Source: MIT Sloan
It’s clear that artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting all industries in all forms - from media to finance to consumer goods. No doubt you’ve been hearing all about it:
“It’s going to take over the world”
“We need to start using it on our business!”
“I think Alexa knows too much…”
Facial recognition on Facebook photos, personalized product suggestions on Amazon, and smart personal assistants are just the tip of the massive AI iceberg. Or AIceberg, if you will.
These examples of artificial intelligence in daily life are consumer-facing tools for the market. But more examples serve to show just how pervasive AI already is in our lives.
As for conducting market research today, AI is disrupting the way we think about insights. It can show us how to collect data, how to engage with our audience, and how to draw out hidden truths. On the internet, AI also assists in search engine research by compiling data on search engines. Whether aggregating search terms, social mentions or google trends, AI can turn market research data analysis in to progress.
Formally, there are two forms of research - qualitative and quantitative. For decades, researchers have developed advanced methods that allow us to analyze quantitative data. This data is aggregated in sophisticated ways - think cluster analysis and factor models (we told you they’re sophisticated).
Now, AI is finally letting us apply these typically quantitative-only methods on valuable data such as video, audio, and text. If you’ve been on the internet lately (which you are right now👀), the evidence is apparent. The qualitative data formats represent the way we communicate like humans -tweets, live video, Youtube, etc. After all, qualitative is the data that tells you the "why."
Now, AI market research tools can:
Before, your focus group of 10 people gave you tons of qualitative info about their feelings towards coconut-oil infused tissues. But in the data, you couldn’t know if this truly represented the population you were looking at. Additionally, your quantitative survey told you that yes, people like coconut-oil infused tissues, but not why.
An example of this is Remesh's findings tool below:
By combining quant and qual data, AI can create surveys and help researchers understand their target market on a much deeper level.
Typically, when deriving insights from a study, there is a good amount of effort needed to get results. You have to get your hands dirty, sift through the data, and come to the surface with something meaningful. With AI market research tools, insights can be delivered in a digestible format in real-time.
Insights can include a variety of information from buyer persona research to the social media performance. Ultimately, AI-powered market research tools enrich insights by constantly aggregating data. Not to mention that machine learning algorithms make research tools smarter and more precise the more data they’re exposed to.
While perhaps less “sexy” than other aspects of AI, automation is groundbreaking for the market research industry.
Many traditional research processes are time-consuming and demand human labor for repetitive and routine tasks. Artificial intelligence helps cut down on busy work for researchers and frees time for tasks that robots can’t do - yet. In fact, according to a PwC study, 54% of executives say AI solutions implemented in their businesses have already increased productivity. Sounds good to us!
As we quickly move through 2018, technology continues to change, evolve, and disrupt at a rate we’ve never seen before. The unknowns of AI make for a nerve wracking future, especially in market research. However, we are positive in our outlook of AI to uncover hidden truths, increase efficiency, and remove age-old silos.
Interested in specific tools that use artificial intelligence?