425. YPulse. Youth Data Pipeline.
Dan Coates
August 20, 2026
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How does a research company make years of survey data queryable inside an AI model, without giving up the reports that built its business?
Dan Coates, CEO and co-founder of YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli on this episode of Up Next to explain how his company built a direct connector between its youth research data and tools like Claude and ChatGPT, alongside the reports and dashboards it has always sold.
YPulse surveys 400,000 young people annually, tracking 13- to 39-year-olds along with a newer tween panel covering ages eight to twelve. That research has long reached clients through syndicated reports, dashboards and a site-based AI tool, and still does. Coates describes the connector as a new way into the same research, one that also lets a client query it alongside their own internal data. He frames the shift as a change in how the company thinks about its own data: from something perishable that expires each year to something closer to a music catalog, where every past answer increases the value of the whole corpus and stays queryable.
Reaching that point required YPulse to break survey responses down to the individual respondent level, underneath the aggregated reports the business was built around. Coates and Mirabelli get into what changed operationally: roughly two years spent moving raw survey data into Snowflake, disaggregating reports built around fixed regions and countries, and building the infrastructure to let a client narrow a report to one country or one life stage on demand, the report and the question design behind it doing the same work it always did.
The conversation moves through data provenance and why Coates sees citation and traceability as central to how AI companies now compete for trust, the EU AI Act consent requirements for AI training data, and the difference between a model that guesses at an answer and one that can say plainly it has no data to draw from.
They discuss:
How atomizing survey data down to the respondent level opened a second way to reach YPulse's research, alongside a client's own internal data, without changing what goes into a report.
Why Coates sees combining a client's internal data with YPulse's youth data, not raw access speed, as the transformational value of MCP.
How a one-way data pipe lets client data sit alongside YPulse's data without either system touching the other.
Why Coates now thinks of YPulse not as a supplier of perishable research, but as a decision support infrastructure powered by a ever growing data set.
Why Coates expects decisions that once took eight to twelve weeks to move toward something closer to immediate.
Why Coates expects research industry rankings to shift as quickly as they did during the early years of the commercial web.
For anyone weighing how AI connectors change a research vendor's relationship to the people who use its data, this conversation lays out that shift from inside one company adding a new access point.
YPulse is the leading authority on Millennials and Gen Z: tweens, teens, college students and young adults. They provide strategic insight to companies and organizations via their subscription-based syndicated research content as well as their custom research and consulting services. Staffed with a cross-functional team of researchers, marketers, writers, and technologists, they give their clients a 360-degree view of what it’s like to be a Millennial or Gen Z today.
Dan Coates is the CEO of YPulse, the leading authority on tween, teen and young adults, providing newsletters, articles, reports and data on how 8- to 39-year-olds across 7 countries live their lives, make their decisions and relate to major consumer brands.
Prior to co-founding YPulse, Dan was Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Polimetrix, Vice President at SPSS, and a co-founder of PlanetFeedback.com (acquired by Nielsen Online). The first decade of Dan’s career was spent founding Interactive divisions at Burke, Millward Brown and the Angus Reid Group. A frequent conference speaker, Dan has delivered speeches at more than 100 conferences and industry events.
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Dan Coates
YPulse