How Wilson Chan Is Building Permutable AI Into an AI-Powered Media and Sentiment Analysis Leading Firm

Wilson Chan didn’t set out to build another analytics dashboard. He set out to teach machines to read the world. As the founder and CEO of Permutable AI, Chan is building what he envisions as the first truly ai-powered media and sentiment analysis leading firm – a company capable of decoding the narratives that move global markets faster than any human ever could.

From early ML trading to building a new intelligence layer

Chan’s path began long before “transformers” became the centre of the AI conversation. With nearly two decades in capital markets, including a senior leadership role at Citibank Asia, he spent years developing machine-learning trading systems. That frontline experience exposed an industry-wide gap: markets were becoming narrative-driven, yet the tools used to understand those narratives remained stuck in an earlier era.

Permutable AI originally explored applications in sustainability data, but as Chan and his team built deeper media-analysis capabilities, one insight became undeniable: the same infrastructure that could analyse sustainability narratives could also interpret geopolitical risk, supply disruption, macro shifts and commodity flows. And those were the stories traders cared about minute by minute.

The pivot was clear. Permutable AI would become an ai-powered media and sentiment analysis leading firm, focused entirely on real-time market intelligence.

Turning global noise into market-moving signals

At the heart of Permutable AI is a system that treats the world’s news flow as a live, continuously updating dataset. Tens of thousands of articles, policy statements, research reports and geopolitical updates flow into the platform daily. These are analysed through multi-entity sentiment modelling, advanced NLP pipelines and predictive machine-learning models.

But Chan’s real innovation lies in how the system infers perception. Rather than simply tagging headlines as positive or negative, Permutable AI maps how narratives propagate, intensify and interact – long before markets fully price them in. The company refers to these outputs as “story signals”: clusters of sentiment tied to themes such as war risk, shipping disruption, rate expectations or energy supply.

In published examples, Permutable AI has demonstrated how its sentiment indices detected narrative spikes around geopolitical events hours ahead of major price moves in commodities and FX markets. For trading desks, hedge funds and energy majors, this kind of anticipatory intelligence is gold dust.

This is where the firm’s positioning as an ai-powered media and sentiment analysis leading firm becomes more than branding – it represents a measurable edge.

Designed for traders, not theorists

Permutable’s flagship product, the Trading Co-Pilot, translates these narrative regimes into actionable tools for traders and analysts: real-time alerts, directional indicators, sentiment-driven insights and fully auditable explanations.

Surrounding this are systems such as:

• Market 360: an institutional dashboard mapping sentiment across geographies and asset classes.
• A real-time geopolitical intelligence layer, tracking global political events and their market impact.
• Live asset-level insights, providing hourly snapshots of sentiment and predictive signals for commodities, FX, selected equities and bitcoin.

Unlike many alternative-data platforms that operate as external add-ons, Permutable AI is built to integrate directly into trading workflows, risk systems and quantitative models. For institutions, this lowers adoption friction and accelerates ROI.

Explainability as a competitive moat

In a regulatory landscape where opacity is unacceptable, Chan has made explainability a core feature rather than an afterthought. Every narrative signal can be unpacked into the underlying articles, entities and sentiment clusters that produced it.

For compliance teams and risk committees, this matters. Billions cannot move on a black-box alert. But when the alert is paired with a clear causal map – illustrating, for example, how conflict-related shipping headlines intensified before a commodities rally – the insight becomes immediately credible.

Chan often describes this philosophy as “helping institutions anticipate, not just react, to market change.”

Climbing toward leadership in real-time sentiment and macro intelligence

Permutable is increasingly recognised as a high-performance ai-powered media and sentiment analysis leading firm, particularly in commodities, energy trading, FX and macro-driven markets – sectors where perception often shifts faster than fundamentals.

Coverage in specialist finance publications and a growing set of institutional partnerships signal a company moving from ambitious upstart to a serious intelligence provider. The demand is clear: in a world where every hedge fund and bank has access to the same price feeds, the new source of competitive advantage is narrative understanding.

Chan believes his team’s combination of quant trading experience, machine-learning depth and institutional-grade engineering gives them a defensible edge over both traditional media-monitoring firms and short-term AI entrants.

The long vision: a world model for finance

Beyond the day-to-day utility of sentiment signals, Chan sees Permutable AI as a stepping stone toward something larger: a continuously updated “world model” for global markets. This model would understand the relationships between events – how energy shocks move FX pairs, how conflicts reshape supply chains, how policy shifts change capital flows.

It’s an ambitious vision, but the earliest building blocks are already visible in the platform’s narrative-mapping capabilities.

For now, Permutable’s advantage lies in a narrower but commercially vital space: reading global media fast enough, deeply enough and accurately enough to detect market-moving perceptions before anyone else.

If Chan succeeds, the next generation of financial-market leaders won’t just have better data – they’ll have better intuition, powered by machines trained to read the world in real time.

In that sense, Permutable AI isn’t simply a data firm. It’s an ai-powered media and sentiment analysis leading firm rewriting how markets understand themselves.