A Year of Co-Creation: Building the Future of Agentic AI for Social Intelligence, with the community
Over the course of 2026, we have been building agentic AI for social intelligence in close partnership with the community. This has been a hands-on process of discovery, design, and co-creation, as the discipline transforms from one based mostly on analysis to something more akin to architecture.
This week, this project take the stage in Paris at the Social Intelligence Lab’s Observe Summit, where we will unveil the winning social intelligence agent we’ve built with a member of the community.
It all started with a simple question: as agentic AI increasingly transforms large parts of the economy and of digital life, how will it change the social intelligence discipline?
We proposed that question to the leading community of practitioners, The Social Intelligence Lab, and began to imagine with Jillian and her team how the community could help develop this. It became clear that with such a fast-moving and foundational shift, the answers couldn’t just come top-down but needed to be shaped by the people actually operating in social intelligence, day in and day out.
That’s where the idea of co-creation came to be.
This builds on Pulsar's own trajectory: Pulsar itself was born out of a co-creation project with an enterprise client of then research agency FACE. And of course over the past few years we've been building agents ourselves: from our autonomous research agent STORY, to our agent for advertising compliance CLEAR, and Crisis Oracle, our agentic system for predicting brand crises.
We kicked it off with a course early in the year – From Analyst to Architect – a training series led by Pulsar's research team to help professionals brainstorm new ways to think about AI and automation. SIL saw enormous interest in the course, and 25 practitioners were selected to be a part of this initial cohort.
In June, we then launched the Insight Agent Challenge itself: an open call for all social intelligence practitioners to come up with the agent or agentic workflow they wish existed, based on the edge cases, pain points, and workflows they encounter every day.
To evaluate these ideas, we assembled an all-star jury made of industry leaders. Our panel included:
- Carrie Stern, Measurement & Optimization Lead, Brand Studio at Google
- Ellen Tseng, Director of Social Listening and Intelligence at Cash App
- Michael Brito, Global Head of Data & Intelligence at Zeno
- Laura Antoniello, Senior Advisor, Marketing Communications: Corporate Affairs Insights at Dell Technologies
- Morgan James, Sr. Director, Data & Analytics - Corporate Communications at Comcast
- Bernardo Ellis, Tools & Tech Expert at The SI Lab
- Francesco D'Orazio, CEO & Co-Founder of Pulsar
Besides reflecting research and industry knowledge, this is also a forward-facing group of experts quite capable of seeing around the curve to assess the ideas with the most innovation potential.
The response from the community was immediate and ambitious, with many social intelligence practicioners submitting workflows that tackled everything from everyday analytical friction to complex cultural or brand tracking. Narrowing down the submissions was not easy, but our Jury zoomed in on three standout concepts from social intelligence leaders at Airbnb, ListenFirst, and Jellyfish/Ogilvy.
Once the judges judged on which one had the most innovative potential and value to the community, we moved into the build phase, with Pulsar's product team partnering closely with the (still unannounced!) winner to bring to life the agent itself.
After months of work, we're really looking forward to sharing not only the identity of the winner, but also the agent we co-created, on stage at the Observe Summit in Paris on Friday 6 November. Join our session here.
