The New Insights Copilot: Ask Anything, Across Everything

Ask one question and get a whole competitive analysis back. That’s the leap in the new Insights Copilot – YouScan’s AI agent for social listening. This is its fourth major update since the 2023 launch. It digs through social media conversations, giving you more time to think about what the findings mean and how to act on them. 

Here’s what’s new, and how far one question goes now.

Social data is noisy by nature. A single active brand can spark more conversation in a week than a team could read in a month, and most of it is noise wrapped around the handful of signals that actually matter. Going through it all by hand, mention by mention, is exactly the kind of slow work nobody got into insights to spend their days on.

So we built Insights Copilot to take that off your plate. It does the digging and comes back with the whole picture: what people complain about, what they praise, where they’d like you to improve, and which trends are quietly building. 

One comprehensive read you can act on fast – to ship the right product, get ahead of a crisis before it spreads, or brief a stakeholder the same afternoon.

A quick refresher: What is Insights Copilot?

Never worked with our social listening agent? Here's the whole idea.

Insights Copilot is the first social listening AI agent, built right into YouScan. You ask a question about your social data the way you’d ask a colleague, and seconds later, a clear, structured answer comes back.

We launched it in 2023, and across three years and four versions, it’s grown into a genuine everyday partner. It reads the sentiment and themes inside a topic, surfaces what people praise and complain about, and turns its findings into charts and graphs. 

It holds a real back-and-forth, too, so you can ask follow-up questions and sharpen what you’re after without starting over.

👉 For insight professionals, here’s the part that matters most: every answer comes tied to the posts behind it, so you never have to take the agent's word for it. You see the raw posts and judge the findings for yourself.

That verifiable, no-black-box approach has been its signature since day one. That’s the Insights Copilot you may already know. Here’s how far this release pushes it.

What's new in this 2026 release: Wider reach, deeper answers, instant reports

Four changes carry this release. Here's what each one actually gets you:

1. One question can now stretch across your entire competitive set.
   Ask who’s leading on Share of Voice and what’s driving the complaints across your brand and every competitor. Insights Copilot works through all of it in a single pass, instead of you running the same query for each brand and pulling the answers together into something presentable.

2. Multi-step analysis.
   Bring it the question you can't quite phrase, the vague, five-part one you'd normally break into a mini research plan. Insights Copilot builds that plan itself, works through each step, and comes back with the whole picture rather than a corner of it.

3. It sets the filters for you.
   Want only negative posts, only on TikTok, only in the US, only from the last 30 days? Say so in one sentence, and Copilot sets all four filters at once. No need to leave the conversation and set each one manually.

4. Found something worth sharing? Insights Copilot writes the report for you.
   Charts, findings, and the real posts underneath. Then it hands you a link to share with the CMO, the client, or the stakeholder who’s never once opened YouScan. A report that used to mean an afternoon in slides now starts with a sentence.

How Insights Copilot works in practice: Let’s bring in a research brief

A feature list only gets you so far. What really matters is what these changes do when a live brief lands on your desk. So let’s walk through one using real data.

We picked the sensitive-skin category – a crowded corner of skincare where a handful of brands get compared against each other constantly. That mix of many brands and overlapping product lines is exactly the kind of multi-topic question the new Insights Copilot was built for.

You do what any researcher would: set up a monitoring topic for each of the six brands, point them at the right products and keywords, and then the real work starts. It comes down to a handful of questions:

Not long ago, answering these meant opening all six topics one at a time, scrolling tens of thousands of mentions, and clustering them into dashboards just to see who’s ahead. With the new Insights Copilot, much of that work collapses into a question you type once. 

Here’s how the same brief gets answered, feature by feature.

🔎 Every topic, one question

Your research rarely stops at one brand or one topic page anyway, and this brief is a good example: six brands, six topics, one category to make sense of. 

Insights Copilot can now hold all of them in a single request and compare them on whatever metric matters – sentiment, complaint drivers, mention volume, engagement, or Share of Voice. All in one pass.

You’ve got options for how to ask. You can pick one of the predefined questions, like a pain-points analysis or word of mouth, or just write in plain language and ask it to compare all your competitors in one go. Let’s take the second route.

So, let's just ask Insights Copilot:

Insights Copilot reaches across all six topics, runs the comparison, and lays the six brands side by side. It starts with a short-form summary for a quick, business-ready overview, then gives you more detail when you want to go deeper.

Take a look at the Net Sentiment Rate distribution, a measure of overall sentiment in each topic. Cetaphil, Eucerin, and La Roche-Posay clearly winning people’s hearts.

And if we dive into detailed summary, here's how Insights Copilot works out who owns the most positive conversation in the category:

• Cetaphil. Happiest customers of the six. Strongest aspect scores in the set (functionality 98% positive, health effects 92.6%), praised for mild, non-stripping formulas and a standout baby line parents rate at 95% positive sentiment.
  
  

• Eucerin. Great products, quiet conversation. Wherever people discuss it they're happy (health effects 92.8% positive, quality 94.4%): urea creams win for rough, bumpy skin, while the Thiamidol serums get praise for fading dark spots within weeks.
  
  

• La Roche-Posay. The efficacy favorite, held back by price. Cicaplast Baume B5 gets called a barrier-repair "miracle," and the Anthelios sunscreens draw praise for leaving no white cast on deeper skin tones.
  
  

• Vanicream. Most loved and most criticized at once. It holds both the highest positive share of any brand (31.1%) and the highest negative (8.8%). Their products are dermatologist-recommended "holy grail" for ultra-sensitive skin, yet reactive users report stinging and breakouts, and stock shortages frustrate the rest (availability 61.5% negative).
  
  

• Avène. Good products, reformulation anger. The Cicalfate line and the Thermal Spring Water Spray are loved, but loyalists are furious about the XeraCalm A.D reformulation, which they say triggers flare-ups. Price sentiment is split down the middle.
  
  

• CeraVe. The product love is real (cleansers and the Moisturizing Cream are praised for deep, non-stripping hydration), but it draws the weakest sentiment of the six in this comparison.

All replies are backed up with real user mentions, so you can open the posts behind the findings and check the evidence for yourself. 

It’s all possible with just one question for Insights Copilot – doesn't matter if you want to explore the chatter about one brand, six competitors, or an even wider category.

✨Multi-step analysis: hand Insights Copilot a complex question, get the whole answer

Some questions have no obvious shape. Ask one anyway. Insights Copilot works out the analysis steps for itself, works through them, and comes back with an answer that covers the whole question.

Example:

It starts with the first half and answers it as a table: each brand mapped to the skin concerns people actually reach for it to solve. And it doesn’t stop at the list. Every use case carries the number of mentions behind it, so you see what each brand is used for and how much of the conversation each concern actually carries.

Then it takes on the harder half: which brand holds up best once the conversation narrows to eczema and rosacea. Insights Copilot automatically launches a search for words tied to these conditions, across all six topics at once, and builds a chart. It also reads the data back to you – and the read matters more than the bars.

So, CeraVe generates the most eczema and rosacea talk, but only because it’s the biggest brand overall. Vanicream and Avène have a far larger share of their smaller conversations focused on conditions, which is the more telling signal when looking at which brands are most closely associated with harder skin concerns.

The chart is the volume side of the answer. Insights Copilot then gets to the part that the question really asked: which brand holds up best. It lays out a detailed read, weighing each brand’s sentiment and efficacy in those specific conversations.

And it doesn’t leave you at the end of the thread. Insights Copilot suggests a set of follow-up questions, each a real next step: which ingredients get blamed for flare-ups, how parents rate the brands for infant eczema, or what people switch to when one fails them.

That’s multi-step deep analysis in action.

⚙️ Set any filter just by asking

Narrowing an analysis used to mean leaving the conversation to set filters by hand. Now you just ask, and Insights Copilot applies the relevant YouScan filters for you. You can still name any you want: tags, categories, sentiment, language, source, engagement, dates, and the rest.

Say I want to look at the chatter around niche skincare trends on TikTok, but only in the UK and the US – just to see whether there’s an untapped opportunity for a brand.

So I ask:

Insights Copilot gets straight to work, picking and applying the right filters as it goes. You can watch it happen in its thinking. Easy as that. Let it do the digging while you’re still on your morning coffee.

Curious about the results?

Let’s save those for the next chapter – and buckle up, because this next feature is a bit of a showstopper for building reports. Your clients will be amazed at how fast you can turn out reports that aren’t just good-looking, but genuinely detailed and useful.

📊 Reports you can send to anyone

Let’s cut to the chase: nobody wants to spend days building reports by hand.

The hardest part of insight work is often the last mile – getting the finding in front of the person who’ll actually act on it. A client, a CMO, a stakeholder with a hundred decisions to make and no time to dig through the platform themselves (we’d love it if they did, of course, but we know decision-making time is precious).

Now you can ask Insights Copilot to turn the conversation you just had into a report. It pulls together the findings, the charts, and the supporting posts behind them, then hands you a link to share with anyone.

Let’s shape it by asking:

Watch what happens next. Insights Copilot goes back to the data and fills any gaps, then starts drafting. You can follow the steps it takes as it clusters the themes, computes the stats, writes the sections, and renders the charts.

A few minutes later, you've got a full, structured report to dive into: an executive summary, a brand-by-brand TikTok footprint across 27,000+ posts, and the low-volume signals that emerged from the analysis. You can even close Copilot while it works, and it'll let you know when the report is ready.

And this one earned its keep.

A few of the things it surfaced:

• The two markets are showing very different patterns. The US is arguing about what's in the bottle: a benzene safety scare is spreading across CeraVe and La Roche-Posay content, pushing viewers toward minimal-ingredient alternatives. The UK, meanwhile, is demonstrating what the bottle does, through named formats like "Dot, Blend, Glow" and "Reapply O'Clock," and hunting the cheapest way to buy it (Boots "£10 Tuesday," ordered through Uber Eats to skip the shop).

  
  

• A distribution gap hiding in plain sight. Vanicream is strong on US TikTok, at 1,314 posts, but almost invisible in the UK, with just four posts in the whole month. That's a distribution problem, not a demand one.

  
  

• Three trends worth trusting. The no-towel hygiene rule, the retinoid "sandwich" method, and pharmacy tourism all turn up independently in both markets, which is exactly what separates an early signal from noise.

🔥 Read the whole report here

And you’re not limited to a single thread. You can spin up a report from your whole conversation – from the basic stats like sentiment, pain points, and Share of Voice, to the specific, tailored questions you asked along the way.

Why this matters for people who live in the data

The parts of your job that are pure friction – the filtering, the scrolling, the stitching – are exactly the ones a good AI-agent can take. The parts that make you a researcher – reading the cultural undercurrent, catching the nuance a keyword misses, shaping the story a stakeholder will actually act on – are the ones AI can never replace.

This release moves more of that manual work off your plate so you have room for the second. The time you'd have spent clustering and stitching six brand dashboards by hand goes back into the work only you can do: exploring an idea, testing a hypothesis, working out what the category shift actually means for a brand, and what you'd recommend. That's the real return – the thinking, the creative leaps, and the judgment calls that stay yours.

Who gets the most out of it

Anyone who has to turn social data into a decision, really:

• Consumer insights and research teams can run cross-market and cross-category questions in one place and hand stakeholders a report they can open. 

• Agencies can answer a client's question live on the call and send the full readout by link the same day. 

• Brand and marketing teams can see how a campaign landed against competitors without opening six dashboards. 

• PR and comms teams can see what's moving sentiment this week and share it with leadership before it escalates.

What's next

This release moves Insights Copilot from a tool that answers a question to one that runs the whole analysis and hands you something ready to share. That’s the direction we’re building in: less time assembling the answer, more time deciding what it means.

The new Insights Copilot is available to every YouScan customer today. Open our social listening agent and hand it the messiest question on your plate this week – the one you’ve been putting off because of how many mentions it would take to answer by hand.

New to Insights Copilot?

Book a YouScan demo, and we’ll run it on your own brand and show you how it works: youscan.io/demo