Platform empowers corporate communications, investor relations and public affairs staff to evaluate, test and optimize before taking action – all in an effort to foster understanding in high-stakes moments.

NEW YORK and BOSTON, Aug. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Kumkuat AI launched today with the first synthetic audience platform purpose-built for communicators at the world’s largest, most sophisticated enterprises. The platform lets corporate communications, investor relations and public affairs teams evaluate how key audiences — from institutional investors, to investigative reporters, to partisan policymakers — will respond to their actions and messaging before going public.

Communicators have had access to a wide range of tools and services in the past, from reputation surveys to large scale media monitoring. What Kumkuat AI brings is a groundbreaking solution that answers three critical, previously unmet needs at once:

1. What the most important stakeholders think about the company and its executives.
2. Why they have those opinions, with infinite interrogability.
3. How to respond, both in action and message, with direct recommendations from each audience.

“The savviest communicators prioritize one thing above all else: how key audiences feel about what you do and say,” said Dan Gaynor, Kumkuat co-founder. “But until now, it’s never been possible to preemptively test every move or message. At a time when valuations and sales can swing on sentiment alone, this is about more than strengthening reputation; it’s about accelerating growth. We’re enabling communicators to validate their instincts with evidence – in seconds, not days – and in doing so, elevate their influence.”

Audiences you can’t survey, modeled so you can

With legacy tools, leaders have to choose between scale or specifics. Either comb through millions of mentions hoping for a golden nugget of truth, or ask a few influential individuals for what’s (hopefully) a representative opinion of many.

Kumkuat fills the missing middle of measurement because the audiences that determine a company’s reputation are precisely the ones it can barely study. An IR team can’t run underwhelming forecasts by sell-side analysts without raising eyebrows. Government affairs can’t survey a Senate committee. Corporate communications can’t ask a reporter covering its crisis which version of a statement conjures confidence.

Kumkuat addresses this critical gap by constructing highly specific, data-informed synthetic versions of influential audiences. It generates hundreds for each client, meticulously built around the distinct profiles of individuals, organizations, or groups that profoundly influence corporate reputation. This encompasses specific institutional analysts, government officials, financial journalists, activist organizations, and key trade groups.

Like real people, those audiences evolve in real-time. Trained on real, grounded information, Kumkuat keeps track of each individual’s latest statements and opinions. Customers can also fine-tune the audiences with proprietary, internal knowledge that will remain private to their organization. Imagine analyst audiences that include private feedback from investor roadshows, or and journalist audiences based on background conversations and the actual questions they’ve asked before.

Kumkuat’s launch builds on emerging scientific research showing that synthetic audiences are as reliable, and substantially more detailed, than polling people. Recent analysis from strategy firm Bain & Company—which demonstrated that “digital twins” mirror human focus group results with 90% accuracy—and from CPG giant Colgate, whose research also predicted real purchase intent with 90% accuracy, noted feedback was more detailed and critical than those provided by real respondents.

While credible and reliable synthetic audiences are its foundation, where Kumkuat excels is building on customers’ own expertise and moving from insight to action. Teams can use the platform to:

• Hold live conversations to prepare for tough questions, before someone asks them for real. From media interviews to Congressional hearings, play out high-stakes scenarios to minimize missteps.
• Co-create content with the audiences. Drop in a draft — an earnings script, an M&A announcement, a crisis statement, a policy argument, a media pitch for a new product — and within seconds, see how each audience receives it: what resonates, what falls flat, or what invites pushback. Then the audiences explain, word-by-word, how to fix it, with specific suggestions on which proof points should be added or reworded.
• Socialize data across teams in any format. Audiences give feedback in report cards, PowerPoint, in-line Q&A, interactive websites, email alerts, and more. Kumkuat even connects directly to enterprise LLMs via an MCP, making audience insights as easy as a chat with Teams, Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT.

“As a marketer, I’ve always been surrounded by solid foundations to understand customers, like ethnographic research, surveys and audience data feedback loops,” said Shann Biglione, Kumkuat’s co-founder and product lead. “We see an amazing opportunity for teams in Corporate Communications, Investor Relations and Public Affairs to supplement their expertise with CEO-ready insights on how investors, regulators and the toughest reporters will react before the fact. We’ve built a platform that is designed around communication teams’ workflows, engineered as a single source of truth that delivers reliable responses in seconds – and without the need for a single prompt.”

Kicking off with early traction

Kumkuat initial customers span industries across agriculture, pharmaceutical, financial services, technology, and national security.

Three examples:

• A publicly traded satellite company preparing a major announcement — set to hit the Bloomberg terminal, a trade show stage and institutional investors simultaneously — tested and reworked the messaging against modeled investors and analysts before release. When the story hit, the company’s stock rose 3%.
• A publicly traded national security firm modeled reactions from the specific members of Congress, governors and regulators, replacing one generic narrative with messaging tailored to each official’s voting record, policy stances, and home-state concerns.
• An agency communications team needed to place a high-stakes op-ed on a ticking news clock. Instead of guesswork, they constructed detailed synthetic profiles for nine national opinion editors. This allowed them to rigorously test various drafts, discerning precisely which arguments resonated with each editor. The result was a placement in an outlet with top-five circulation, with the op-ed reaching millions of readers – on the client’s timeline.

Kumkuat’s capabilities have received acclaim from leading communications executives.

“Communications today moves at the speed of markets, and for a global company like CNH, precision matters as much as speed,” said Cameron Batten, Chief Communications Officer at CNH. “Kumkuat’s AI sharpens our edge by pairing our team’s judgment with real-time evidence, so we reach our stakeholders with the right message at the right moment. It’s a force multiplier for the human craft of communications, not a replacement for it.”

“With Kumkuat, I’m able to answer with certainty the questions that once relied on intuition: ‘How will my investors and regulators react’?” said Steve Lott, a corporate communications and public affairs executive, whose background includes leadership roles at Intelsat, RTX, Boeing, and Airlines for America. “For all the talk about AI replacing our expertise, this platform scales it. By tailoring every audience to the precise context of the market and moment, Kumkuat delivers insight that’s defensible in a boardroom.”

Built for enterprises operating at the highest stakes

Synthetic audiences are only as useful if they offer trustworthy and repeatable insights. In a world of AI-wrapper service offerings, Kumkuat is differentiated because it is a SaaS platform engineered to meet the reliability and security enterprises demand. That means:

• Audiences evolve, like real people. Each persona is built from what that stakeholder actually says and does. Personas are linked to their live social profiles and latest published work — an analyst’s recent notes, a lawmaker’s floor statements, a journalist’s latest stories — so reactions reflect current positions, not a model’s stale memory.
• Fixed frameworks and consistent results. Kumkuat locks its narrative sources, stakeholder definitions and analytical logic. The same input produces the same assessment — no drift, no improvisation – with every audience citing evidence for each opinion. That consistency is what lets teams compare option A against option B, and over time, track the aggregate impact by audience.
• Security at scale. Kumkuat runs thousands of documents — including proprietary, internal knowledge — against hundreds of modeled audiences continuously, and turns the results into reports leadership teams can actually use. It offers both comprehensive external-to-internal understanding of a company’s perception and secure workspaces for every team, on any project.

“Anyone can paste a press release into a chatbot and get an opinion. That’s improvisation, not intelligence,” said Dylan Roy, the Kumkuat co-founder leading engineering. “We built the platform with the same standards that a Fortune 100 expects of a frontier AI system: locked sources, fixed analytical frameworks, and a traceable line from every conclusion back to its evidence. If a simulation can’t show its work, it doesn’t belong in front of a board.”

The team

Kumkuat was founded by three leaders whose careers sit at the intersection of communications, corporate strategy and applied AI. Dan Gaynor, currently an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, held communications roles in the Obama Administration, Nike and Weber Shandwick. Previously Chief Strategist at Publicis and bringing with 20 years in marketing for companies like LVMH, Disney and Verizon, Shann Biglione is a Forbes CMO columnist and co-hosts The Overthinkers podcast. Dylan Roy brings experience building data infrastructure at KKR and Dow Jones. Each founder has been part of two businesses that successfully exited, with Roy’s last company acquired by KKR, and Biglione and Gaynor previously co-founding of Kelp Data, which was acquired by Signal AI. 

About Kumkuat

Kumkuat enables you to simulate how your corporate and product narrative lands with audiences, even before the real world does. A custom-built competitive intelligence platform, we analyze corporate positioning, benchmark competitors, and model reactions from hard-to-reach audiences like customers, regulators, influencers, media, employees, and beyond. Get insights that identify white spaces to win against the competition, stress-test announcements, identify narrative risks, and refine positioning — with the validation from your priority audiences — before it goes public. Previously only available via expensive, time-intensive market research methods, Kumkuat’s platform enables on-the-fly market sensing and messaging iteration.

For more information or to request access, visit www.kumkuat.ai. 

Media Contact
Kumkuat Inc.
Daniel Gaynor – dan@kumkuat.ai
www.kumkuat.ai

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SOURCE Kumkuat AI