GWI

Big news today - and one that's been a long time coming. Leading generative AI platform Pencil just launched the GWI Insights Agent, embedding our consumer intelligence directly into their Agentic Marketing OS. That means creative teams can now build personas, plan campaigns and generate copy powered by real-time audience data on over 3 billion people, all without leaving the platform they're already working in. When we started building out GWI's agentic offering, the ambition was always to bring our human data into the places where decisions actually get made. Not sitting upstream in a separate tool, but embedded in the workflow itself. This is that. The team at Pencil have done something genuinely impressive here - combining the best data, creative and AI in one place. Proud of both teams. More to come. 🚀 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dMJnb3fn

I challenged the team to build the best agent in our sector. They delivered and in just one quarter the shift is dramatic. Adoption has been huge, with a massive increase in users and is re-accelerating our organic growth significantly. Clients love it and it's expanding the use cases for our data in ways we didn't anticipate. It’s also clear that these agent-led insights are genuinely better for the user and can significantly accelerate the discovery and application of human insights. It’s enabling us to deliver on our vision to democratise human insights for everyone - in a way that pure software couldn’t. This transformation is turning GWI , which has operated as a SaaS business for the last decade, to be agent-first. We're fortunate to be a proprietary data business with clear AI value, but even then, this is a hard transition to pull off. Here's what I'm learning from the front line: The agentic revolution is already happening - Since launching Agent Spark in December, adoption has surged and new business is scaling rapidly. Demand is now. Every sector is building - Every customer has an agentic strategy at various stages of execution and some of the most regulated industries are doing the most interesting work. Budgets have moved up the org chart - We used to fight for declining market research budgets. Now, we're backed by CEOs and CFOs as part of the agentic stack. That changes everything. Expanding users - Growth is coming from empowering sales and marketing teams with direct access to insights so they move faster. It's not replacing insights teams - it's augmenting them. The narrative is that AI is killing user expansion, but that's not true if it makes your product accessible to anyone. We don't need AGI - Today’s models are good enough for 99% of use cases today. The real friction is data, context and adoption. Context is a big market - Agentic workflows need excellent context to work. We’re bringing the context of key personas and marketplaces, and companies are willing to pay for this. Building out-of-the-box agents with limited data and context is not going to work. AI creates more work, not less - When generating narratives takes seconds, expectations shift. Teams now explore 4-5 personas instead of one. The bar keeps rising. Autonomous agents will define 2026 - Our MCP and APIs are being baked into many agentic platforms that will automate large parts of the marketing process. It's going to land this year in a big way. This year, agents will surpass human usage of GWI. We’re far from the peak here, things are still just getting started based on where customers are on the journey.