Or, how insights professionals can seize their gen AI opportunity
By Adam Bai, Chief Strategy Officer, Glimpse and Neil Dixit, CEO, Glimpse.
If you’re interested in the trajectory of generative AI adoption and what it means for your organization, this article is for you! It shares data from a longitudinal study we’re conducting with our client and partner, HubSpot, and introduces a new research-backed adoption maturity model and ends with career tips any insights professional can apply.
Meet Glimpse
Glimpse is a global, AI-powered and self-service research platform, focused on language and emotion, analyzed in real-time and over time, for marketers, researchers and creators.
- Our advanced AI crafts content and decodes language, illuminating audiences.
- We offer representative data, intelligent guardrails, fine-tuning and added context.
- Our clients use generative AI in our platform to craft insights, tailor messaging, create nuanced personas and even have ongoing conversations with those personas!
- They also use generative AI to help them create surveys, output key messaging (based on the responses of audience segments), blog posts, top positive/negative stories and far more.
We recently published an article in Harvard Business Review about using the power of generative AI to achieve greater customer understanding at-scale. The piece shared some lessons we’ve learned about applying generative AI-based approaches to the business challenges of clients like HubSpot and Wells Fargo.
The article argued, along with another recent piece in Adweek, that the most compelling application of generative AI right now isn’t content creation; rather, it’s the ability to achieve audience understanding based on high-quality and representative data – data that would have been too difficult or time consuming to collect and analyze in the past.
The most exciting application of generative AI right now is an unprecedented opportunity for insights professionals, and they should be leading the charge!
Gen AI adoption and business impact
The future of generative AI within marketing and market research functions is still very much up for grabs. The first wave of adoption has been overwhelmingly individual, ad hoc and designed for efficiency.
The real impact of generative AI will come with the second wave and will require an approach that is team-based, strategic and designed to enhance capabilities and processes.
In Adam’s recent presentation at the CRC in Chicago: “Customer-Centricity in the Age of Generative AI: Essential Lessons for Every Organization” (along with HubSpot’s Research and Thought Leader lead, Amy Maret), he shared preliminary data from a longitudinal study about gen AI adoption experiences by 1,800 (per wave) marketing and sales managers across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Brazil and Japan.
We also introduced a gen AI maturity model to outline adoption stages and began investigating the corresponding benefits that organizations can expect to reap.
Here’s the outline:
“Which of these statements best describes your team or function’s adoption of generative AI right now?”
- We haven’t started talking about it at all.
- We’ve talked about gen AI at work but haven’t tried any AI tools yet.
- There’s been some individual usage but not in team contexts.
- We’re conducting officially sponsored experiments within teams to find the best applications.
- We’re embedding commercially available tools or platforms in some processes.
- We’re leveraging our own business data as an input to tailor outputs to our needs.
- We’re training our own models or fine-tuning LLMs.
Here’s what we found:
- Organizations at early stages of adoption are seeing some efficiency gains but organizations at later stages of adoption are actually seeing significant gains in self-reported customer-centricity and marketing ROI.
- The ability to leverage proprietary data, including first-party data, is what really matters.
- Organizations at the middle stages of adoption maturity are experimenting with dynamic content creation but all that dynamic content hasn’t yet led to more effective campaigns.
- There are huge differences by country, with Brazil in the lead (relative to the U.S., France, Germany and Japan) and Japan coming up behind when it comes to adoption.
If you’d like to see the data in the Glimpse dashboard, reach out to adam@glimpsehere.com.
In the study, the correlation between maturity stages and business performance was stunning. As organizations advance through the stages, revenue and business outcomes see a boost, largely correlated with enhanced consumer understanding. As always, customer understanding is the key that unlocks the other benefits of new technologies.
Six adoption tips for insights professionals
The gen AI movement is far more of an opportunity than a threat for insights professionals, especially if they focus relentlessly on (actionable) customer insights:
- Adoption is more about mind-set and team processes than tech. Planned experimentation is everything when it comes to discovering business challenges that can be solved with the application of generative AI-based approaches.
- Early stages of gen AI adoption are unlikely to yield real business benefits. Focus on customer understanding as the key to unlocking the value of other applications of generative AI. For instance, dynamic content is irrelevant unless it’s guided by new approaches to segmentation – enabled (as at Glimpse) by new sources of unstructured data.
- Your proprietary data is a new goldmine if analyzed effectively.
- Garbage in; garbage out. Become the inputs and outputs quality guru.
- Keep the focus on customer and market understanding. Much of the early investment in generative AI will focus on sales data, but market research data matters. Get a seat at the table to create the holistic vision which allows your organization to prospect for insights across diverse data sources.
- Intervene early and often in organizational planning. Help drive your organization’s maturity curve. (If you’re an agency, support your clients here!)
Glimpse is here to help you achieve enhanced customer understanding with the innovative application of our industry-leading approach to generative AI. However, these tips apply regardless of platform or data source.
To discuss this article or to discover how Glimpse can help your organization, reach out to Adam@glimpsehere.com.
