppa while it works!🪄✨ Once created, these scenarios can be published or edited and published in your organisation's catalogue. But how exactly does it work? Organisation admins can turn the AI Scenario Generator on and off in the platform settings area, so you’ll need this to be turned on if you want to try it out! Our AI Scenario Generator is currently only available to our Cyber Crisis Simulator customers. It’s based on technology provided by OpenAI, with generations based on publicly available data related to crisis management as well as our own Immersive Labs Crisis Sim catalogue. Organisation admins can choose to use the feature in a layered approach: No AI access at all: This means that your organisation has chosen not to enable the AI Scenario Generator. Without scenario sharing enabled: You can generate AI scenarios based only on the inputs shown in the generation box. With scenario sharing enabled: The AI will access specific parts of your previously published scenarios when generating new ones, ensuring the new scenario is highly relevant to your context. These settings can be updated on the organisation's settings page. If you’re keen to use the AI Scenario Generator but it’s not enabled in your organisation, you’ll need to discuss this with your internal Organization Administrator. If you’re an Organization Administrator and want to know more about the feature, contact your CSM. Tell me more about scenario sharing! If your organisation chooses to also enable scenario sharing, Immersive Labs will include specific information from any previous custom scenarios that you’ve published in the temporary “context window” for requests to our third-party AI vendor. A "context window" is an extension of the query sent to an AI model. It exists only during the processing of the query and isn’t saved by any third parties. The third-party AI vendor won’t use any of the information you share to train its models. Shared data will only ever be included in this temporary "context window" of generation and won’t be stored by the third-party AI vendor. The shared information includes scenario titles, descriptions, inject titles, and response options. It excludes feedback to response options, exercise information, reporting, account or organisation information fields, or metadata. Scenario sharing is designed to make the generated scenario more relevant to your particular context. You can still create scenarios using AI without scenario sharing, but your scenario will likely be more generic and less relevant to your particular organisational context. However, you can still edit the final version to make it more relevant to you – just like with our catalogue scenarios. Let’s not forget the human in the loop As with all things AI, we recommend that you review the AI output before publishing your scenario, to ensure it meets your needs. The AI Scenario Generator currently only generates text content, so you’ll probably want to add additional rich media, such as images or videos, to your scenario. To get the most out of your crisis simulation, we also recommend enabling, adding, changing, and checking certain elements. These include: Checking that you’re happy with the text formatting and narrative content Checking that you’re satisfied with the role listed Enabling and adding response feedback or performance indicators If you want to capture ranked response data, select the ranked options setting and add a rank (great, good, weak, okay) to each response option to suit your organisation's preferred situational response Turning on response confidence or justifications Get involved and share your thoughts! We know that AI is a hot topic and we’re keen to hear and capture your feedback and suggestions on this first release of our AI Scenario Generator as part of our user research taking place this November and December. If you want to participate in this research, you’ll be able to share your thoughts and experiences of using our AI tool and scenario creation more generally directly with our team. Comment below if you’d like to find out more, and we’ll contact you with further details! If you’re an Immersive Labs customer, you can find out more about the AI Scenario Generator in our FAQ guide.
