A few years ago, Jamie Brownlee started experimenting with LLMs inside a global marketing team, and at first it felt like a real breakthrough, the kind that reshapes how work gets done. Creative production that once took weeks could suddenly happen in days, with campaign assets, variations and localisation all becoming faster, cheaper and easier to produce at scale.
But the more the team leaned into it, the more something didn’t quite add up.
The bottleneck hadn’t disappeared, it had simply moved.
As execution sped up, the harder question became impossible to ignore: what should we actually be making, and why?
The tools could generate almost anything, but they couldn’t tell you what was worth creating in the first place, and without that clarity, speed just meant getting to the wrong answer faster. That shift made something obvious in a way it hadn’t been before.
AI hadn’t solved marketing strategy. It had exposed how fragile it already was.
The bottleneck no one owns
Modern marketing teams don’t suffer from a lack of information; if anything, they have the opposite problem. Research reports, audience data, brand frameworks, past campaigns, category trends and cultural context all exist in abundance, but almost none of it shows up in a usable way when decisions are actually being made.
Strategy becomes something that lives in decks, scattered across teams or lost in handovers between the people defining direction and the people executing it. The same work gets repeated, context drops out, and alignment slows to a crawl.
At the same time, AI tools have made it dramatically easier to generate outputs, but they haven’t improved the quality of thinking behind them. In many cases, they’ve amplified the issue, producing work that looks strategic on the surface but lacks the depth required to build anything distinctive or consistent over time.
What gets squeezed out in the process are the fundamentals: insight, clarity and direction.
That is the gap Brainwaves is built to close.
Turning knowledge into direction
Brainwaves is a brand intelligence platform designed to help marketing and creative teams turn everything they already know into clear, actionable strategy, without getting buried in process along the way.
Instead of starting from scratch with every brief or campaign, teams can work from a system that brings together their existing knowledge, from research and past strategy to audience understanding and category context, and makes it usable in real time.
At the core of the product are purpose-built AI agents, each designed around a specific strategic discipline, whether that is audience analysis, category mapping or insight synthesis. These agents take on the work that typically slows teams down or gets skipped altogether, pulling together fragmented inputs and structuring them into something coherent.
The result is not just speed, although weeks of work can be compressed into minutes, but a shift in how decisions get made. Teams move from scattered information to sharp insights and clear creative direction, with far less friction between thinking and execution.
The opportunity for AI in marketing is not about generating more content. It is about structuring the right context and surfacing it at the exact moment a decision needs to be made, so strategy becomes something teams can actually use, rather than something they document and move on from.
Built from inside the system
Brainwaves is not a product built in isolation from the industry it serves; it comes directly from people who have spent their careers inside it, experiencing the problem from multiple angles.
Jamie has over two decades of experience in brand strategy, including leadership roles at Publicis and as CMO of Euronews, while Ben Crawford previously served as Chief Client Officer at UM APAC. Tom McKenzie, the founding engineer at Mr Yum, brings deep experience building AI systems and has spent years working with intelligent agents.
Together, they have worked across agencies, in-house teams and global markets spanning Asia Pacific, Europe and the US, which has shaped how they think about the problem. Strategy is never one-size-fits-all, and cultural nuance matters, but the underlying friction, too much process and not enough time for thinking, is consistent everywhere.
That shared experience is reflected in the product itself. Brainwaves is not trying to replace strategy as a discipline; it is trying to remove the friction that stops it from happening properly in the first place.
Early signals, strong pull
While still early, Brainwaves is already seeing meaningful traction that points to the scale of the problem it is addressing. In its first nine months, the company reached $200K USD in ARR, with more than 200 strategists across 15 countries actively using the platform.
Early pilots have demonstrated up to a 70% reduction in time-to-brief, a metric that captures just how much effort is currently spent getting from scattered inputs to a usable starting point for creative work.
One of the most important inflection points for the team has been the shift from agency adoption to enterprise engagement. Agencies were natural early adopters, but the real validation has come from large global brands beginning to run paid pilots, signalling that this is not just a tooling improvement for individuals, but a structural shift in how strategy can operate at scale.
The opportunity reflects that scope, with Brainwaves targeting a global strategy market worth over $100B.
Giving marketers their time back
At its core, Brainwaves is not just about efficiency or even better outputs; it is about changing how marketing teams spend their time and where their attention goes.
Most marketers did not enter the industry to manage processes or stitch together fragmented information. They were drawn to the work because of the ideas, the opportunity to shape brands, influence culture and create work that resonates at a commercial and human level.
Over time, that has been eroded by the operational reality of the job.
By handling the synthesis, structuring and retrieval of knowledge, Brainwaves allows teams to shift their focus back to the part of the work that actually drives impact. Instead of managing processes, they can manage ideas.
Success, for the team, looks like becoming the infrastructure that enables that shift, the system that sits underneath modern brand teams and gives them the context, clarity and confidence to do their best work.
The ask
Brainwaves is working closely with enterprise brand teams, agencies and marketing leaders who are rethinking how strategy should operate in an AI-native world, particularly those looking to connect insight more directly to execution without losing depth along the way.
If that sounds like you, you can learn more at https://getbrainwaves.com/.
Watch them pitch at Demo Day
When: Thursday, 30 April @ 7:00 PM (pre-party starting at 5 PM)
Where: Carriageworks (at the close of Blackbird's Sunrise Festival)
What: Pitch night (19 companies)
Tickets: Grab your ticket here
