Delphio, an independent agentic marketing effectiveness and foresight platform, has launched with the aim of making sophisticated measurement more accessible to businesses that have traditionally been priced out of it.
Founded by Paul Sturgeon and Jeremy Pounder, who have held senior analytics and insight roles at NIQ, Amazon Ads, WPP and Omnicom, Delphio combines AI agents with human expertise to help businesses make more informed marketing investment decisions.
Speaking to The Media Leader, Pounder said Delphio is looking to speed up some of the “difficult, laborious elements” of effectiveness measurement, helping clients make decisions “more quickly and more effectively than they have done in the past”.
The platform combines econometric modelling with scenario-planning capabilities, allowing businesses to understand which marketing channels are contributing to sales, determine appropriate levels of investment and assess how different plans could perform under changing market conditions.
It also aims to translate marketing effectiveness into measures including revenue, cash flow and risk, helping businesses connect marketing decisions with wider financial planning.
Human element
According to Delphio, while AI can automate much of the technical work involved in measurement, human expertise remains essential to defining the questions, interpreting results and turning them into recommendations.
As Sturgeon explained: “AI without experts gives fast answers nobody trusts; experts without AI give trusted answers few can afford. Delphio combines both to deliver answers that are fast, trusted and affordable.”
The company pointed to Marketing Week‘s Language of Effectiveness 2026 survey, which found that 71.7% of marketers say ease of measurement influences budget allocation. This creates a risk that investment decisions become increasingly shaped by platform-reported metrics rather than independent evidence of marketing effectiveness.
Delphio aims to address this gap, using AI agents to lower the cost of sophisticated analytics while retaining expert oversight throughout the process.
The company will begin by working with clients to establish the business questions they want to answer. AI agents then handle tasks including data validation and model building before Delphio’s specialists review every model and help clients interpret the findings.
Clients can choose between a self-serve platform and analyst-led studies.
The company is targeting three main groups: growing advertisers without access to in-house econometric or data science teams; independent agencies looking to offer robust media effectiveness measurement without building their own function; and media owners seeking independent evidence of their channels’ contribution to sales.
AA Ireland and Alight Media are among Delphio’s founding clients.
Don Brennan, chief commercial officer at AA Ireland, said Delphio’s proposition offers “the rigour of expert econometrics at the speed and cost a business like ours needs”.
He added that Delphio had transformed The AA’s understanding of what its marketing delivered and helped the company make decisions about future investment “with confidence”.
The UK had an estimated 5.6m small and medium-sized businesses at the start 2026. For Pounder, this represents a significant opportunity for Delphio to scale its model of combining automation with expert insight.
