Australian-founded platform Rumblings is positioning itself as a strategic AI partner for brands overwhelmed by data, trends and generative tools. By identifying emerging cultural shifts and translating them into tailored commercial recommendations, the company hopes to redefine how marketing, communications and innovation teams make decisions in an increasingly crowded AI landscape.
As marketing departments grapple with an avalanche of dashboards, social listening feeds, trend reports and generative AI tools, a new Australian-founded platform is betting that the future of marketing intelligence lies not in producing more information, but in helping brands understand which signals genuinely matter.
Rumblings, an AI-powered decision engine launched by a team of marketing, analytics and media veterans, aims to bridge what its founders describe as a growing gap between identifying cultural shifts and knowing how businesses should respond to them strategically.
The company has been founded by We Scout founders Annabelle Jones and Lori Susko, alongside G+S founder and former News Corp journalist Jenny Ringland and former Woolworths Group Head of Advanced Analytics & Data Science Tom Crawford. Together, the founders argue that businesses are suffering from an overload of fragmented intelligence systems that provide visibility but little clarity.
“Marketing teams today are drowning in signals and tools,” said Jones. “Social listening tells you what has already happened. Trend forecasting tells you what might matter in 18 months. Generative AI helps you produce more content. But nobody is solving the gap between seeing a cultural shift emerge and knowing what your business should actually do next and why.”
Rather than operating as a conventional trend-forecasting or reporting platform, Rumblings positions itself as a strategic collaboration partner. The platform combines real-time cultural signals with brand-specific intelligence, including audience behaviour, psychographics, commercial priorities, positioning and category dynamics, to generate tailored strategic recommendations across marketing, communications, innovation and product functions.
According to Crawford, the current AI and marketing technology landscape remains highly fragmented, with businesses often relying on separate research teams, consultants, listening platforms and generative AI systems that rarely work cohesively.
“Right now, companies have trend agencies, internal research teams, social listening platforms, consultants and generative AI tools all operating separately,” he said. “But very little exists to connect those dots into one clear commercial recommendation. That’s the opportunity we saw.”
The launch arrives amid a broader global surge in AI investment. Businesses across sectors are rapidly increasing spending on AI-powered marketing systems, while simultaneously confronting concerns that automation may be leading to increasingly formulaic brand communication.
Rumblings’ founders say the platform has been intentionally designed to counter what they describe as a growing “sea of sameness” emerging across advertising and brand strategy as AI-generated content becomes more widespread.
“A lot of AI is creating optimisation, but not originality, and that’s a real problem,” Jones said. “You can already see the flattening effect happening across marketing — same aesthetics, same campaign structures, same language. We built Rumblings to help brands think more clearly, not more generically.”
Central to the platform’s proposition is the belief that the same cultural trend should not necessarily produce identical recommendations for every business. Instead, Rumblings interprets emerging behavioural shifts through the lens of each brand’s unique positioning and commercial relevance.
“Two brands could see the exact same cultural shift,” Jones explained. “The future isn’t brands using AI to copy each other faster. It’s brands using AI to better understand themselves, their audiences and where they can lead.”
Industry momentum appears to support the founders’ ambitions. A recent PwC survey found that 88 per cent of executives intend to increase AI-related budgets over the coming year, with agentic AI becoming a major strategic priority. Meanwhile, Grand View Research forecasts the AI marketing industry will expand to US$82 billion in annual revenue by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of more than 25 per cent from 2025.
Against that backdrop, Rumblings is attempting to position itself not as another content-generation tool, but as a decision-making layer for organisations seeking confidence amid increasingly complex cultural and commercial environments.
“The real competitive advantage won’t come from producing more content,” Jones said. “It’ll come from knowing what matters early and having the evidence to support the confidence to act on it.”
Rumblings is currently conducting pilot discussions with brands, agencies and innovation teams ahead of a broader rollout planned for later in 2026.
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