Can AI Replace Humans for Market Research? This Firm Is Doing It

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.

“Market research is a pain point,” said Boff. “It’s important, obviously, but the methodology, the time, the expense, the process is one that, in my own experience, is largely unchanged over the years.”

Market research is emerging as a hot application for AI, in addition to tweaking creative and enhancing chatbots, as others are also pushing into the space. Advertising agencies such as Pereira O’Dell, Supernatural and Media.Monks, for example, are experimenting with AI-generated focus groups to better understand their clients’ potential and current customers.

One concern that looms over AI-generated research, however, is its accuracy. How much is competitive advantage? How much is misleading hallucination?

“Synthetic research is a new technology, and there’s always skepticism toward new technology,” said Weinberg, who noted that AI is only getting more powerful and precise with time.

Fleming said that although he maintains a trust-but-verify mindset, he’s been happy with the results so far.

Upon first hearing Evidenza’s pitch, Toni Clayton-Hine, EY’s CMO of the Americas, said she felt a mixture of optimism, skepticism and wonder.

As a test, Clayton-Hine fielded EY’s annual brand survey—which asks executives at large companies to share their upcoming investment plans and thoughts on EY—through traditional channels. Without revealing the answers, she got Evidenza to run the same questions through its platform.

The two sets of results showed significant overlap.

“It was astounding that the matches were so similar,” said Clayton-Hine. “I mean, it was 95% correlation.”

Clayton-Hine now feels confident that AI-based research can help augment EY’s insights and strategy. Plus, she noted, while its annual brand survey can take six to eight weeks to complete, Evidenza turned it around in “a day or two.”