Claims about possible new applications of AI are foisted on us regularly, and now a group of respected industry brains are banking on its use as a “reasoning engine” for strategists and creatives.
Mattias Ronge, former CCO of Edelman EMEA who quit last year after winning a Cannes Titanium Lion, has launched Engine Y as an AI service that helps brands and agencies to land “culturally relevant insight and ideas.” This one doesn’t rely on sophisticated prompts, instead it has encoded decades of creative and strategic experience while, Ronge claims, being optimised for media neutrality and “divergent, asymmetric thinking.”
Ronge was making culture-first campaigns back in the 90s and founded Swedish agency Deportivo in 2010, which then sold to Edelman in 2014. He quit Edelman last year to set up Engine Y with his brother Stefan and engineer Patrik Hedmalm.
Mattias Ronge said: “Cultural strategy and creativity is a deeply human trait. Our service helps professionals make brands more exciting and insights more relevant for their audiences. Users can collaborate with each other back and forth, almost like inviting others into their very thought process. While some other services look to replace humans, our aim is to inspire people to do better work in less time.”
Patrik Hedmalm said: “Our service is not like anything on the market, because it is based on decades of first-hand human specific experience rather than traditional agentic workflows that rely purely on the generic knowledge of LLMs. Combining deep experience with our very own AI programming language and real time cultural research module, we have a framework that is second to none.”
Stefan Ronge said: “We have managed to solve a high level problem: How to use AI to get to novel thinking and tension, instead of well-trodden paths and consensus. As the value of earned is increasing, Engine Y will be even more interesting, not only for the marketing world, but also for investors, entrepreneurs and small business owners.”
Engine Y sounds like a way to invite a lot more brainpower into a brainstorm and potentially save time, as long as the actual humans in the room can agree. A big barrier to adoption has come down because Engine Y costs surprisingly little – the basic package is only $25 a month – so it’s an accessible way to try AI without, like WPP, giving $400m to Google.
