Understanding Generative AI: How Is It Used in Market Research?

The introduction of generative AI has transformed the world we live in, and in the space of a few short years, it has become an almost daily feature in many people’s professional and personal lives. However, while it remains the buzzword of the moment for countless industries, how is it shaping the world of market research?

Embracing generative AI in market research is rapidly changing how marketers, researchers, and companies gather and analyze insights. This is helping to make market research faster, more impactful, and easier to scale. How exactly is it being used, though? Let’s take a look… 

Interview and Survey Automation 

One of the most prominent and transformative uses of generative AI in recent years has been through the automation of interviews and surveys. Traditionally, when running a qualitative research campaign such as undertaking qualitative interviews, researchers would need to identify their audience, recruit participants, generate interview questions, moderate conversations, transcribe responses, and then analyze the information. 

This was a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process that would often be limited by things such as the number of available personnel, geography, and overall budget. The use of generative AI has helped to change the game, allowing researchers to run fully automated, in-depth interviews using conversational AI that is trained to follow question logic, probe naturally, and adapt its approach depending on the responses of participants. 

Here at Yasna.AI, we have poured all our expertise into developing an AI moderator that is able to navigate the complexities of human conversation. Yasna is able to adapt, answer and probe with the fluidity of a human moderator, providing culturally aware responses in the appropriate tone and using relevant terminology. 

In short, AI-generated questions and highly adaptive paths are helping researchers by:

— Making surveys far more dynamic and insightful

— Reducing abandonment rates and surface-level responses

— Freeing teams up to undertake more meaningful, creative and strategic tasks. 

Rapid Insight Generation from Unstructured Data 

Unstructured data is one of the biggest frustrations for market researchers. And interpreting it quickly can be a major challenge. Interview transcripts, open-ended survey responses, chat logs, voice notes, whatever it might be, these can all contain rich and highly valuable data. However, sifting through it manually can take hours, if not days. This often leads to slowed-down decisions and can result in the data feeling too soft or not useful enough for product development teams. 

Generative AI is helping to solve these issues by quickly analyzing unstructured data in real time.

Advanced AI models are able to perform labour-intensive tasks (in a fraction of the time a human could):

— Instantly transcribe interviews

— Process thousands of dialogues

— Identify key themes

— Highlight emotional cues

— Identify contradictions

— Recognize emerging trends

This technology is helping to make qualitative insights far more accessible for market researchers, product teams, marketers and UX designers. They will no longer need to wait for a final report or spend hours sifting through data. Instead, they can simply dive into live dashboards, explore top themes, and hear real customer language within hours of the survey being completed.

That said, generative AI is not designed to take over the role of real humans, but instead help them avoid time-consuming and repetitive tasks. 

Data Summarization 

Generative AI is not just great at helping to quickly understand what people are saying in interviews. It can be a fantastic tool for making sense of all kinds of data, which is the most critical part of research task. 

This technology is able to accurately summarize highly complex data into readable and structured formats. This is not just picking out some commonly used words or simple statistics, but instead in-depth coherent studies from vast amounts of data points. Generative AI is also able to help explain sentiment shifts or compare results across a broad range of groups, no matter their demographics, location, or where they sit on the customer journey. 

This rich insight, when written clearly and backed up with examples or real quotes, will allow your team to determine what actions to take much faster compared to relying on manual summarization.  

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Report Drafting 

Report writing is one of the most time-consuming aspects of market research, but it is also incredibly important. Even when the insights are clear and well structured, being able to then structure and shape them into a clear, cohesive, and well-structured story that can be easily understood by all stakeholders is an overwhelming process. 

Generative AI tools are able to help on this front, allowing researchers to draft full research reports that contain everything they need, including:

— Executive summaries

— Key findings with supporting evidence

— Relevant quotes from participants

— Data visualizations and charts

— Recommendations for the next steps

As before, though, this does not mean that generative AI is taking over the researcher’s role. Instead, it provides a strong starting point for a report, which they can then review, refine the narrative and add strategic context to ensure it perfectly aligns with their audience. This is a big advantage for all researchers, but especially for smaller teams and startups without a dedicated research function. 

Stimulus or Concept Generation 

Another emerging use of generative AI in market research is to create things such as product concepts, campaign ideas, ad copy, and even any graphics or content that is needed. This means that instead of having to spend hours drafting and rewriting ideas and messages or designing mockups, teams will now be able to ask AI to generate early ideas that can then be tested directly with users through automated interviews or surveys. 

For instance, a team launching a new feature might ask the AI to write three different value propositions targeted at different personas. Or a marketer might generate 10 headlines for a campaign to test which resonates most.

This all helps to reduce creative fatigue, diversify input, and speed up the concept validation process, as well as ensure that the research phase doesn’t hold up the design or development roadmap.

Global Research at Scale 

Finally, one of the most powerful capabilities of incorporating generative AI into market research is its ability to be quickly scaled across geographies.

Generative AI is helping to remove the barriers of traditional market research methods by providing multilingual support, automated transcription, and cultural sentiment analysis. At Yasna.ai, we have worked hard to develop a solution that allows for simultaneous global rollout with ease. 

For example, our AI moderator recently undertook an extensive survey in South Korea and the Netherlands to unlock insights into how people are using and engaging with dating apps. We also explored how people in Austria and Thailand deal with the common cold, and people in Poland and Italy feel about hair loss.

With our AI assistant, we were able to interview hundreds of people in their native languages and get the results back in days. 

Ready to Embrace Generative AI?

Generative AI is no longer a futuristic concept, it is a powerful tool that is helping transform market research. By automating core processes, such as interviews, analysis, summarizations, and reporting, it helps those who dare to embrace it to move faster and respond quicker without sacrificing depth or quality. 

Generative AI allowing it’s adopters to be nimbler, but it is also allowing them to expand their research to areas that would have otherwise cost too much or taken too much manpower.

At Yasna, we’re proud to be leading the way in making AI-powered research more practical and more accessible. Don’t just take our word for it though, sign up for your free 14-day trial today and discover how it can make a difference for you.

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