Accelerated Speed-to-Market: How AI is Changing Market Research
In the world of business, Artificial Intelligence has started to trade hype for reality. Where the possibilities of AI were exciting to imagine, today businesses have started to use stable, robust, and sustainable forms of AI in various business processes to reduce costs and gain efficiencies.
The market research industry has adopted various non-AI technologies in the past to expedite the time-consuming research operations process. This has eased operations and improved efficiency to a certain level across board. Yet the overall speed and efficacy of the market research process are now falling far behind the rapid pace of business and the speed of insights delivered are required at a pace where real-time decision making can happen.
At Course5 Intelligence we’ve been investing in AI research and development and have enabled several of our market research clients leverage AI in their digital transformation journey. Our AI-driven research operations platform, Optimizer Suite (OS), expedites the market research process in various ways. One module that is already driving enormous efficiencies for our clients is the Survey Programming module. Pre-trained on thousands of sample questionnaires, the Optimizer Suite platform can immediately parse new questionnaires in varying formats and turn out ready scripts suitable for several survey platforms—within hours instead of the weeks this usually takes. As the platform operates on self-learning algorithms, any outliers or variations to standard scripts are immediately highlighted, and the new information is ‘learned’ by the platform based on reviewer feedback. The next time the platform encounters the new question format, it ‘knows’ how to read and process it. One of the biggest advantages of using this platform is that all the knowledge is safe-deposited in the platform, which helps eliminate people-dependency and thereby the typical knowledge loss caused during handover, resource churn is largely eliminated.
Other ways in which the platform can accelerate the research process is through inbuilt business-focused questionnaire banks, automated data processing, smart OE Coding, and automated intelligent report generation through augmented analytics.
Using AI technologies in day-to-day operations enables market research businesses –
1. Launch projects faster – AI technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are enabling the transformation of all manual driven process into automated forms that are highly accurate. ML + RPA (Robotic Process Automation) enable our OS platform to quickly learn and relearn new formats and rules, applying them automatically to the rest of the data set. NLP allows platforms to read through vast variations in language and expression to produce error-free and contextual survey data. Combining automation with AI technologies means that these complex capabilities are executed —without manual intervention and without time lag—in near real time. Time-to-insight has shrunk.
2. Lower dependency on people – The use of AI-driven automation not only greatly accelerates operational processes, but also eliminates the time lags caused by gaps in knowledge transfer between people, resource churn, and manual error. When several processes are automated in a single platform like Optimizer Suite, the smooth continuity also eliminates the time typically lost in handovers.
3. Take on more projects in the same bandwidth – The ability to turn around projects with higher quality and faster time invariably improves your ability to take more projects and your value proposition to prospective clients. AI-driven automation also frees precious researcher time to design better products, new ways of finding insights, and better insights improving the overall caliber of the research organization.
4. Increase overall revenue with direct bottom-line impact – The time and cost savings achieved through AI-driven automation of MR operations not only have a direct bottom-line impact but, as mentioned earlier, improve the company’s pricing and value proposition in the long which has a direct impact on revenue. In fact, in such competitive and dynamic environments, survival, differentiation, and competitive edge will all depend on how you use emerging technologies to deliver greater value to business.
As always it is exciting to see how technologies mature and improve the quality of human life and business, and watching Optimizer Suite evolve and steer market research into the future is no different. The future of work isn’t on the horizon; with OS it’s here and it’s now!
Learn more about AI in Market Research here: Accelerated-Speed-to-Market: Transforming Research Operations with AI
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