Scale AI Invests in Plus Company’s Smart Persona, Accelerating the Shift to AI-Agent Driven Marketing Insight and Human-Centered Growth

Scale AI, Canada’s artificial intelligence (AI) cluster’s latest investment round includes dedicated funding for Smart Persona, a next-generation consumer research platform developed by Plus Company. This funding is part of a broader $4.3 million investment that strengthens Plus Company’s ambition to lead the application of AI in solving real-world challenges, such as turning fragmented data into transformative, actionable insight in real time.

Smart Persona embodies Plus Company's core principle of Action Over Adoption. Developed in Canada and powered by Google Cloud, the platform simulates a population of 292 million synthetic adults across North America, allowing marketers to test ideas, optimize messaging, and forecast behaviour in seconds, not weeks. More than a research tool, Smart Persona operates as an intelligent agent within workflows, delivering real-time customer insights that inform decisions and accelerate refinement. 

“This investment from Scale AI is a validation of our strategy of pre-building multi-functional agents. This allows us to rapidly embed intelligence into our work of reimagining internal and client workflows,” noted Ryan McCracken, President, Integrated Digital Experiences, Plus Company. “Smart Persona is a scalable, homegrown accelerator that modernizes consumer research and directly supports our mission to empower team members and make quicker, more human-centered decisions.”

This innovation is a testament to Plus Company's belief in a technology partnership approach. Smart Persona was built on Google Cloud, a deliberate choice made to leverage Google’s unparalleled research and development tools in creating a custom, state-of-the-art AI platform. 

This strategy is already delivering early market impact, with Smart Persona gaining strong traction among early adopters in the financial, retail, and tourism sectors. It is also being piloted by several other major Canadian organizations, demonstrating its versatility and broad potential across industries. 

Catherine Laporte, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at RONA, explained: “Smart Persona's insights are in perfect alignment with our traditional consumer research findings. This offers a significant competitive edge by allowing us to deploy consumer research more rapidly and cost-effectively than traditional methods. With the support from Scale AI, the progression of Smart Persona delivering more innovation in consumer research will trigger for us a comprehensive reassessment of how we integrate predictive synthetic research alongside traditional approaches across our entire development process, and this, in more areas including content, new initiatives and more.”

Smart Persona reflects Plus Company’s commitment to empowering people and businesses through applied intelligence. It joins Plus Company’s growing portfolio of AI-driven tools that help Canadian organizations lead with purpose and agility in an era of intelligent transformation.

Plus Company, founded in 2021, is an entrepreneurial network of forward-thinking creative agencies, each bringing its own expertise and empowered by the collective capabilities of the network representing 15 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Brought together by the unabashed belief that anything is possible, the unique partnership of and limitless drive of delivering creative magic fueled by an innate understanding of culture, technology, and data. Plus Company agency brands include: We Are Social and its partner practices The Narrative Group (TNG), Socialize, Hello, Kobe, and Metta; Cossette, Citizen Relations, Mekanism, All Inclusive Marketing (AIM), Aperture1, Cossette Media, Impact Research, Jungle Media, K72, Level Eleven, Magic Circle Workshop, Make My Day, Middle Child, Mindshaker, Munvo, Septième, Visionnaire, Zapiens and 55rush. Built on collaboration, not competition. We are Partners In Possibility.