What happens when everyone reaches for the AI Easy Button?
I have a lesson today about an emerging danger of AI and marketing. But to get to the lesson, you’ll have to hear my story. It’s an old story, but it matters a lot. Here we go.
I was the CMO for a large business unit of a Fortune 100 company.
Each year, we sent teams out to visit customers to learn how they were using our products and how we could improve. These three-person teams were well-trained for this activity, and the lessons we learned would inform my marketing and R&D strategy for at least the next 12 months.
This was a long and expensive process — our customers were scattered around the world. We were wrapping up our final trip of the year and saying goodbye to our hosts when one of the customer scientists said offhandedly, “By the way, did you happen to see this preliminary research report on coating ingredients from the U.S. government?”
We had not. When we looked into it, we found the new research could potentially ban a key ingredient that my industry had used in its products for decades. It was still early, but if the research found a problem with these chemicals, my company and its customers would be imperiled.
Changing a fundamental ingredient in an industrial product used worldwide is no easy matter. It would take millions of dollars and years of testing to make a change. But with this early alarm and the potential risk, we proceeded on an R&D path to find a replacement ingredient.
Three years later, the government changed the regulations on this chemical. Our competitors were panicked. We were safe because we had listened, learned, and acted responsibly, thanks to our deep and unique understanding of the market.
And that brings me to AI.
The AI Easy Button
I have a number of friends working in market research. Their workload is drying up because companies are turning to AI as an inexpensive shortcut.
Not only can AI scan the universe for the information you need, but synthetic AI audience panels can simulate what your customers might say in real interviews.
The general feedback is that using AI is about an 85% solution, and that is good enough to justify the cost savings over human effort.
Except when it isn’t.
Let’s go back to the story I told to begin this post.
There is no way we would have found that critical information through an AI scan or synthetic customer panels.
If I used AI for my customer research, I would probably have the same information our competitors had. What good is that?
The real marketing insight and innovation doesn’t come in the 85%. It comes inside the 15% that you get by doing the hard work and digging into unique customer insights.
Challenge and opportunity
The use of synthetic data for research poses both challenges and opportunities for traditional researhers.
Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, agrees there is a danger in relying too much on synthetic research. “At some point, the regurgitation of insights will lead to a brain rot like we’ve never seen,” he said. “Folks are going to be craving for authenticity and insight, and that only comes with years of human experience.”
Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, told me, “Market research got itself into a bad hole because because 80% of their answers come from the same 20% of the population that answers questions. They then keep renewing the panel with the same people and give them a Starbucks gift card, hoping they will answer the same questions differently.
‘We’re in a disappointing space when it comes to market research, if we’re being really honest with it. So there is a place for AI research, but it also gives traditional researchers the chance to be brave and ask the hard questions, the questions they’ve never been able to have answered before.”
Pause before using AI
I know there are always budget pressures. I’ve been there. I know you have to make responsible decisions abotu your research. But before you hit the AI Easy Button, think hard about what you’re giving up.
Information that transforms your company?
A unique competitive advantage over everyone else opting for shortcuts?
An insight that secures your future?
Maybe your future lies in that 15% that only human experience can pick up on.
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Illustration courtesy MidJourney
