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Manos Perakakis
From Hallucinations to Hard Data

Manos Perakakis

Co-founder, Mentionlytics & Associate Professor, Hellenic Mediterranean University

Manos Perakakis is the co-founder of Mentionlytics, a web and social media intelligence platform used by hundreds of brands, agencies, and organizations across more than 200 countries. Since co-founding the company in 2016, he has led the product's evolution from a social monitoring tool into a full brand intelligence platform, fully utilizing the advances in AI technology.

Alongside his work at Mentionlytics, he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management Science & Technology at the Hellenic Mediterranean University, where he teaches digital marketing and UX related courses.

Presentation Title:

"From Hallucinations to Hard Data: Grounding AI Marketing Decisions in Real Brand Intelligence"

AI has become central to how marketers understand their customers, their competitors, and their market. But how reliable is the intelligence it produces? LLMs are optimized to give complete, confident answers — not to flag when their data is thin, outdated, or missing entirely. The result is a growing gap between AI-generated insights that sound authoritative and insights that are actually grounded in what real people are saying right now.

In this session, Manos Perakakis explores the structural reasons why AI marketing intelligence breaks down — and demonstrates the difference between an LLM working in the dark versus one connected to real-time social and web data via MCP.
From personalization decisions to competitive positioning, the session shows what becomes possible when the AI driving your marketing strategy is fed what customers are actually saying — not what it was trained to predict they might say.

Key Takeaways

  • Why AI marketing intelligence fails silently — and why confidence is not the same as accuracy
  • How LLMs fill data gaps without flagging them, and what that costs in real decisions
  • Why brand and customer intelligence is the hardest case: social data is largely invisible to base LLMs
  • What MCP (Model Context Protocol) is and why it changes what AI-powered marketing can deliver
  • How connecting AI to real-time social monitoring transforms insights from plausible to actionable.