In the concluding chapter, I focus on synthesizing the findings from the book and addressing some lingering normative questions. Specifically, I ask what this means for boycotts, whether forcing political activity underground is really preferable to having it more out in the open, and what this means for if and how corporate influence can be tamed.

The introduction to this book surveys what we already know about political influence and explains why companies are and are not exactly like other organized political interests that try to influence politics. Companies differ from other organized interests in that they do not exist primarily to further policy objectives, and instead pursue policy objectives as a means to improving their business climate. Companies exist to sell things. This provides insights into how they go about seeking political influence because their audience is a group of people that may not agree with them politically. This chapter also discusses where political influence happens (i.e., anywhere there are governments) and provides an overview of the book.

In this chapter, I test whether concerns about public backlash actually translate into changes in corporate political behavior. The theory suggests that companies that are worried their political advocacy might get them into hot water with the public and thereby imperil their reputation and brand ought to take one of two broad strategies: either hide their political behavior or take steps to make the activity more palatable to the public. I test this using federal campaign contributions and lobbying data. The evidence suggests that both campaign contributions through PACs that share the company’s name and direct lobbying at the federal level are relatively rare and that companies that cite concerns about social media and reputation damage in their 10-Ks are less likely to engage. Having demonstrated that these companies are less likely to do these things raises the question of what, if anything, they are doing instead, which I address using interviews. I find strong evidence that companies take concerted steps to both hide their political advocacy and somewhat weaker evidence that they try to make it more palatable.

In this chapter, I explain how fear of a public backlash shapes how companies engage in the political system. I outline a probabilistic chain of events that can lead from a company engaging in advocacy to being noticed and criticized by activists, to that criticism spurring a larger public response, to eventual damage to a company’s brand and reputation. Certain attributes of companies and advocacy strategies change the probability of each of these events happening, which means that (a) some companies are inherently more vulnerable than others and (b) companies can take intentional steps to reduce these probabilities in order to engage in advocacy while skirting damage. This chapter produces a set of expectations I test in the remainder of the book – that public backlash to corporate advocacy is a form of political speech and signaling rather than a statement about consumer behavior; that companies fear this backlash and “boycotts” primarily because of fear of brand damage, not necessarily sales; and that companies engage in particular strategies to either hide their political advocacy or defuse the public anger over it.

India spans 3.3 million kilometres spread over 7,900 towns and around 600,000 villages. It has approximately 10 million retailers. The fast moving sector, which, along with automobile, consumer durables and pharmaceuticals, makes up the majority of the consumer industries (CI) sector, retails products from around 21,000 manufacturers producing a quarter of a million stock keeping units (SKUs) (Nielsen 2016). Add the other sectors, and the CI sector in India sells a million products to a billion Indians. Imagine doing that only with human intelligence.

The path to achieve stability for artificial intelligence (AI)-based implementation in the CI sector is nascent but the potential is becoming increasingly clear. The adoption of AI-based solutions in India has seen an upward trend in the past few years. Over the past few years, it has been observed that high-and mid-cap CI companies have benefitted from AI in their various practice lines. AI has delivered excellent results in terms of increased revenues, improved productivity and increased effectiveness of their promotional expenditures. Companies have seen tremendous changes in their transactional, distribution and marketing-based processes, thereby improving both top-line and bottom-line growth. The reason behind this key success is the ability of these organizations to combine AI-based technology with the human-in-the-loop to deliver efficient business outcomes at scale.

Having operated in the market for over two years, Digilytics AI, a category leader of easy-to-use SaaS AI products, finds that players in the consumer industry are extremely receptive to the use of AI and analytics to gain firstmover advantage. However, only a selected few companies understand the real benefits of AI and how to apply it. Despite a huge growth in the technology infrastructure in these companies, most continue to struggle with basic data quality issues. However, there is a consensus among business heads that there lies a huge potential in using AI and in all the major business functions within the company. With this positivity in the business sphere, companies have initiated the roll out of AI-based capabilities with the right steps in mind.