How Gen AI Is Transforming Market Research

While gen AI is already having a profound impact on marketing activities like customer service and content creation, it has the potential to be absolutely revolutionary in another area: market research. After spending two years studying the technology's use there, two professors believe that gen AI offers firms unprecedented opportunities to understand customers, better assess the competitive environment, and push data-driven decision-making deep into their organizations. These fall into four categories: supporting current practices for collecting data and generating insights by making them faster, cheaper, or easier to scale up; replacing current practices by leveraging synthetic data (artificially generated data that mimics real people's behaviors and preferences); filling existing gaps in market understanding by obtaining insights and evidence that aren't available in conventional data; and creating new types of data and insights (often with the use of digital twins). Gen AI does have limitations and risks, of course, and as marketers harness it, they'll need to keep that in mind, being sure to ground their strategies in fairness, accuracy, and genuine customer insight.