EP 93: Revolutionizing Market Research with AI

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Is traditional market research broken? Will AI help make it better? Make it worse, completely change it? I'm not sure. I don't have the answers to these questions, but they're not rhetorical. We have a guest today that's going to help us dive into everything about the future of market research and also what it means putting generative AI into that mix so we can learn more about our customers and clients. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host. This is Everyday AI. We are a daily livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people learn and understand AI. Yeah, that's right. Someone, someone was confused. Every day they say, so so what day is this? And it's every single day, Monday through Friday. So if you're joining us live, thank you. Make sure to get your questions in. What questions do you have about market research and AI? Let. Let us know. Get your questions in now. That's why we bring on a guest so we can all learn about this together. All right, but before we get into that, let's go over the AI news of the day. All right, very excited. We got some, some, some big stories. Some big stories. So number one, there is a chatbot fight of sorts. So the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just responded on Twitter, kind of slamming, I would say, a recent report that said that Google's new kind of secret large language model called Gemini would be about five times as powerful as ChatGPT. So this was put out in a kind of a blog post by some researchers that said Google's new large language model would eat. I believe it said it would eat GPT4. So if you want to follow that cat fight, jump on Twitter and follow along next. There is real risks with generative AI and especially when it comes to how business leaders are using it in the office. So a new, a new Forbes report kind of looks at it and talks.

About how some of these risks are.

Real and it's not just, you know, sci fi or make believe. So make sure you check that article out in the daily newsletter. It's very interesting. All right, and last but not least, this is not a political story, but it's dealing with politics. But did a news network really just interview a fake President Trump? Yes, this actually might have happened. So a TV news news network, I've never heard of it, called Real America's Voice aired a 17 minute broadcast and now the network is investigating whether it was an AI generated Trump or a real Trump. The network said they are not sure. Essentially everyone called them out and said, this doesn't sound like President Trump, former President Trump, they said, this is AI. So, wow.

I mean, when we talk about AI.

And politics, as the 2024 elections are heating up here in the U.S. i wonder if this is not the last time that something like this happens. All right, but that's not why you tuned in. You tuned in today to talk about market research and AI. And I'm excited for our guest today. So let me bring on CD Lamine. He is the founder and CEO of Jade Kite. CD thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Jordan. Excited?

Oh, fantastic. Let's get into it. Just real quick, tell everyone, just high level, what is Jade Kite? What do you all do in the areas of kind of market research and AI?

Yeah, so we're, we're a market research agency. We do qualitative research and quantitative, and we're just trying to move the needle and make things a little bit different from how they were in the 60s. The marketplace has changed a lot. You can't compete in the same way you used to. You need to have a different understanding of your customers. And that's what we bring with traditional methods and AI. Yeah.

So let's talk real quick. Let's go high level. I think some people, especially if you're in market research or if you're a business owner or if you're in advertising or marketing, you probably know what research is, market research is. But give people what is kind of traditional market research before we shift into how AI may be impacting that.

Absolutely. You want to understand your customers. You want to make products that fit them and adverts that fit them. And so to understand them, traditionally, you've got two options. You've got surveys, right. Answer 30 questions between one and five, yes or no, or qualitative, which is focus groups, interviews, of which you can only do a certain amount. And ultimately you're confined to understanding just what they answered consciously. That's your two options, broadly speaking.

Okay. And then talk a little bit, CD about what it means to have AI, generative AI involved in market research. So before we even dig into the details, like, like what the heck does that even mean to start integrating generative AI into traditional market research?

So imagine you Talked to maybe 25 people, right? One in a row for an hour or two hours each. You've got transcripts of what's been said, You've asked them tons of questions. You end up with maybe 600 pages of tightly written transcripts. You can read through those, have someone in your team read through those. Are you going to get everything, are you going to get everything in time when actually the client needs, you know, you need results in a few days. So what can you do to accelerate that a little bit to make sure you're not missing anything? You can apply generative AI to read through this transcript, give you the top line of what's been said, interrogate them. And that's one way that generative AI can really help is to make sure you keep the big picture and are able to dive in, into the detail as well.

I have so many, so many interesting follow ups on that. But, but before we get to it, just, just want to shout out everyone joining us live and excited to learn here. So Jordan, thank you for joining us. Brian said he's looking forward to this one, Peter. The show of the show, the one and truly the best. Thank you, Peter. Appreciate that. Good morning. Woozy. Yogesh. Yogesh, thanks for the intro. CD is awesome. Agree. Trey asking is everyone here in AI? I think I'm real. I think CDs real. But no, we're all here to learn AI. So real quick CD, because I'm very interested in that. So you kind of said, hey, traditional market research is essentially you're getting transcripts. Right. Are people still like market research companies still doing it that way where they're still literally reading hundreds of pages of transcripts?

Most of them, yeah. It's, it's how it's always been done and it's how most people still operate. You can, the other option is to try and watch all of those interviews and watch the recordings, etc. It's not, it's actually slower. You know, you're going to spend a week doing that and it's, it's just not the kind of turnaround that we can allow ourselves anymore.

Sure. So, so for me, kind of the traditional way seems archaic. Right? It seems very antiquated. But I'm sure there's people on the other side of the fence that maybe would defend it. So I'm going to ask you to maybe play devil's advocate. Why would marketing research companies still maybe say let's not use generative AI? I want to sit down and read this 600 page transcript. I guess, I guess what's the rationale for, you know, companies still going the traditional route before we kind of talk about the benefits of the generative AI.

Route, very simply, you put your finger on it when you say, sit down and read. Right. Research strategy. These are disciplines that require a lot of thinking. The more time an expert spends thinking, the better the results, the more insight for the reports and the more accurate the strategy. So spending a lot of time thinking is good, particularly when you don't have all the expertise from a category or from an audience. So not everyone has that expertise. And so for a lot of people who are coming to grips with a new subject, it's a, it's a good thing that they have, you know, maybe an excuse to spend all that time on the subject. It's not a bad thing. Yeah.

You know, May Britt, just saying she has so many ideas in terms of improved market research. So even, even with that, so what are new by tapping into generative AI? What are some new facets of market research that maybe weren't available or maybe even feasible before? So I guess, what new functionalities or insights are companies able to get when they can kind of use this generative AI approach to market research?

So is it one that will create a lot of debate? If anyone listening isn't, isn't a market in market research, please get in touch with me so we can have a heated argument later. But one thing that came on the scene very recently is synthetic respondents. So traditionally you have to find exactly the right people. So let's say you're selling luxury shoes to men in their 50s, you have to go out, find the right category of people to talk to, and ask them how they feel about your new product. Right. And that takes time. And you're in the middle of a really important workshop and you just want to check something. You don't have two weeks, you want something in the next hour. And so what some companies have been developing is synthetic respondents, which are tailored exactly to your audience and are loaded up in some version of ChatGPT or equivalent. And you can just ask them questions and you can show them your ideas and they will respond instantly. They're always ready. So obviously, you can imagine this would get a lot of people up in arms on its validity, how good it is, which way it takes the industry, but it's something that is completely new that was absolutely impossible a few months ago.

What's your, not to put you on the spot, what's your personal take on something like that? Is it, are, are there benefits to it? Is it too early to know?

Because I have, I have a hot.

Take on this, but I want to Hear, I want to hear your take first on the synthetic research. So yeah, instead of talking to hundreds of humans, you know, essentially talking to you know, dozens or hundreds, I don't know of, of AI Personas. What's, what's your take?

This is what I'm going to say. Like I mentioned, it's something that wasn't possible. You need results in an hour. Before that you couldn't all the results perfect. No. Is this something that a multi billion dollar industry should base its next big ambition on? No. But as a pre check, as a really quick sense check, as an idea generator it has a lot of value. And if you're going to go into research, let's say you have, you've developed 25 great ideas with your team. Are you going to go into research and absolutely test each one of these ideas and check them and try to optimize each? No, you're going to put these to the tests quickly, run them through your synthetic participants, maybe keep the six best ones and then your real research, quote unquote with human participants is going to be so much tighter, so much more productive and so much more fruitful.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess it is, you know, giving capabilities that were never there. But here I'll do, I'll do my hot take and then I have a question. I think that consumer behavior is changing faster than it ever has before mainly because of generative AI because you know, consumers now are getting probably, I don't know, at least double or triple the amount of high quality personalized content because it's so much easier to create that at scale with generative AI. So I do think consumers behaviors are changing a little bit. But a great, a great question here from, from Yogesh, former guest. Thank you Yogesh for tuning in. So he's asking can Gen AI pick up on nuances that a human can pick up? So is it better than a human, a trained human, Can AI be as good or better?

I've always got the, the same answer, frustratingly when. Thanks Yogesh. By the way, good to see you. When someone asks can AI do this, can Genai do this? My answer is always, you know, are you talking about this week's Genai, last week's Gen AI or NEC or next week? It's, it's constantly evolving. I'm sure you've seen the, the ideogram new generative AI image generator. What three months ago the big joke was you know, generative AI can never do hands and it can never write correctly. You tell it to write something and you get a jumble of letters and now we've got both for free. Yeah. And it's just constantly changing. Can it pick up nuances in response in what's being said as well as a human, I will also ask which human? If you've got a junior out of university, maybe if you've got an expert that's been doing this job for 20 years, probably not. We're not there yet. So I wouldn't recommend replacing humans with AI now, but just assisting them.

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative.

AI to get ahead.

And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you, you can partner with us too.

Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do.

Go to your everyday AI.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

That's, that's a very interesting, an interesting take and it's kind of, kind of related to this question here from Jackie. So great transition. So Jackie saying she's worked for market research companies and asking can it be that they think they are losing value so digging their heels in the sand. So maybe is that one of the reasons why we're not seeing even more generative AI and, and market research? Maybe because companies have built up large companies by doing it the old school traditional way, which requires a lot of time, Right. So you can bill hire, right?

Hey, I'll, I'll say the quiet part.

Out loud, but is, is that, is there something to that that, you know, they don't want to lose value of? You know, we have all these humans that have been doing this for decades.

I, I don't want to go that way. I don't want to think of my colleagues this way. I think genuinely all of my colleagues are trying to do great work and deliver great insights that help their clients perform better. I'm pretty sure that's the general consensus.

A great question here from Cecilia, and we'll see. She's asking who develops the prompts for synthetic participants to ensure true diversity, which is a great point, Cecilia, because as we know, any generative AI models are trained essentially on the data just of the open Internet, right? And so much of the information that is using that is being used to train models of all different mediums. It is inherently biased. It is inherently has stereotypes. What's, what's your take on Cecilia's point? That, hey, is this what, like the information that is being used with, you know, synthetic participants? Let's just, let's go down that route. Is it even reliable? Because a lot of that information may be very biased. It could be.

Yeah, absolutely. Hi, Celia, thank you for such a really, really good, really important question. Obviously, diversity is at the heart of everything we do, and representativeness is at the heart of market research. If you, in this, even with human people, if you go out and you only talk to, you know, 18 to 25 white males about your new soft drink, you're going to miss out on so much richness of how people view it. And so it's all about the way the participants are built. And not all providers are the same. Some will basically plug you into ChatGPT, add a few prompts, and off you go. And there you get all the biases inherent to whatever generative AI. The beauty of it is when you go out and you build them consciously, you build your participants from very deep understanding of who your market is, who your audience is, and you build in all of that diversity. And so you will talk to a diverse crowd, get all of the information from them of who they are, what are their attitudes, how do they feel, segment them, and then you can make sure that when you do your synthetic research, you can address each of your different types of participants, each of your different segments of your audience, individually or together, and get that richness?

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's one of those things. Cassidy, I get, I get where you're coming from, but I also get, you know, because other people here, it looks like we have people in the comments that are in market research. You know, here we go from, from Brian saying research needs to be done in a more efficient way, given the volume of we, of what we are trying to assess in, in many cases. And then, you know, goes to the same point that Jackie's making here. So saying sometimes you just need an answer that is close enough and good enough and sometimes you need to be exact. So I'm guessing, you know, even companies that are using generative AI in market research, it seems like they need to, you know, and maybe going back to Cecilia's point, maybe they shouldn't be applying this approach across the board unilaterally. Maybe they should be a little judicious about where they should be applying generative AI to research versus where they should be still having humans involved at least you know, on the front, the back. Is that, is that kind of the way that you see it?

Yeah, that's spot on. That's spot on. Ask yourself, can I do market research now? Do I have time? And if the answer is no, because millions and billions of decisions are made every day without any market research just shot in the dark, five people around the table, this is probably it. If that's the case, the there might be a new solution now that helps you at least get a sense check before you have to make the big commitment. Yeah.

I think we got our connection issues. You know, thank you. For those of you that, that in the comments were asking and harsh. This is live. This is live.

We're taking questions live.

We do it every Single week, weekday 7:30am Central standard. So here's, here's another question. We'll take this one live cd. Great question from Mabrit asking could synthetic respondents and I know that's not your background, you know, your jade kite is, is more of, you know, combining generative AI and there is a big difference probably between generative AI powered, you know, market research versus synthetic. But you know, great question here. You know, what about for a product or a company that maybe doesn't exist like a startup in the MVP stage, how could we'll go both routes so, so quickly could generative AI powered research work and then could synthetic work for a company that doesn't exist yet?

Yeah, 100%. Startups, particularly at MVP stage, have a lot to gain from AI enhanced methods. Synthetic respondents is one of those cases because things move even faster for a startup and you don't always have the time or the budget to go out and do big proper research. So this would work really well. Another thing that works really well is what we're doing the most off, which is emotional analysis and that can give you a definite advantage on quote, unquote, the big dinosaurs in your marketplace.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's such a good point. You know, another, another great question here from, from Val. Val, thanks for joining us so Aside and don't worry guys like we're going to put in the the newsletter so make sure you go subscribe to that your everyday AI.com so CDs been dropping a lot of great information. We're going to link to Jade Kite so you can check out more about them. But maybe for the everyday person cd, those who maybe aren't in the position to even hire, you know, a company such as yours, what are some tools or, you know, recommended software that people can just jump in and they can at least get some good insights. So that's kind of what Val's asking, you know, is there a plugin in ChatGPT or what other software can be used to at least get people started and get their, get their, you know, foot wet, so to speak.

So first thing I want to say is, as you can guess, I'm always super excited to talk about this stuff. So get in touch and you know, you might not be able to hire us, I might not be appropriate, but I love talking, I love giving advice. So find me on LinkedIn Connect and we'll have a chat and I can absolutely fill you in on, on what's new and best in terms of tools, apps you can use. It really depends where you are in your market research journey and expertise. I wouldn't necessarily recommend to just go ahead and do it yourself right out the box. If you are already doing market research, you want to enhance it with AI. With Generative AI, I would recommend looking up Coloop Co L O P. They do absolutely fantastic work to help do what I said at the beginning and go through a lot of transcripts, go through a lot of data really quickly and keep that detail. Yabel is another one Y A B B L E that do something very similar as well, but with a slightly different angle.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. All right, so we've gone over a lot top to bottom city, but I do have maybe one or two just as hot pressing questions before we wrap up. What would be your advice to the everyday person? And now they're thinking a little bit differently. Maybe they weren't thinking that Generative AI had a place in helping them make decisions about the future of their company. What are just some, some practical tips or guidelines that you can give to people who are now maybe interested just in this, in this approach at all first and maybe they were before. So maybe some, some learnings that, that you've experienced or best practices red flags to look for. What would you say to people that are now interested in using Gen AI in market research.

So I would say ask yourself a couple of questions and particularly ask yourself what do you believe that you cannot know about your customers? Right. Because ideally you would know everything there is to know about them. And there are probably some blind spots that you think are unavoidable or that you don't have the budget or the time for. And I would say look at these square interface and reconsider. There is probably a solution right now that exists that lets you have that knowledge quickly and within your budget. So that's the first thing. The other one is, you know, talk to a small company, talk to someone who's medium sized or small, who's on the market and has been doing a lot of things with AI. The community is actually a lot friendlier than we think. When we think, you know, market research company, we think about the big multinationals, very faceless. But actually it's a very warm, very generous community and particularly the few of us that are focused on AI as well as maintaining tradition, are very sharing and always really excited to talk about it. So, you know, reconsider your limitations and then just reach out and have a chat.

I love it. I love it. Thank you. Wow. I mean we got, we got to so much here. I'm going to have my work cut out for me today CD when we put together the newsletter to kind of recap this for everyone. So don't worry if you missed some things. We're going to be sharing about it in the newsletter today a little bit more about CD and Jade Kite. So make sure you go to your everyday AI.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter right there. It'll be out in a couple hours. Check it out on podcast. Thank you everyone for joining us. You know, Jordan said, from one Jordan to another, thanks for hosting. Saying Jade, Jade Kite is amazing. Thank you. And cd, thank you for, for spending your time to, to help everyone understand a little bit more about generative AI in market research. This was a fascinating discussion. Appreciate your time.

It's been a real pleasure. Jordan, thank you for everyone to join us as well.

All right, so we're not going to see tomorrow, it's Friday. But that's fine. We hope to see you back next week. We have some amazing, amazing guests lined up over the next week or two from entrepreneurs, startup people, sales to some executives. Yeah, from IBM, Microsoft. We're bringing in a whole range of great guests to help us all learn generative AI together. So hope to see you back next week for more everyday AI. Thanks Y' all.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday. AI, thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.