Many chief marketing officers want their market research to possess more of these three qualities: Faster, cheaper, better.
Making it happen, however, can be difficult—especially in the business-to-business category, which targets a more select group of individuals than business-to-consumer. Assembling focus groups takes time. Getting business leaders to fill out surveys can be expensive. Obtaining more detailed responses with follow-up questions can be downright impossible.
“You have to make a decision by tomorrow, but it takes weeks to staff a proper focus group,” said Colin Fleming, CMO of software giant ServiceNow.
New York-based startup Evidenza, which has been in stealth mode since January, is building a strong case for using artificial intelligence to upend this entire process.
Instead of talking to humans to gather information, Evidenza built a platform that accesses several large language models to create digital personas who mimic whatever kinds of people a marketer wants to interview. This could mean chief technology officers or mothers—or mothers who are also CTOs. A project that would have taken months to complete can be done in hours. Without obligations or places to be, these AI-powered characters can also answer questions all day long, providing researchers with more context and insight.
Fleming called AI-based market research, which provides customers on demand, a “true, real-world delivered use case” of AI.
“Whereas traditional market research tends to be slow and expensive, especially when you’re going after hard-to-reach audiences like CEOs, synthetic research is the alternative—it’s fast, it’s affordable,” said Peter Weinberg, one of Evidenza’s three co-founders.
The company has already generated over $1 million in revenue from more than one-dozen clients, which include professional services firm EY and ServiceNow. Evidenza has yet to accept any money from outsider investors.
Weinberg and fellow co-founder Jon Lombardo worked together at LinkedIn, where they formed LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, a think tank dedicated to B2B research. Evidenza’s third co-founder, Brian Watroba, spent eight years at Facebook before joining the others.
Linda Boff, former CMO at GE and advisor to Evidenza, described AI-based research as a new painkiller designed to ease an old headache.