Rob Jekielek Joins APCO as Vice Chair of Intelligence & AI Client Solutions

• Appointment to lead the next growth phase of Margy, APCO’s adaptive intelligence, already at work across 80+ markets and 30+ languages.

NEW YORK—September 14, 2026—APCO today announced that Rob Jekielek has joined as vice chair of Intelligence & AI Client Solutions, based in New York.

He will lead the next growth phase of Margy, APCO’s adaptive intelligence, taking her into more of the decisions that determine how companies are understood, trusted and given license to operate.

Companies rarely fail because the strategy was wrong. They fail because the ground moved and they read it late. Permission withdrawn by a regulator, a legislature, an investor bloc or a workforce. A geopolitical shift that redrew a market overnight. A disruption that was visible for two years to anyone looking in the right place. Each of these is tracked somewhere in the organization, by teams that rarely compare notes, in systems that never speak to each other, and the pattern is usually only obvious once it has cost something.

Margy exists to close that gap. She starts with what an organization already knows—its institutional knowledge and hard-won know-how—and holds that alongside its own data and external signals in one continuous view, interpreting them together and projecting where conditions are heading.

Margy’s judgment comes from APCO’s proprietary Mental Modeling. Not a literature review. Hundreds of hours of “here’s how I’d read this, and here’s what I’d do,” taken from APCO’s International Advisory Council—including former heads of state, senior ambassadors, chief executives, leading academics and editors—alongside the firm’s most tested practitioners across public affairs, communications, reputation, corporate marketing, crisis, geopolitics and corporate strategy, then distilled into reasoning patterns and decision rules. That is the foundation. The client’s own practitioners, experts and leaders are modeled the same way on top of it. Judgment that has always been rationed one advisor at a time, now underneath every decision.

Jekielek spent eight years as a managing director at The Harris Poll, where he modernized the Reputation Quotient behind the Axios-Harris Poll 100 and helped rebuild it as an always-on system tracking hundreds of companies across more than 20 countries, adding signals from search and generative AI platforms.

“Over the next decade, the binding constraint on most large companies will not be capital or talent. It will be permission, and the foresight to see how it is shifting,” said Imad Lahad, global chair of Intelligence & AI at APCO. “Rob has already helped lead the rebuild of one of the best-known measures of corporate reputation from an annual snapshot into a live system. That shift, from episodic to continuous, is the bet on which Margy is built.”

“Data infrastructure was solved a decade ago. What was never built was an operating system for judgment,” said Jekielek. “That’s what Margy is.”