Hey folks - I wanted to send you a note about what I’ve been building with the PSFK + Retail Innovation Week communities and ask for your advice, opinion and involvement.
Over the last 12 months I’ve been exploring the rebirth of PSFK through Fodda - insight and ideas delivered for our AI age - connected into your LLM or as a tool in an agentic workflow. I’ve built a ‘layer cake’ of data sources - some from my team, some from our community, some from our user’s own library.
In this email, I’ve described each layer of what we have built with the help of folks like you. When you scan through, please think: would you want to be an expert, could your networking group use this tool, would you want to supply your own data for Fodda to resell, would you buy this service?
If you could reply and respond to some of the questions dotted throughout, it would help me a lot.
Thanks, Piers.
P - If you want to try Fodda today there’s a free to use layer. Sign up on Claude or on ChatGPT or in app. I can also demo you Fodda if you book a time here.
The Expert Layer
At the very top are human experts who have allowed me to index their expertise and turn that into a knowledge graph that grows over time. I’ve surrounded this merry group of early-adopters with a rowdy band of classic writers and thinkers - and then another layer of synthetic CMOs and CEOs built off of the speeches and interviews of real ones.
With Fodda, you can now tap the minds of these brilliant strategist, forward-leaning brains and - ya know - folks like you. You can question their Human Agents, show these digital twins a deck for feedback, get them to battle over a conundrum you set - all within your own LLM or corporate AI system.
A brilliant question you could ask in ChatGPT today - Ask the experts in Fodda about how brands should behave in modern society?
Questions for you - when would you turn to a digital twin of an expert and when would you still want to speak to a human? What reservations do you have about digital twins? What questions would you want answered before becoming a Human Agent yourself? Could you see yourself adding the Human Agent into your workflow as a an agentic component? Just reply to this email.
The Context Layer
The next layer is curated and proprietary insight unavailable in typical LLM training data and AI apps. We mix up-to-date trend data with corporate research. We also take a good look at all the industry reports that get published but we take steps to be careful with their IP. And, the big project I’m working on right now is to bring on data partners that can allow Fodda users to access consumer research in any part of the world.
A fantastic question you could ask in Claude today - Ask Fodda to tell me about the trends in the way young people are socializing today?
Questions for you - what other suppliers of trend and consumer research would you like to see me partner with? When would you turn to a digital twin of an expert and when would you still want to speak to a human? What reservations do you have about digital twins? What questions would you want answered before becoming a Human Agent yourself? Could you see yourself adding the Human Agent into your workflow as an agentic component?
The Signal Layer
The way I see this layer being used is for access to supporting market data to insights identified in the higher layers. We have local stats from hundreds of national banks, police-forces, ecommerce suppliers, environmental monitors and other sources that LLMs do not index. The signal layer provides instant back-up (and sometimes contradiction) to the insights the expert- or context-layers have provided.
A good question you could ask in our app today - Use Fodda to pull stats that provide an insight into the quality of life in London today.
Questions for you - what are the most important sources you use in you work? What topics or areas are hardest to gather? Where’s the gap we could fill?
The Partner Layer
I didn’t want to build ‘the only research layer you need’ - it’s a naive strategy. I am building a layer of curated and proprietary data that can be added to your other layers - such as internal insights, ecommerce data, social listening and brand tracking. Fodda can be one of many context layers that your organization accesses but we have found that some users want to get Fodda to query their third party systems - whether to query other expert networks like GLG, insights providers like GWI or Justin’s Adveron, or internal data via tools like Neil’s Noan.
You can see how to add an API key of a 3rd party service in our app here so we can start mixing 3rd party data into our results.
Questions for you - when would you want to channel your partners through Fodda rather than access side by side? What are your most cherished insight sources we should be compatible with? What usage restrictions should I be concerned with.
If you sign up to Fodda today there’s a free to use layer. Sign up in app, on Claude or on ChatGPT. I can demo you Fodda if you book a time here.
Thanks for letting me interrupt the flow. Hoping that you’re enjoying the newsletters that I’m producing with the help of all the insights and research I find with Fodda. Getting community involvement and feedback means I can keep sending these out.
And… If you read this and see what I’m building as competitive or something you should try to do yourself, don’t. Why don’t we partner?
piers@psfk.com
