In the Greek myth, Prometheus smuggled fire away from Olympus as a gift to humanity, kickstarting civilisation. That first flame was carried inside a hollow fennel stalk – inspiring the name of our AI operating system: Fennel OS.
Fennel OS is Delphi’s AI operating system for comms: a suite of tools for next-generation communications execution. From spotting newsroom opportunities, to monitoring brands and competitors, and measuring AI visibility, Fennel OS helps our clients unearth Inspired Answers to their biggest challenges faster.
We’ve taken inspiration from the ancient story of Prometheus because we see a direct parallel to today’s AI. Like fire, AI requires care, and it brings immense power in the right hands.
Every tool in the growing suite tackles specific challenges our clients face: from understanding their brand visibility in AI engines to reacting as quickly as possible in a changing media landscape.
What is Fennel OS?
Generative AI has removed the barriers to building amazing digital experiences and software. Using this form of AI in communications tackles both old and new problems. No longer limited by skills or requiring additional budget for outside help (or third-party software), the answer to “Could we do this?” isn’t a no – almost anything becomes possible.
We wanted to build a single portal that gives everyone in the company secure access to a range of problem-solving tools. Unlike in bigger agencies, no one gatekeeps capabilities to a select few. We know we’ll only see the benefit of AI if everyone can experiment and come up with new ideas for how it can improve or change how they work.
So what’s in the Fennel OS suite today?
Daily Sparks: Surface reactive newsroom and newsjacking opportunities
A client-tailored news feed with curated opportunity notifications – known as “sparks” – which act as the starting point for rapid response opportunities. With a by-client filter in place, our people can do faster and better newsjacking, focusing their time and energy on crafting the right story and building stronger relationships with journalists.
Echo: Understand AI visibility across Claude, OpenAI, Gemini and Perplexity
Measures AI visibility for set prompts and topics against competitors. Runs a structured prompt set through one or more answer engines (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity), classifies every brand mention, scores visibility, identifies where citations come from, and produces a client-ready report.
Hawk: Easily manage brand and competitor monitoring
Using multiple data sources, this tool collates the paid, earned, shared and owned comms activity of any brand (or competitor) into an interactive report and allows for ongoing tracking.
CXO Panel: Reveal trends grounded in real-life leader interviews
Built from Delphi’s long-running archive of C-suite executive interviews, this tool helps us identify trends and surface insights from business leaders.
Plinth: Build targeted research questionnaires from narratives
Turns a story narrative into a field-ready audience questionnaire. The tool is trained on Delphi’s corpus of thought leadership content and the research questions developed to support their desired narratives.
How Delphi uses AI in communications: three tests for every tool
We want AI to work for us and not the other way around. AI slop is only getting worse. It doesn’t take much to see examples of how damaging this can be in the delicate relationship between PR agencies and journalists.
We deliberately don’t use AI to generate ideas from scratch or write content end to end. Instead, we use AI where it excels: heavy lifting on large amounts of data and insights, research, pattern recognition, and automating repeatable manual processes. And increasingly in my role, turning ideas into lines of code.
Any new tool that we build for Fennel must pass three simple tests:
- Does this address a pressing challenge our clients face?
- Will this enable us to do our jobs better and faster?
- Does it elevate the role of human taste, judgement and experience?
The next generation of comms consultancy will understand how to build systems that integrate with whatever way clients want to work. This means using technology to meet clients where they’re at, and it requires openness and collaboration. Fennel OS is our starting point.
Talk to us about Fennel OS
We have more use cases in development, and I’m excited to share them soon. If you’re interested in a demo or want to discuss the services we can support with Fennel OS, drop me an email or let’s connect on LinkedIn.
We’re determined to put the fire that AI brings to good use.
John Crossley
