Impulse AI Model Called Knicks Over Spurs. ESPN, Basketball Reference, Polymarket, and Kalshi Didn't.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Impulse AI's autonomous agent was the only model to pick the winner of all three of the 2026 NBA playoffs' biggest upsets, beating every major public forecaster and betting market it was measured against, including ESPN's Basketball Power Index, Basketball Reference, Polymarket, and Kalshi. No data scientist built it. The company uploaded data, wrote a prompt, and the AI agent did the rest.

Before each series tipped off, Impulse posted its picks in public, next to the markets and the top models. Its model favored:

• New York over San Antonio in the Finals, against the consensus built around San Antonio's young star.
• San Antonio over Oklahoma City, the defending champions and the West's top seed, in seven games.
• Cleveland over Detroit, the No. 1 seed in the East, in seven games after losing the first two.

"We didn't get lucky three times. We put the picks on the record before each series, in public, so anyone could check," said Eshan Chordia, Founder and CEO of Impulse AI. "Nobody on our team wrote the model. We uploaded data, told the agent what to predict, and it the model selection, the training, and the calibration on its own. That is the product."

The workflow is the same one Impulse customers follow. They upload data, describe what they want to predict, and the agent handles feature engineering, model selection, training, and evaluation. No notebooks, no pipelines, no machine learning hires. Hours, not weeks.

The playoff app is a proof point, not the product. The same agent can build models for churn, demand, fraud, lead conversion, insurance losses, or energy prices, from any tabular dataset. You should not need to know machine learning to build a model that works, and anyone can build one on their own data at impulselabs.ai.

Impulse has run the same playbook in other sports as a public test of the agent's range, including live predictions for the NHL playoffs and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

The NBA picks and the full pre-series forecasts are at nbapredictions.impulselabs.ai. Build your own model at impulselabs.ai.

About Impulse AI

Impulse AI builds an autonomous AI agent that lets anyone turn their data into a working predictive model without writing code. The company is a member of NVIDIA Inception, the Apollo accelerator, and CMU VentureBridge. Live demonstrations are at nbapredictions.impulselabs.ai, nhlpredictions.impulselabs.ai, and worldcup2026.impulselabs.ai. Learn more at impulselabs.ai.

SOURCE Impulse AI