Like many tech CEOs today, I am focused on making AI a core part of our strategy along two vectors: Using AI to facilitate business operations and incorporating it into our core offering.
From our people and culture teams to sales, AI offers easy wins when it comes to increasing efficiencies, facilitating administrative tasks and refining communications. Prompting takes practice and as you improve, you can increase the complexity of the tasks you complete.
Unlike Google search, I find the iterative, ongoing nature of ChatGPT helps me craft internal communications and improve my responses to challenging questions. If you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest you give it a shot. It’s a tactical application that saves me hours a week.
Applying AI to strategic initiatives requires a different approach
When I founded Rival Technologies, we built a conversational market research platform that global brands like Kimberly-Clark, Amazon, Meta and Diageo use to better understand the attitudes and opinions of their customers. Our mission is simple: Rival the status quo of the market research industry by transforming boring surveys into meaningful mobile engagements. When ChatGPT was released, it immediately caught our attention because, like the Rival platform, it is conversational by design.
Much like any disruptive new technology, AI must be considered within the parameters of the business you have created – your mission, vision, purpose and, of course, the core value you deliver to your customers.
In my industry, as in many others, the opportunities for AI are overwhelming. So we chose to look at AI through the lens of our core brand promises: Engage, understand, optimize, and inspire.
Engage: Improve the participant experience with AI
AI and large language models will amplify the impact of our conversational approach with intelligent follow-up questions, copy refinement and tone adjustment. Authoring conversational surveys is a unique skill. That capability is native to applications like ChatGPT and would add real value to our platform.
Using AI to author conversational surveys and enhance our customers’ ability to engage participants will boost response rates, foster lasting relationships and improve the overall brand experience of research.
Understand: Combine the power of AI and mobile tech to uncover deeper insights
Data quality is a challenge. Decision makers want to know that the feedback they use to make decisions comes from people, not bots. Ensuring confidence in the insights we generate is a priority.
Using mobile’s native capabilities like video provides an additional validation layer. When feedback from a human is validated by video and confirmed by AI, the value of that unstructured data increases exponentially. The authenticity of the response is verified, and our customers can act with greater confidence.
Optimize: Reduce repetitive tasks and get initial ideas with AI
Our core customers face daily challenges: Shifts in priority, huge volumes of work and constant pressure to do more with less – faster.
AI is an exceptional assistant. When applied correctly, it can empower our customers to utilize their human intelligence, think critically, evolve best practices and focus on strategy and storytelling.
Inspire: Increase speed to insight with AI
Global brands are awash with data and starving for insights that inspire action. We’re currently launching new capabilities on our platform that use AI to rapidly analyze vast volumes of “open-ended responses.” These include free-form written customer comments and video feedback on our platform. What could take 30 to 40 hours of analysis now takes minutes. Every data point, from first to last, is analyzed with the same rigour and focus, eliminating researcher bias and burnout.
Output is organized by themes and verbatims are included to validate the summaries. The result is the ability to tell stories that inspire better decision making and reinforce the enterprise value of customer feedback.
Final thoughts
Customer opinion data, analytics and insight are ground zero for AI. Transactional data enhanced with the rich, first-person feedback as we collect is rocket fuel for generative AI. Our early experiments with AI show real promise. More importantly, they have demonstrated our ability to deliver on our promises to our customers. And that is a solid place to start, or build from, for any company looking to incorporate AI into their business.
Andrew Reid is founder and CEO of Rival Technologies.
