Rumblings launches AI platform for marketing decisions

Rumblings has launched an AI marketing decision platform founded by former Woolworths analytics lead Tom Crawford and agency founders Annabelle Jones, Lori Susko and Jenny Ringland. The Australian startup is targeting a market Grand View Research estimates will reach USD $82 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

It aims to address a persistent problem in marketing software: turning large volumes of data, signals and generated content into clear business decisions. The founders argue that many existing tools either retrieve information or create material, but stop short of telling companies what action to take.

Crawford was previously Advanced Analytics & Data Science Lead at Woolworths Group. Jones and Susko founded We Scout, while Ringland founded G+S and earlier worked as a journalist at News Corp.

Rumblings describes its product as a decision engine for marketing teams, designed to identify shifts in human behaviour and turn them into recommendations for marketing, communications, strategy, product and innovation teams.

The platform combines real-time cultural signals with internal business context, including audience behaviour, category dynamics, commercial objectives, brand positioning and user psychographics. The goal is to tailor recommendations to each organisation rather than deliver the same response to every brand.

That distinction sits at the centre of Rumblings' pitch in an increasingly crowded field of AI marketing products. The sector has grown rapidly, with copilots, social listening tools, dashboards and content generation systems competing to show AI can do more than automate tasks.

Rumblings argues the market has focused heavily on productivity while leaving a gap in judgement. Crawford said the company was built around reasoning rather than simple retrieval or generation.

"Most AI products in marketing today are either retrieval systems or generation systems. They surface information or create content. We built Rumblings as a reasoning layer, designed to interpret early behavioural signals against deep business context and generate decision pathways, not just insights," said Tom Crawford, Co-Founder and Chief of AI, Rumblings.

He said the challenge was not a lack of data, but knowing which information mattered commercially.

"A lot of the current AI stack is built around productivity. We built Rumblings to combine productivity with judgement, credibility and human collaboration. The challenge wasn't finding more data. It was building a system capable of understanding a business deeply enough to know which signals are commercially actionable," Crawford said.

Fragmented tools

The founders contend that many businesses now rely on separate systems for trend forecasting, social listening and content production, leaving teams with more inputs but less clarity. In their view, the value lies in connecting external cultural signals to the specifics of a company's brand and market position.

Jones said the market still lacked products that could interpret change through a business-specific lens.

"Social listening tells you what already happened. Trend forecasting tells you what might matter in 18 months. Generative AI helps teams produce more content. Most tools surface information. Very few deeply understand your business, interpret cultural shifts through that lens, and tell you what you should actually do about it, and why. That's the layer missing from the market," said Annabelle Jones, Chief of Experience and Partnerships, Rumblings.

Rumblings is also positioning itself against a broader concern in marketing that AI systems may push brands towards uniform outputs. As generative tools spread across the industry, some executives and consultants have warned that standardised prompts and templates can narrow creative variation.

Jones said that trend was already visible in campaign design and language.

"A lot of AI is creating optimisation, but not necessarily originality and that's a real problem. You can already see the flattening effect happening across marketing, the same aesthetics, same campaign structures, same language. It's accelerating a wave of monoculture in marketing, and that needs to change. We built Rumblings to help businesses think more clearly, not more generically," Jones said.

She added that two companies in the same sector might need very different responses to the same cultural signal.

"Two brands in the same category could see the exact same shift in culture and require completely different responses. 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," Jones said.

Investor interest

The launch comes as investors examine a new group of AI software companies that promise to improve decision-making rather than simply automate execution. Venture firms are increasingly looking for products that can embed more deeply into business workflows and offer recommendations tied to commercial outcomes.

Dominic Matthews, Managing Partner at Trampoline, said the category was attracting broad attention, although many products remained superficial.

"This is one of the most interesting spaces in software right now. There are dozens of teams trying to crack the code on turning AI into actual decisions that are rooted in deep brand intelligence and foresight, but very few are doing it well. Most are an LLM over a dashboard. If a team has spent years inside the workflow and can now automate it, that's interesting," Matthews said.