Two core beliefs
When we founded Profound back in August of 2024, we held two core beliefs:
- Every brand on the planet will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand, products, and services
- Every marketer will use AI to do great work, faster.
As for the first belief, in 2024, Perplexity was already starting to trigger web search. ChatGPT was close behind with hundreds of millions of users onboard. The way customers discover products and services was about to be rewritten, and the brands that figured this out first would have a massive competitive advantage. This belief became the category we created and continue to lead today: AEO, answer engine optimization.
Our second belief had larger implications, and it’s where we’ll dive deep in this post. We believed that every marketer on the planet was about to use AI to do better work. Work that was previously impossible because no team had the hours to do it.
This belief is why we built Profound Agents.
Today, leading marketers use Agents to do better work at a scale and quality that wasn’t possible even six months ago.
That’s what we mean by the marketing platform for the age of superintelligence. Not a chatbot dashboard, but a platform with deep proprietary data, tools to act across channels at scale, and infrastructure to measure impact, with AI embedded throughout.
This post covers what’s coming next. We’re excited to share how we’re building toward that future.
Software should work alongside you
Profound started just as analytics. We were the first platform to show how your brand appears in AI Search.
You logged in, found insights, decided what to do, then went elsewhere to act. That’s how most marketing software works: the customer does the looking, thinking, and execution.
That model no longer holds. AI Search fragments visibility across dozens of engines, hundreds of prompts, and constantly shifting answer surfaces. No team can keep up manually. Even with great data, the volume and quality bar are too high.
Our vision is different. The platform should find opportunities, recommend actions, and do most of the work. The marketer becomes the orchestrator, guiding, editing, and applying judgment with inputs AI can’t replicate.
The result is not just more output, but better output. AI removes rote work so marketers can focus on what actually differentiates their brand.
Talk to your data
The first step is already live. Ask Profound lets you query your AI Search data like a teammate. Ask a question and get answers with citations, prompts, sentiment, and visibility inline.
You can diagnose a drop in sentiment, identify the engines and prompts behind it, and see what changed. Upload a media list and have it re-ranked against top-cited domains. Ask why a competitor is pulling ahead and get a clear gap analysis.
The point isn’t chat. It’s that everything in Profound can now be done in plain language. And if it can be asked, it can be automated by an Agent.
That Agent can run in Claude, Slack, or tools built on our MCP (Model Context Protocol). The same data and actions, available wherever marketers work. You’ll continue to see more and more investment here over the next few weeks
That’s why Profound already runs in Slack, with Microsoft Teams coming next. Wherever the work happens, Profound is there.
Build agents by describing them
The second stepping stone is Agent Assistant.
Profound Agents are our way to let customers automate the repeatable parts of marketing work: competitive monitoring, citation tracking, media outreach, persona research, content refreshes.
Agent Assistant lets you build those agents by describing them in plain text, or by voice.
"Find the ten top-cited pages that mention our brand, excluding our own domains. Draft a personalized pitch email to each publication asking them to write about our upcoming accuracy analysis feature, and drop the drafts in our #media-targets Slack channel for review."
Agent Assistant designs the agent, validates each step, catches its own errors, and hands you a working functional workflow. More importantly, you keep full control and visibility into the Agent you're building. Rather than re-prompting to try and nail the final details, every node is exposed and directly editable. You can even ask Agent Assistant to make surgical changes to any step.
You get the speed of describing what you want and the predictability of a structured workflow underneath.
Chat is not the workflow
Many builders default to chat-only interfaces. Chat is useful, but on its own, it’s a step backward for serious work.
Chat-only systems trade ease for visibility and control. When something breaks, you need to trace the failure, fix it, and prevent it from happening again. You can’t do that with a black box of model calls. Enterprises need to steer, review, and audit. That’s table stakes.
You don’t have to choose. We use both. Chat as the front door for intent. Structured, auditable Agents underneath for reliability at scale. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s what teams need to operate.
Agents will run 24/7
Most Agents today are things you launch. You set them up, you run them, they finish. That model is fine for one-off jobs. It is not enough for the way marketers actually need to operate in this new world, where category shifts happen overnight.
That’s why the next major piece we are shipping are always-on Background Agents. Agents that listen for triggers and act on them. Agents that watch your visibility score and spawn a response when it crosses a threshold. Agents that monitor a competitor's sitemap and draft a counter-move when they publish something new. Agents that run on schedules, every night, every morning, every hour, checking the things that need checking and queuing up the work that needs doing.
Background Agents surface what they saw and what they did. You review, you approve, you edit, you ship. They are the closest thing we have built to a marketing team member who simply does not need to sleep.
Opportunities identified by Background Agents, or created by your team, become a trackable project where you measure your progress against a target KPI.
This is the piece I am personally most excited about, because it’s where the AI-native version of this category genuinely diverges from what came before. Nothing in legacy software does this. It is only possible now, with this generation of models, and we intend to be the team that equips marketers with it.
Work needs a home
Insights, opportunities, and Agents are the core pieces to get work done. But the actual work, the artifact a human ends up reviewing, sharing, approving, and shipping, has to live somewhere.
So we are also building a productivity layer directly into the platform.
Profound Docs is shipping in the coming weeks: full rich-text, collaborative, AI-assisted.
Image generation is shipping shortly after with brand kit integration. Video and other media will follow.
The point is not to replace Google Docs. The point is to make sure that when an Agent produces a draft, an analysis, or an asset, the human reviewing it has a real place to read it, edit it, comment on it, and approve it, with all the context of the project that produced it sitting right alongside.
The team behind the product
One of the things I’m most proud of at Profound is the team we’ve built. I have the privilege of waking up and building this product with the most talent-dense set of engineers, data scientists, designers, and product minds I have ever worked with.
And we ship absurdly fast. AI-driven software development now lets us move at a different pace. We started in 2024, so we never had to retrofit an old SaaS model. We are AI-native and were built for this moment from day one.
Ask Profound, like many features, went from idea to launch in weeks. Agent Assistant followed on a similar timeline. What’s next is weeks away, not quarters. Some of it will be live by the next post.
The marketing playbook now changes weekly. The only response is speed, and speed comes from a team built to deliver it.
We’re just getting started
We started Profound with two beliefs: every brand will care how AI talks about them, and every marketer will use AI to do better work. The first defined a category. The second defines the platform we’re building.
Marketing has changed. Work is faster, reach is broader, expectations are higher. The question is which platform helps marketers move faster without losing quality, reliability, or control.
We intend for that to be Profound. Not by being louder, but by building in line with how the work is changing. Building the best product for marketers.
If you are not a customer yet, I’d encourage you to get a demo and see what we are building.
