Hootsuite spent 2026 rebuilding the product as Social OS. The public shape is four apps under one navigation: Perch for planning and publishing, Nest for the social inbox and care, Parliament for employee advocacy, and Lumen by Talkwalker for listening across a claimed 150 million sources. Sitting on top is Wisdom, which the company calls a social-first agent — not a general chatbot with a social plugin.
Founder Ryan Holmes returned as CEO in 2026 to push that AI agenda. The June 24 cutover moved classic Hootsuite surfaces onto the new names: Plan and Create into Perch, Inbox into Nest, Amplify into Parliament, Listening into Lumen, OwlyGPT into Wisdom. The claim is that a signal in Lumen should be usable in Perch without a handoff, and that Wisdom answers from live social data rather than last quarter’s export.
The outward-facing piece is Model Context Protocol. Hootsuite shipped MCP connectors for Perch, Nest, and Lumen so Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or an internal agent can schedule, triage, or pull listening without opening the Hootsuite UI. Parliament MCP was still listed as coming at launch. That is the same MCP pattern showing up at Buffer and Planable, but sized for an enterprise suite instead of a single queue.
Social OS is a packaging and permission story as much as a model story. An agent that can publish from Perch and reply from Nest is a different blast radius than an agent that only drafts. Teams that adopt the connectors should treat Wisdom as an operator with a keyring, not as a writing assistant. The product is live for existing Hootsuite customers; the MCP surface is what makes it relevant to anyone already working inside Claude or ChatGPT.
