Introducing Alli Business Insights: AI-Powered Research Built for the Agentic Era

Today, we're launching Alli Business Insights, a first-of-its-kind intelligence product built into Alli, PMG's proprietary marketing operating system. It helps teams answer the strategic questions that shape a business. That might mean understanding why a competitor is gaining share in three of your most important markets, why a product line is outperforming in one region and stalling in another, or what's behind an audience signal that's just starting to surface.

Instead of treating research as something that arrives later in a deck, Alli Business Insights makes intelligence active. Every insight can shape strategic decisions, fuel new Live Personas, and flow into the creative and media work that activates them.

The Intelligence Gap

There has never been a moment in marketing where teams had this much data at their disposal. Market research, competitive intel, audience signals, performance benchmarks, cultural trends, all of it available in real time. But anyone who's actually trying to run a brand will tell you that access and intelligence aren't the same thing.

Related: Date is Everywhere. Intelligence is Not. Read the letter from PMG’s Founder and CEO, George Popstefanov. 

Most teams are buried in dashboards they don't have time to read. The research a planner commissions in January is stale by April. Competitive intel gets pulled together from six different tools and three Google Docs; nobody's sure if it's current. The quarterly trend deck appears two weeks after the trend has already peaked. And the deep-dive research presentation that takes forty-five minutes could've been a five-minute conversation if anyone had asked the right question.

The cost of all that lag isn't just wasted spend. It's the opportunity that slipped by before anyone noticed. It's the strategy approved on instinct because waiting for evidence wasn't an option. It's a good idea that died in the deck because no one had time to validate it. It's the team reacting to a consumer who already moved on.

Alli Business Insights closes that gap. By bringing market research, competitive intelligence, audience signals, content generation, and deep research into one platform, it turns the flood of information teams already have into intelligence they can actually use to move the work forward.

A Different Kind of Research

For as long as marketing has existed, research has been a deliverable. You commission it. You wait for it. You read it. Then it sits in a folder somewhere until someone needs to dig it up for a pitch deck six months later. Business Insights doesn't work that way.

PMG's approach to research is different because Alli answers the questions marketers actually have, in the moment they have them. Instead of waiting two weeks for an analyst to pull a brand health report, a planner can ask Alli why a competitor's mentions are climbing and have an answer in seconds, with the charts and citations already attached. Instead of commissioning a category trend study that's stale by the time it lands, the report updates itself as the trend moves.

This isn't a faster version of traditional research. It's a different shape of research entirely.

"Marketing teams have never had access to more data. They've also never had less time to actually use it. Business Insights closes that gap by giving teams the intelligence they need immediately, not weeks, and connecting it directly to the rest of the workflow," said Parks Blackwell, VP of Marketing and Client Development at PMG.

That matters for the people reading this. The hardest part of using research isn't gathering it. It's getting to the right answer fast enough to act on it. When your market intelligence, your audience signals, and your performance data are all telling the same story at the same time, in the same place, the debate in the room stops, and the work starts.

What Makes Business Insights Different

Marketers already have plenty of research tools. What they don't have is a single source of intelligence that actually shows up where they're working, refreshed the minute they need it. Business Insights automatically and continuously pulls research signals, competitive intel, audience behavior, and your marketing performance data into the platform. So the intelligence in front of you is current, not pulled from a study that's been sitting in a folder since last quarter.

Brand and Competitive Reports That Write Themselves

Every configured brand receives its own AI-generated research report covering brand positioning, performance drivers, and the competitive landscape. It refreshes on demand, so you're never looking at last month's view. Interactive charts and infographics carry the visual story. Source citations sit beside every claim, so the work is always traceable.

The marketer who used to spend a Friday afternoon stitching screenshots into a slide for Monday's QBR can now point to a live report that explains itself.

Ask Alli, Built In

The Ask Alli integration is what turns Business Insights from a research deliverable into a conversation. You can chat with any report in plain English. Curious why a competitor's brand health is climbing? Just ask. Want to see the market insights as a chart? No problem. Want to know which audience segments are driving a category trend? Same thing. Answers stream in with text and inline charts immediately.

It's the difference between reading a report and interrogating one. And it changes how teams prepare their strategies.

Cross-Channel Data, Already Connected

Business Insights pulls directly from client data cubes. Spend, clicks, performance metrics, channel breakdowns, all of it flows in without manual work. The reports you read are grounded in your actual business performance, not just whatever's publicly available about your category.

So when Alli tells you a competitor is gaining share, it's not a guess. It's tied to what's actually moving in your business.

Live Personas, Created Automatically

The audience opportunities Business Insights uncovers don't sit in a report waiting to be acted on. They automatically become Live Personas in Alli Audience Planner. So the moment new audience intelligence shows up, it's already where you plan campaigns.

That's a meaningful shift. Most teams find an audience opportunity in a research deck, then spend weeks trying to figure out how to build for it. Here, the audience is already ready when the insight surfaces.

Unlimited Brands, Cleanly Separated

Configure as many brands as you need. Each one lives in its own dedicated report, with no overlap or noise. Use it for business units, product lines, individual product launches, competitor brands, industries, or really anything else you want a dedicated view of.

For an enterprise team managing a portfolio, that means every brand gets the same depth of analysis without competing for attention in one giant deck.

Granular Scoping and Custom Context

Each brand can be scoped by competitor set, industry, geography, and product line. Add custom context to steer Business Insights' focus, and the platform tailors its analysis to your specific priorities. The more you teach it about the business, the sharper the output gets.

Built Into the Operating System

Business Insights isn't a standalone tool. It's a core part of the Alli, PMG’s operating system, which means everything it produces flows into the rest of Alli. Insights move into Audience Planner. Performance benchmarks feed Media Planner. Competitive intel surfaces in Creative Studio. Nothing has to be exported, reformatted, or re-explained between teams.

That's the part that matters most. Most research tools end with a presentation. Business Insights starts there. The insight you uncover at 9 AM can shape the campaign brief you're writing at 11.

The Shift

The marketing teams that will succeed in the agentic era are the ones that can turn data into intelligence faster than the competition. That's the bet behind Business Insights. It compresses weeks of manual research into minutes, brings disparate data sources into a single source of truth, and turns intelligence into the kind of action you can actually take, without requiring anyone to leave the workflow they already use.

For the marketer reading this, that means walking into the next client conversation with answers, not assumptions. It means making the case for a strategy with evidence, not instinct. And it means spending less time gathering the story and more time telling it.

This is what modern research should look like.

Alli Business Insights is now available to PMG customers.