After nearly eight years in management positions at Ideal Axicom , Paula Nadal left to venture into the world of communication, creating a public relations agency that aims to bring public relations, press relations, and reputation building into the age of artificial intelligence (AI) .
Pivot Comunicação arrives with the proposal to combine established PR methodologies with technology, believing that, currently, reputation is not built solely through relationships, but also depends on work focused on platforms, algorithms, and language models.
“We are living through a turning point,” Nadal tells NeoFeed . “The complexity of communication systems has changed, and the way we consume information has changed drastically. Reputation, which was previously built from a reputational architecture developed day-to-day, whether in relationships with the press, digital channels, or influencers, becomes much more complex in a world of AI.”
Founded in March of this year, shortly after Nadal left Ideal Axicom, where he spent the last three years as Global Chief Strategy Officer, Pivot already has eight regular clients, such as Ânima Educação , Auren Energia , and Vórtx , in addition to carrying out projects for other companies.
The new agency boasts a senior team of professionals, based on the understanding that building a reputation also requires the human factor. Nadal emphasizes that experience counts for a lot at a time when slop content —low-quality, meaningless digital content generated in large volumes by generative AI—is a concern for companies.
Operating under a partnership model and without external investors, Pivot currently has 15 employees. Vera Brandimarte, former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Valor Econômico , holds the position of vice-president and is responsible for establishing strategic relationships with key clients and the press.
Tales Ponce, formerly of Ideal Axicom and FSB , is the director of client services, having led teams responsible for accounts such as Ford , Embraer , and Patria Investimentos . Thiago Campos, with 18 years of market experience and stints at Ideal Axicom and Salve, is the strategy director at Pivot.
“Reputation will continue to be a human construct; what has changed is that now it also needs to be understood by machines,” says Nadal. “We want a team with very strong experience and seniority, with excellent relationships with major media outlets and key networks of influence, and we want to combine that with technology, which guarantees us scale and agility.”
Nadal explains that Pivot is investing in technology, both its own and third-party, to better position its clients at a time when Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — the practice of structuring digital content so that search engines with AI and conversational chatbots can easily read, summarize, and cite it as a primary source — is gaining momentum.
With Marcelo Dominguez, a data scientist with 16 years of experience and stints at Edelman and the Burson Group, serving giants like Google and TikTok , as head of intelligence, Pivot internally developed its own methodology to assess brand perception in the press, on social media, on websites, and in the main LLM models. Called Aura, the tool scans the brand across different environments.
Nadal believes that this structure and the proposed embedded technology help differentiate Pivot in a highly fragmented market — a survey conducted by Mega Brasil indicates that the country had approximately 1,100 agencies in 2024, with total revenue of around R$ 5.3 billion.
“I understand that another agency is needed, because perhaps not everything that exists works for the complexity of today's world,” he says. “I say that we are in the age of complexity, with a series of layers in the communications market, and we need operations that can handle this with agility.”
