Built on More than a Decade of Expertise with Global Enterprises, Opal’s AI Co-Pilot Enables Brand Alignment at Scale.
PORTLAND, OR — April 14, 2026: Opal, the connected planning platform for marketers, today announced the launch of Gem, an AI co-pilot aimed at marketing’s biggest operational drain: the “alignment tax.” Each year, executives and middle managers spend countless hours chasing down what’s going to market and how well it fits their brand strategy, while teams scramble to clarify what’s actually in motion. AI is now pushing this human infrastructure to the breaking point. To combat the “paddle faster” problem, Gem brings a distinctly modern approach: an AI agent steeped in a company’s marketing strategy and guidelines that can instantly identify misfits in a sea of campaign briefs and content. Gem is a force multiplier for human judgment, allowing marketers to move faster and with greater confidence.
Global marketing alignment has always been a challenge. However, it’s estimated that the volume of machine-generated collateral will grow 5X by the end of this decade. The dance this creates across teams, channels, and regions becomes a “horrible game of telephone” between intent and execution. Marketing teams now have more content than ever, and more decisions to make. Gem repairs this overwhelm by systematically tying every executional element back to the governing strategy.
“AI is often seen as a content vending machine, but more content without a compass only amplifies the alignment predicament,” said George Huff, CEO at Opal. “Gem is the steering wheel for the generative age. We aren’t just helping marketers move faster; we’re helping them move together.”
The idea of using AI to manage AI is not novel. But standalone chatbots lack the context to “know” a company’s brand, its strategy, guidelines, and best practices. By contrast, Gem is built directly into the scaffolding of Opal’s platform, where years of real marketing work live. It understands every brand brief, content execution, and larger initiative – as well as the hierarchical relationships between them. Gem knows how the brand operates, giving marketers a strategic lens to do the work that AI can’t: proof for taste, storytelling, and cultural nuance.
Opal believes that marketing is a fundamentally human activity and its “human-in-the-loop” design principle reflects that philosophy. It puts the marketer squarely in the role of architect and arbiter, while Gem traverses the full array of structured and unstructured data. As execution volumes multiply, this human-plus-machine hybrid ensures brand consistency at hyper-speed.
“Global social coordination has always meant navigating fragmentation across teams, markets, and content,” says Kelly Broili, VP of Global Social Media at SAP. “Opal gives us the foundation to do that well at scale, and from what we’ve seen of Gem, we’re excited about what an embedded AI layer could unlock. ”
Opal remains committed to the rigorous security standards required by the world’s largest brands. Gem is deployed in a private environment within Azure, ensuring that no customer data is ever used to train underlying models.
To learn more about Gem and connected intelligence, visit workwithopal.com or contact info@workwithopal.com.
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About Opal
Opal is the connected planning platform for marketers, built to link marketing strategy to tactical execution in a shared, visual system. With more than 15 years of experience solving the complexity of enterprise marketing operations, Opal is trusted by leading brands such as Target, Starbucks, General Motors, and SAP. Organizations that leverage Opal drive greater impact, collaborate more effectively, and gain full visibility into their marketing efforts. For more information, visit workwithopal.com.
