Summer Release 2026

AI: access on your terms

For years, the way you experienced Brightidea was the way we built it: our UI, our screens, our workflows. This release breaks that open. Whether you want to reach your instance through an AI agent, plug in your own model, or build your own interface on top of our data, the platform now meets you where you are.

Headless is the headline – Brightidea’s capabilities are increasingly available wherever your team already works, not just inside our front door. That decoupling shows up three ways in this release, plus a research instrument to shape what comes next.

Want to enable it? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager. We’re prioritizing onboarding for customers who already have an active AI footprint internally.

• Brightidea MCP Server. The Brightidea MCP Server, lets you interact with your system’s instance directly through the AI agent of your choice. Built on the Model Context Protocol, the MCP server connects to Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, AWS Bedrock, and any other MCP-compatible agent — so your team can surface ideas, summarize submissions, query pipeline status, or pull engagement data conversationally. Admins can interact with configuration; end users can interact with ideas. Contact your Customer Success Manager to enable it.
• Bring Your Own Model. Every enterprise has a different AI setup. Some are running models through Azure OpenAI or AWS Bedrock. Some call model APIs directly. Some run models entirely behind their own firewall. Brightidea now connects to all of them. Bring your endpoint and your credentials — we route Brightidea’s AI workflows through whatever model you already use, with no changes to your data residency, governance, or cost structure.
• AI-Powered Vibe Widgets. Our HTML widget has quietly become one of the most powerful surfaces in the platform. Customers can now use AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, or any vibe-coding workflow of their choice — to generate fully custom, data-driven widgets and inject the resulting HTML directly into their Brightidea sites. Build a custom leaderboard, a department-specific submission tracker, a portfolio visualization, or whatever your innovation program needs — without waiting on a product release. Your AI tool writes it; your HTML widget runs it. Vibe away.

Help shape Fall: AI Maturity Survey. As we continue to ship AI focused features, we want to hear from the people who will actually be using it. We’ve put together a short survey to understand how your organization is using AI today: your maturity, your governance posture, your concerns, and where you’d most want to see AI show up in your innovation work. This isn’t a sales survey. There’s no follow-up call, no gating, just your insight.

Department Idea Box: built for self-contained departmental innovation

Department Idea Box is one of the most strategically important parts of our platform — it’s how large enterprises empower individual departments and business units to run their own innovation programs without competing for the central platform’s attention. This release is a substantial investment in making Department Idea Box feel truly self-contained: every department gets the tools to run its own program without interfering with anyone else’s on the platform.

• Dynamic idea and user lists. Idea List and User List are now dynamic at the department level — so each department sees the right ideas and the right people for their context, without manual configuration overhead.
• Additional sub-pipelines. Departments can now add additional sub-pipelines, supporting more sophisticated workflows for departments that have outgrown the templated three-pipeline approach and linear flow.
• Setup wizard flows and logic. We’ve reworked the setup wizard with smarter flows and decision logic, making it faster for admins to spin up a new department program and easier to get the configuration right the first time.
• Left rail updates. Navigation refinements bring the product in line with the rest of the platform — consistent admin and participant views, cleaner left rail behavior.

Together, these updates make Department Idea Box the right answer for any large organization that wants federated, departmental innovation programs running in parallel under one platform roof.