AI in Research: Additive or substitute?
Transformative technological leaps forward have been around well, forever. The shift from pre-Internet to AORTA (always on, real-time access). Fixed phone lines to mobile computing anywhere. LAN to SaaS to Cloud to name a few. And now, Artificial Intelligence.
Prevailing opinion on what makes AI dramatically different than those prior landscape shifting advancements, is its ability to perform certain tasks independently.
Over the last year, we have spent hundreds of hours engaging with CEOs, CMOs, VPs of Pricing & Packaging, Competitive Intelligence teams, Product Marketers, and UX Researchers exploring how to best leverage AI in research, as well as using AI in our daily work.
Our experience has proven AI delivers projects faster, improves insights, and saves our clients time and money. AI has outperformed humans in transcription, translation, and data synthesis and summarization. In other areas such as instrument design, moderation, and reporting, while not completely replacing humans, it accelerates these processes.
AI’s unique advantages
- Speed & scale: Processing volumes of data no human team could efficiently manage
- Pattern recognition: Identifying themes and trends across large data sets such as coding verbatims and analyzing qualitative transcripts
- Cost efficiency: In synthesis & summarization
- Time savings: In transcription, translation, and data synthesis. Jump starting instrument design and reporting
Human’s unique advantages
- Research planning & design: AI can answer questions only after humans have carefully framed the problem and business context
- Sourcing quality sample: Synthetic data does not produce the quality of information sourced from human respondents
- Capturing unmet needs, emotional drivers, and the why: Recognizing feelings, hesitations, contradictions, unexpected insights, and pinpointing why is still out of AI’s reach
- Understanding organizational, contextual, and cultural nuances: Complex purchase processes, local market characteristics, and providing contextual recommendations to decision-makers are not independent capabilities of AI
AI is now an essential part of our research toolkit that is delivering improved insights and meaningful time and cost savings to our clients. We are excited about the areas in which it already operates independently, eager to continue using it in areas where it provides a head start and committed to pushing its boundaries in new directions.
Our 20 years of strategic marketing and research experience, combined with our aggressive use of AI has positioned Paradoxes to help you capitalize and benefit from this powerful new technology.