Brussels · Public Affairs Intelligence
25+ years inside European public affairs — watching regulatory complexity compound, executive expectations rise, and the window for actual influence shrink. I am building the infrastructure that does not yet exist.
I have spent 25+ years not advising PA teams from the outside, but operating inside the institutional machinery — at O-I across ten European markets, at PlasticsEurope leading PFAS and fluoropolymer advocacy, on the board of Fost Plus navigating EPR governance from within the scheme.
That trajectory gives me something most founders in this space do not have: I know where the current tools fail not because I read about it, but because I lived it — in trilogues, in COMEX presentations, in coalition negotiations, in the eighteen months between a Commission consultation and a final text.
Before building anything, I conducted 20 qualitative interviews with senior PA Directors across consultancies, trade associations, and in-house teams in Brussels. The same structural problems came back independently, every time.
I also hold a seat on the opposition council for Les Engagés in Uccle — which keeps me close to the institutional reality I am building for.
"My colleagues use ChatGPT, so they are already informed. I now need to bring something different — analysis, not just information."
A new generation of civil servants treats AI outputs as briefings. One-to-one meetings are declining. The window for direct influence is narrowing — and the PA Director who arrives without something the AI cannot provide is increasingly irrelevant.
Campaigns are becoming more political, more binary, more coalition-dependent. Timing, proof, and pre-aligned industry positions matter as much as the argument itself. Advocacy that used to be bilateral is now adversarial.
Commercial teams, sustainability directors, and technical experts now access the same public sources as PA teams — often simultaneously. The value of PA is shifting from knowing to interpreting: stakes, timing, political context, business implications.
These are not technology problems. They are structural problems — in how PA teams are equipped, how they produce intelligence, and how they govern decisions internally. That is what I am building for.
Regulatory Intelligence
Built from your business reality, not the keywords you remembered to type.
Every monitoring tool starts from regulation and waits for you to configure it. LexPulse inverts this: it models your actual regulatory exposure from your economic footprint — before the first conversation. The result is not more alerts. It is the right signals, classified against your signed profile, justified by two verifiable facts.
Explore LexPulse →Decision Governance
Your 25-day internal alignment, turned into a 7-day defensible audit trail.
PA Directors spend the majority of their time as strategic secretaries — chasing Legal, compiling Comms, reformatting documents. Arcylis replaces the Word and email loop with a structured consultation workflow. Every department's sign-off documented. Every decision defensible. No legislative window missed.
Explore Arcylis →I do not build in isolation. Before writing a line of code, I spent months in structured conversations with senior PA professionals — in consultancies, trade associations, and in-house teams across Brussels. The 20 interviews produced not just validated pain points, but the vocabulary, the real workflow, and the political context that no technology team from the outside could replicate.
That same posture governs how I engage with the broader ecosystem — monitoring services, institutional platforms, potential partners. The questions that emerged from the interviews — around weak-signal detection, audience-specific briefing generation, the gap between formal monitoring and informal intelligence — are questions I am actively exploring with those who are closest to the same space.
I am not building against what exists. I am building the layer above it.
"The challenge is not finding the information — it's translating monitoring into something the commercial team or sales team will actually react to."Senior PA Director, Brussels — Interview #14
I am speaking with PA Directors who want to be part of the pilot programme, potential partners building in adjacent spaces, and advisors who know this environment from the inside.
nicolas.robin@arcylis.euBrussels · European Public Affairs Intelligence