Every marketer has experienced this frustration: they spend hours prompting ChatGPT, tweaking copy, or briefing their team, only to end up with content that looks fine on paper but doesn't resonate with their customers. Campaigns fall flat, product launches underperform, and brands start to sound interchangeable.
The truth is simple: today's AI doesn't understand people. It understands text patterns. It optimizes for "what usually works" across scraped internet data. However, for marketers, it can't tell why their audience really cares, or what motivates them to act.
That's the gap being filled by a new wave of AI grounded not in content scraping, but in empathic intelligence, or systems that understand human psychology at scale. And at the front of that movement is Elaris, a just-launched platform from Solsten, the cognitive-behavioral artificial intelligence (AI) company already trusted by big names, such as Sony, Peloton, EA, Lego, and Meta.
Why empathy is the next competitive advantage
People are in an era where trust is eroding, attention spans are shrinking, and brand loyalty is more complex than ever to win. Most marketing teams are still guessing, running A/B tests, building static personas, or commissioning outdated surveys as soon as they're published.
At the same time, third-party cookies are disappearing, and regulators are tightening the screws on data collection. Marketers are under pressure: how do you deeply understand your customers without compromising their privacy?
For Joe Schaeppi, CEO and co-founder of Solsten, the company behind Elaris, empathy is the answer. However, empathy at scale requires more than intuition or creative genius. It requires technology that can decode why people act the way they do and then translate that into creative, product, and campaign decisions in real-time.
What Elaris does differently
Elaris isn't another text generator. It's built on anonymized, first-party psychological data collected through years of Solsten's partnerships with leading digital products and game studios. This dataset represents 3.4 billion people across 400,000 brands and interests, and it's protected by some of the most rigorous privacy standards in the industry.
Here's how it works: Marketers find their real audience, and instead of shallow interest targeting, Elaris uses psychological traits and motivations to map who their audience truly is.
They can engage with dynamic, living personas powered by Elaris, conversing with audience models that continuously adapt in response to changes in market sentiment and consumer behavior. These insights empower teams to test ideas, messaging, or features in a realistic environment before launching, allowing for rapid adaptation and optimized creative strategies.
Additionally, Elaris delivers tailored content, campaign briefs, and feature roadmaps that deeply resonate with specific audience segments. Because the system evolves in real time, marketers' insights keep pace as markets shift and people change. Its real-time, adaptive intelligence ensures marketers can move beyond guesswork, maintaining relevant campaigns and connected as customer needs shift.
"We've been told for years that AI would replace human creativity," Bastian Bergmann, COO and co-founder, mentions. "Elaris does the opposite. It gives creators the empathy and precision they've been missing, so they can make products and experiences that resonate instantly."
Why this matters for business leaders
Think about how much time and money your company spends on campaigns that don't connect. Industry benchmarks show that more than 60% of content created by marketing teams never gets used. Teams get stuck in a cycle of trial, error, and rework, while budgets vanish and opportunities slip away.
Elaris compresses that cycle from weeks to minutes. A strategist can craft a campaign brief tailored to their real audience in an afternoon. A founder can test product ideas with personas before investing in development. A marketer can port audience intelligence directly into Meta ads for sharper targeting.
The result? Less waste, faster launches, and higher resonance.
"AI that doesn't understand people is just artificial," Joe Schaeppi adds. "The future of AI isn't artificial—it's deeply human, emotionally intelligent, audience-aware, and trust-building. Elaris is the infrastructure for that future."'
Why now?
Empathic intelligence is emerging in the market now as marketers experience mounting AI fatigue, frustration from generic outputs, and disappointing, overly automated workflows. As digital privacy shifts accelerate, with the disappearance of third-party cookies, organizations increasingly recognize that first-party data provides the only sustainable path forward.
Meanwhile, the experience economy drives consumer demand for personalized products and connections; purchasers want more than functional benefits, seeking experiences that genuinely feel tailored to their needs.
Elaris responds to these evolving trends, offering a solution built for a time when brands are expected to deliver authentic, data-driven relationships. Its credibility is highlighted by its adoption among global leaders in gaming and digital products, signaling the promise of empathic intelligence for modern marketing strategies.
What's next
If the first wave of marketing AI was about automation, the second will be about connection. Businesses that adopt empathic intelligence will have an unfair advantage: they'll know not just who their audiences are, but why they care.
Marketers don't need more dashboards. They need technology that helps them understand and connect with people. That's the promise of empathic intelligence, which Elaris delivers today. For companies competing in crowded markets, that may be the difference between growth and irrelevance.
For leaders ready to move beyond generic AI and into campaigns that feel alive, Elaris offers this new opportunity. Because the future of AI won't belong to the loudest brands or the biggest budgets. It will belong to the brands that understand people best.
As of launch, over 14,000 people had joined the waitlist for Elaris, but interested users can now skip the line and get ElarisPro, joining big names and top human-centered agencies in the industry.
