SAPIENT: A Multi-Agent Framework for Corporate Reputation Intelligence Through Sentinel Monitoring and LLM-Based Synthetic Population Simulation

Corporate reputation teams rely on media monitoring and qualitative research, both limited in speed and coverage when digital narratives form rapidly. This paper proposes SAPIENT (Sentinel-Augmented Population Intelligence for Emerging Narrative Tracking), a multi-agent system that links a sentinel layer over public text streams with a simulation layer that runs moderated, repeatable in silico focus-group sessions. The sentinel layer ingests social media, news, and forum text to produce a compact signal state (topics, sentiment, anomaly scores, risk labels), which conditions the simulation layer through an orchestrator. Persona agents and a moderator follow an Agentic Focus Group (AFG) protocol with repeated runs, variance reporting, and human review gates. We describe four sustainability communication scenarios: greenwashing backlash prediction, greenhushing risk assessment, campaign pre-testing, and crisis communication simulation. Nine experiments span 280 AFG runs across 20 conditions, three LLM backends (Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Flash), and a preregistered pilot human validation study with 54 participants. Signal conditioning improved simulation specificity (p=0.012). Cross-lingual sessions revealed a sentiment asymmetry between English and Turkish (p=0.001) with preserved persona rank ordering (r=0.81, p=0.015). Cross-model comparison showed consistent persona differentiation across all three backends (Pearson r>0.92, p<0.002 for all pairs). Sentiment was robust to prompt paraphrasing (p=0.061, n.s.), though credibility was sensitive to prompt wording (p<0.001). All significant results from Experiments 1–8 survived Benjamini–Hochberg correction. A preregistered pilot with 54 human participants on Prolific replicated the predicted credibility ranking across framing variants (p=0.004) but not the sentiment ranking, identifying a specific calibration target for future work.