Our Origin Story

Kirk Cheyfitz & Adam Penenberg, Co-Founders

We — Adam and Kirk — became friends some 15 years before we founded the Persuasion Engine.

By 2022, Adam, once one of the country’s leading tech journalists, had become an early follower of AI. As a professor at NYU’s journalism school, he started building AI tutors, teaching assistants, and even debating partners for his students soon after ChatGPT became widely available. He had a rare talent for giving these creations distinctive, sometimes mischievous personalities.

Kirk, a former political reporter turned content marketing innovator, had pioneered the art and science of persuasive storytelling in corporate marketing. Using that experience for good, he spent the next decade helping nonprofits, social movements, and the occasional political candidate tell their stories — and sell their visions of a better world.

We kept trading discoveries.

Adam kept sharing the astonishing things he could teach AI to do. He insisted — again and again — that AI would change everything. That the 2020s were the 1990s all over again: the rise of the Web, only much bigger.

Kirk kept sharing how he and a few colleagues had spent 20 years building a powerful process — now backed by a decade or more of rigorous field tests and large-scale studies — that reliably finds the story most likely to move people. Even across vast differences in values and lived experience. Not by tricking them, but by making the truth feel true. Not to force decisions, but to help people decide what’s best — to see what’s good for them and why, and choose it freely.

We agreed we had to build our AI with democratic, people-first values  — a system that prioritizes truth and expands human choice and agency, not limits them. Because others will build it — are already building it — to flatter, mislead, and control.

Then one day, Adam built a chatbot with a sharp, funny personality — patterned after a young gamer. He gave Kirk a simple prompt: Talk to it like it’s your research assistant.

So Kirk did.

And in those increasingly long conversations with AI personas, the future Adam had seen became clear to both of us. For the first time in history, we realized, it was possible to teach an AI — or a network of them — to instantly apply something as complex as the narrative process Kirk had spent decades developing and testing.

An AI with persuasive power was going to be built. One that could truly connect with people. One that could understand the deep internal stories people carry about themselves and the world. One that could use that understanding to make the truth feel true — at scale. To reach people across divides. To help them shape what they believe and do. Even to help strengthen the shattered social cohesion in America.

Kirk called it a “persuasion engine.”

With such an engine, we saw enormous — endless — possibilities, like:
Sympathetic, neutral interviewers for all kinds of large-scale audience and public sentiment research — AI systems that gather deep qualitative research at large, quantitative volumes.
AI assistants that make complex choices clearer: Imagine a conversation about how to think through buying a car or how to figure out which mayoral candidate really is best for you.
Persuasive agents that advocate for good ideas, productive actions, useful products.
AI that doesn’t just repeat the news, but answers people’s questions and helps them connect the story to their lives.
Personal teachers, tutors and trainers that offer customized, one-on-one instruction and support for kids doing homework or new employees getting onboarded.
Rapid media-testing platforms that can inexpensively produce distinct versions of a TV spot or a social post to find the optimal frame and narrative arc for different audiences.

It could be very powerful. Maybe even frighteningly powerful.

It was inevitable.

We agreed we had to build it with democratic, people-first values  — a system that prioritizes truth and expands human choice and agency, not limits them. Because others will build it — are already building it — to flatter, mislead, and control.

The Persuasion Engine was born from that shared realization.

Together, we’re committed to building an enterprise where AI amplifies human potential — not just corporate profits.