The Market Research Society of India (MRSI) held its sixth Wednesday Webinar of the seventh season on 23rd October 2024, on “Amplifying Human Insights with AI”. The session was hosted by Sivakumar Somanathan, Consumer Behaviour Consultant, Curious Cat Consulting; Amitabh Mishra, Head-Insights and Analytics - India, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories; Sunder Muthuraman, Executive Vice President, IPSOS MMA; and Mukul Gautam, VP & Chief Of Capacity Building, Purple Audacity; including speakers Preriit Souda, Director, Data Science, PSA Consultants Ltd; Shaveta Bhardwaj, Co-founder & CEO, SprintStudio.ai; and Vinay Virwani, Head - Consumer Insights, Dabur. The session delves into how AI serves as a powerful support system, enabling researchers to process and manage large datasets efficiently, ultimately freeing them to focus on deeper analysis and interpretation.
Host Sivakumar Somanathan, Consumer Behaviour Consultant, Curious Cat Consulting emphasized, “AI is everywhere, it is no longer a fancy term but a transformative force reshaping industries, including market research. A recent Kantar Global Trends Report 2024 revealed that 57% of marketing professionals now consider AI-driven insights essential for understanding consumer behaviour and 62% are expecting to increase their investment in artificial intelligence technologies to stay competitive.”
Preriit Souda, Director, Data Science, PSA Consultants Ltd, highlighted the firm’s data-driven approach to addressing complex business challenges. PSA leverages advanced analytics from macro drivers to micro effects including ships to shops for global expansion, economic indicators to simulating long term possibility on luxury sales and understand immigration to predict telecom sector. Further he shared a few case studies from research papers, including Mars Wrigley. Mars wanted to understand the fast delivery ecosystem or on-demand delivery (ODD), particularly in the context of chocolate purchases. To achieve this, they conducted a combination of call research and data mining. Call research, conducted by partners in New York, focused on consumer sentiment regarding quick purchases. Data mining involved analyzing e-commerce reviews and other text and image data to understand consumer preferences. To gain deeper insights, PSA reversed engineered algorithms to understand how machine learning influenced product recommendations. By comparing machine recommendations with consumer feedback, they developed strategies tailored to the ODD market.
Souda added, “Market research itself will become an integrated system, collaborating not just with marketing, advertising, and strategy teams, but also with technology R&D. While consolidation, commoditization, and pay stagnation may occur, the field will likely experience high growth. The key will be to adopt a "human first" approach, even as technology plays an increasingly prominent role.” He concluded saying, “Be inquisitive, be detectives like Sherlock Holmes. Don’t worry that you’ll lose something in fact, you might gain and replace executives. Use tools and don’t be intimidated by those tools.”
Opening her session with an intriguing question, Shaveta Bhardwaj, Co-founder & CEO, SprintStudio.ai asked, “What’s your AI code? Not as an individual, but as an organization”. She mentioned, “97% of business leaders are talking about the urgency to deploy AI in the next six months. On the flip side, 86% admit that they are not fully prepared. What’s holding them back, is culture. Culture plays a crucial role as we adopt AI and see the progress across organization.” Adding to her point, she said, “Indian GenAI startups record an impressive 3.6X growth, positioning India at 6th rank. India’s AI country readiness is actually low and so is the investment. AI space is undergoing rapid expansion, with the most significant growth driven by the development of industry-specific AI assistants and productivity tools. The latest buzzword in this explosive space is "agentic workflows," which refers to AI's ability to think, iterate, research, and revise responses to queries.”
Speaking on AI powered insights in FMCG, Vinay Virwani, Head - Consumer Insights, Dabur, said, “AI has been around and just getting better. In FMCG it has different segments like data collection and processing, consumer insights and segmentation, predictive analytics, sentiment analytics, and competitor analytics. Amplifying human insights through AI would involve boosting capabilities of the current predictive AI and also leveraging GenAI. Today predictive AI is also used across marketing mix. With vast amounts of historical data available from advertising and concept databases, AI tools can extract thousands of features from an advertisement and generate output without the need for traditional consumer research. This output is continuously refined through validation with full-fledged research, ensuring the AI model's accuracy and evolution.”
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MRSI webinar.