January 2026
This post is part of our monthly supporter updates and reflects product development and thinking at the time it was written. Here is our latest update.
Hi all,
Happy 2026!
Since September 2024, we've shared a weekly update with our supporters every single week for 65 weeks straight. That rhythm has been one of the most valuable disciplines we've built as a new company. It forced us to keep shipping, to reflect regularly, and it sparked many of the introductions and messages of support that helped us get here. Thank you for that.
More recently, we've narrowed our focus to high-value problems that traditional market research can't solve. This means that much of our work now sits under NDA, and our shipping cycles are naturally getting longer as we prioritise depth and quality over speed — a change that reflects us maturing, not slowing down.
To keep these updates meaningful and worth your time, we're moving to a monthly update cadence for 2026 and beyond. We've consolidated our previous weekly updates into monthly ones as well for posterity.
So here's what's new this month at Artificial Societies:
To recap our previously weekly updates in December, we:
James wrote in his personal annual report for 2025 that, over December, we realised that "Artificial Societies is meant for high-stakes research where all the traditional alternatives are either prohibitively slow, expensive, or simply too risky. Because of Artificial Societies, impossible research methods — like testing how policymakers would react — are now within reach."
We are glad to now have this firm focus. With the growing list of enterprise partners, our January is already looking like an extremely busy month — and who knows what the rest of 2026 will hold? We hope it will defy all our expectations.