Allan Maman, Kalshi’s chief marketing officer, didn’t wait for a postmortem. When the World Cup kicked off in the U.S. this summer, he started watching the numbers like a sports fan watches scores, refreshing Kalshi dashboards hourly. Within 72 to 96 hours of the opening matches, he saw enough: Kalshi had badly underestimated the tournament. Organic signups surged, volume spiked, and the pre-World Cup plan, which included billboards and ad deals with Jose Mourinho, Luka Modric, and nearly a dozen former national team players, suddenly looked small next to what was happening in real time. “We pivoted away [from] our evergreen strategy to basically be all in on World Cup,” Maman told Fortune.

The pivot mattered because it matched the exact moment the public attention machine turned up. By July 14, World Cup volume on the platform climbed from $6.67 billion by June 22 to $24.2 billion by July 14, according to data shared with Fortune throughout the tournament. And if you want a second number that lands like a punch, the “FIFA World Cup Winner” market alone surpassed $1.2 billion by July 15. This is not “brand lift” math. It is measurable, time-boxed demand. And Kalshi’s team treated it like breaking news.

Kalshi’s playbook, according to Fortune, is run off what’s working, not a calendar. The growth side described the operation as a war room, or even a news bullpen: roughly 20 people, most young, all “chronically online,” locked in until they produce 10 awesome ideas. The team screens hires on whether they “have the dog in them,” prioritizing grit and creativity over polished résumés. Allan is on the numbers “like a hawk,” which is both a vibe and an operating system: when you can track performance minute-by-minute, you can sprint when the audience actually shows up.

That speed is what made the “lookalike contest” concept feel like it arrived from nowhere and yet perfectly matched the cultural weather. When Erling Haaland emerged as a mid-tournament phenomenon, Kalshi’s team had a simple idea and executed it in about a week. Roughly 200 fans showed up in Miami for an event hosted by Emma Kate Willman, and the winner got two tickets to that day’s match. Within days, Kalshi ran a Messi lookalike contest in New York for the final, hosted by a former Argentine taxi driver who, according to the story, had been told for years he had the face for it.

Behind these stunts is a thesis Kalshi found “accidentally” while chasing virality with data: AI, paradoxically, might be bringing back the monoculture. Maman and Brandon Beckhardt, who runs growth for Kalshi, told Fortune they used AI in a “practical” way, but suggested most of the ratio is intuition. The bigger pattern they noticed is that their strongest engagement clusters tightly around live, unrepeatable events: the World Cup, football season, midterms, and award ceremonies.

This is where external research enters the frame. University of Chicago economist Alex Imas has suggested scarcity could shift toward more “human” and “relational” skills in the AI age, because people will want AI-proof experiences. When reached by Fortune, Imas agreed that Kalshi’s real-world experiments seem to support his thesis and said demand for live events is “through the roof.” He added that tech is so everywhere people get saturated, so interest in live moments should keep rising. Another lens comes from Wharton economist Judd Kessler’s “hidden markets” idea from his book Lucky By Design, where he argues some experiences are underpriced and the real price discovery happens in hidden places. Prediction markets, by putting tradeable prices on outcomes in real time, could be one way to illuminate demand that otherwise stays invisible.

Kalshi’s data suggests exactly that, and it raises a strategic question for executives: are you measuring culture, or are you letting culture measure itself? Roughly 75% of people who visit Kalshi aren’t trading at all, Fortune reports. Kalshi is increasingly using prediction markets as a data source to see the state of the zeitgeist based on the “wisdom of crowds.” Bloomberg has begun integrating Kalshi data into its terminal because market moves can sometimes arrive before the news does. The company positions itself as something between a newsroom and a financial market, and as a “cultural thermometer.” If that framing is right, marketing becomes less about persuasion and more about timing, and product becomes an always-on instrument for what people collectively believe right now.

Then there’s the regulatory reality, which never waits for the next viral moment. Kalshi holds a “designated contract market” designation from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the same regulatory status as traditional commodity exchanges. But it is “fighting on multiple legal fronts simultaneously,” with the CFTC moving to bar contracts on injuries, officiating calls, and other “discrete-action” sports outcomes, even while defending… (Fortune’s account continues beyond the excerpt). For boards and investors, the strategic stakes are obvious: a company that can turn live events into massive, time-sensitive volume still has to survive the rules that govern what it is allowed to offer.

The World Cup spike is compelling on its own, but the real second-order implication is cultural: if synthetic content floods the feed, live collective moments may become more valuable, not less. Kalshi’s pattern suggests collective attention might be converging again around tentpoles, and prediction markets may be making that convergence legible in numbers. Executives in adjacent categories, from media to consumer apps to fintech infrastructure, should watch this closely. When a 20-person, chronically online team can pivot within days and turn a global event into $24.2 billion of platform volume, you do not just rethink marketing. You rethink what “real-time demand” looks like, and how quickly it can reshape your market.