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October 15, 2025
AI is transforming market research. As startups disrupt and bots blur reality, the divide grows between those who master AI and those who don’t.
Check out the full episode below! Enjoy The Exchange? Don't forget to tune in live Friday at 12 pm EST on the Greenbook LinkedIn and Youtube Channel!
Market research is in the middle of a transformation. Investors are betting big on AI platforms while startups give away services that used to be premium offerings. AI can now create fake videos and shop for us—raising a crucial question: how do we study human behavior when we can't tell humans from bots?
The real divide isn't between people and AI; it's between professionals who can leverage AI and those who can't. Speed matters, but clients still need humans who can make sense of the noise and tell stories that drive decisions. The industry isn't disappearing—it's just figuring out what comes next.
Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos.
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[0:02] Lenny Murphy: And there we go. Happy Friday, everybody. It's, uh, Lenny Murphy. And today, uh, Karen is off. So I have the honor, the privilege to have the man, the myth, the legend Niels joining me. Um, we've known each other a long time. Uh, for those who don't know you though, Niels, once you give the, give the background, the bio, so people can know why I think that you're a legend. Okay.
[0:29] Niels Schillewaert: Well, thanks for the compliment Lenny. Thanks for having me. Hi, everyone. I'm Niels. I've been in the market research industry and the insights industry for 30 years. Was managing partner and co-founder at a company called Insights Consulting, now HumanAid. So a big family of gongos in the US joined the dots back in the days in the United Kingdom, avian impact in Asia. So global companies. I had the privilege to work quite a bit on innovations, communities, social media listening, all that kind of stuff. Lived in the U.S. For a while, I started together with other managing partners, the U.S. Office there, so I have an international background from that perspective. Was heavily involved in the insights associations of our industry, so past president of ESOMAR. I've had an academic career on the side, so I've been really privileged to combine entrepreneurship with practical and academic research. Anyway, I got out of the business at HumanAIDS about two years ago, and I would say pure serendipity-wise, joined Conveo, which is an AI-led qualitative insights platform. And yeah, it's back to innovation, it's back to startup, but yeah, having a blast.
[1:52] Lenny Murphy: That's great. And I want to give a shout out to Conveo, is the sponsor of, uh, of the exchange. So thank you for that. Uh, but it all worked out because Karen was, uh, off doing mom stuff and thought, Hey, well, why don't you, you know, let's guest host and, and go. And with your background, uh, and experience, I think this will be interesting as we go through all of the news. Uh, and there was, there was a lot, uh, so in normal fashion, we'll, we'll try and go through it as quickly as we can while still giving us some. Well, let me start with some of the funding news. And first, give a shout out to our mutual good friend, another man, myth and legend, Stanislaus Anthon, his company, iGenie, raised $7.5 Series A, and their AI-powered consumer insights platform. And if I understand iGenie correctly, what they really look at is a combination of search and ratings and reviews and extracting information from that. And you look like you're frozen. Yeah, I'm there. OK, there we go. All right. Have you spoken to Stan? Do you know any more about iGenie than that?
[3:04] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, I've spoken to him. We're on the MRII board together, and have done a podcast for that channel as well. And I really have to say that I thought he was retiring, but he's clearly rewiring. You know, well done for Stan. I think one of the things, you know, it's interesting, right, what they do. But I think what's especially smart is not necessarily the technology, but, you know, he's surrounding himself as well. Obviously, he's an expert in the field, but there's other people that are also experts in the field. So it goes a little bit broader even than insights people. And it'll be interesting. To see where it goes, but it's a nice pocket of money. All the best to Stan.
[3:58] Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. There may be a slightly bigger deal that we saw, Signal AI, 165 million investment for them to help accelerate. They do really reputation measurement and management, I believe. Well, Signal AI, we've got to add the AI on to the end of it. Is there already a trend here of IGD AI, Signal AI?
[4:31] Niels Schillewaert: Well, it probably has to do something with AI.
[4:35] Lenny Murphy: Maybe, I don't know. There's going to be a lot of money flowing to AI.
[4:38] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, and there is already a lot of, it's not only this, the past weeks, some money has flown in. It's going to be. It has to be, it's not always, it's good, but it has to be deployed well, of course. So that's going to be interesting. One of the things I do, they're obviously different in size, but I think the Signal.ai funding is pretty big. And yeah, it's really a company that's evolving from, I would say, traditional medium monitoring to a much broader piece. So I think obviously that's a bigger addressable market that probably wants to get closer to the C-suite, I would say.
[5:26] Lenny Murphy: I think you froze again, buddy. So listeners, watchers, hey, this is what happens when you go live without a net. Well, Neil's come back. I'm going to just go on to the next one and agree with what he was saying. You're back. There you go. Okay. Uh, this is, it's those drones. I'm telling you it's the drones.
[5:53] Niels Schillewaert: I'm not sure my kids aren't home, so they're not streaming. So I don't know what's going on, but okay.
[5:59] Lenny Murphy: All right. Then, uh, you want to talk about Alchemark? So that's, that's a little more, uh, traditional. I mean, from the standpoint of obviously there it's building on new adjacencies, Alchemers started a survey platform, they acquired a chat meter for reviews, social listening. So combining that with the survey capability, and then, to be fair, I don't think the survey capability really gives justice to what Alchemer had built. Overall, it's a very robust platform, focused on CX with lots of different capabilities, but now they're expanding that out. So it's fundamentally a consolidation, I think. Um, uh, so the other, we see that the AI VC money flowing, and then we're seeing more private equity based, uh, money flowing into these types of consolidation plays. I think that's, we've seen that trend for a long time, but I mean, you did it with human aid, right? So, uh, any actually let's, let's pause it for a second. So you've, you've been down that road, right? Now you've got, you did the startup and you did private equity and you did growth. Now you're obviously with, uh, with companies. You know, the fast, the rocket ride from that. Anything that you would share from an experience of kind of just your view on the market right now?
[7:19] Niels Schillewaert: Well, I do think if I connect these three and just look around as well, it seems like capital is concentrating around platforms that are turning unstructured content into some form of structure. That's obviously where the force of LLMs lie. Can really do it at scale. They make it much easier to go into massive unstructured data, come up with recommendations even. So I think that that's a common trend. And whether that's then like Conveo, Qual at scale, or even just using AI to get into the workflow, end to end. That's also what we do, but you see it in other applications. A couple here and even a couple of the other topics that we'll talk about. It really gets into the workflow to get the tedious parts of the job out, but also to be able to mine that huge amount of data. So I think that that's not something that's going to stop anytime soon. Obviously, as I mentioned, it's going to be about how that money is going to be deployed well. And we may be, one of its startups is different from a start through or a scale through. So it's a little bit binary, but I do think there's going to be a shakeout and there's going to be things that work and things that don't work. That's not new. But yeah, I think that that's a given. From the client side, what I take from this as well is that it seems like traditional Traditional research, communication, CX, it's kind of blurring, right? You kind of see that trend in here as well, and that's where the money is going. So that's like a key takeaway for me on this topic. Yeah.
[9:22] Lenny Murphy: Well, it's probably a good segue. Let's talk about some of these product launches, because deploying capital, right? And driving growth. And there were, as always, guys, there's so many original topics that we started with and to condense it down. But there were a few here that I thought were really interesting. And let's start with Civic Science, partnering with The Atlantic to enhance advertising and real-time consumer insights. Remember when Civic Science launched right around the same time that Google Surveys did? They're doing the micro-surveys as a paywall for content. Uh, and if it's always been really interesting to see a company like that, there's just a massive amount of consumer insights on a daily basis. And now seeing that convergence to drive advertising effectiveness, um, the, uh, it, that's always been kind of a no brainer to me. And, uh, I know the company that took a lot of, uh, private equity money, uh, I believe DC money anyway, took a, a bunch of money, uh, and now maturing well. And I mean, this kind of civic science is 20 years old, at least. So, uh, and, and kind of transforming into this. So I thought that was interesting. Any, any perspective on that?
[10:41] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah. Similarly to, to what I just said, this is also, you know, blurring lines, um, getting insights directly into advertising operations. So the research becomes part of the media, not a service. So it gets embedded, if you want. That's in this specific case, my take. Because as you said, it integrates the real-time-ness of insights into the targeted campaigns. So that's an interesting one. Yeah, it becomes one product. And again, it's blurring those lines between communication and insights. I know that Advertising Insights has always been a little bit different than, you know, your traditional consumer understanding, but this makes it even, yeah, one bundle if you want. Yeah.
[11:35] Lenny Murphy: So the rest of these that we got, I found to be very disruptive in one form or fashion, primarily in business models. Yeah. So Disco, our good friends at Disco, go, they've always done big chunks of business and have always been kind of media measurement. And, now they've just given away a free brand lift measurement. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. I think we're going to see it especially coming like this, because it owns data collection, right there, their respondents, they're in the panel, they have an app, they're capturing this stuff. As data becomes more and more commoditized and not really value-add. It's about the data itself and using that as a hook to then upsell and cross-sell other things. I think we're gonna see a lot of this. So what, any take on Disco?
[12:33] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, when I was reading it, it reminded me of an old...
[12:39] Lenny Murphy: Ah, we lost you again, Niels. Thea, and I know you were to put out some brilliance on that. Let's give it a second. See, uh, those damn drones in Belgium are messing up the wifi. Okay. So what we got was I was reading it and I knew it was going to be brilliant. And then you died.
[13:01] Niels Schillewaert: So, all right, you're a reader and it reminded me of an old marketing tactic, which is basically a loss leader, right? You, uh, you give stuff away for free and then people come and then they're, they're, they're stuck. Uh, it's cool. It's quite disruptive, though, because, yeah, brand lift. I'm not a specialist, but for me, you have a campaign, and how does that impact your awareness, your consideration, your intention of your target markets? If you give that away for free, it's already quite a lot of information. So I'm sure that competitors will have to follow. Typically, in a lot of markets, when it attracts a lot of money, when companies are successful, it pushes down prices. This is a form of a price reduction, of course, because you're giving away such an amount of value. And you're going, so, so they, they, I don't know what you call it. They probably want to grab a bigger piece of the market that doesn't run away from them. So we'll be interesting, that's an interesting dynamic.
[14:04] Lenny Murphy: It is, it is. Now this next one, Definitely that this just looks interesting. It's kind of a process play, right? So if I understand correctly, it's effectively kind of a billing agent that takes, so let's say you were Alchemer, right? And rather than having their standard licensing model, it handles all the billing to make it DIY pay-as-you-go targeting SMEs and just create scale in targeting those markets. I think that is brilliant. Will it work? I don't know. But I love the idea of having somebody else effectively function as a marketplace for you to sell into categories that you may not allocate the resources to internally. I just thought that was a brilliant concept.
[14:58] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, I had to actually, to be honest, I had to look, look them up, because I hadn't heard of them. I hadn't either. I looked them up and found so many around, amongst others on Insights platforms. I do think it's an interesting dynamic. Will it work? I have the same question, but the principle is there because, you know, part of the market, you know, let's say SMEs or individual consultants, and even a lot of agencies that provide, you know, that need Man, we lost you again, Niels.
[15:38] Lenny Murphy: Guys, check this out. While we're waiting on Niels, though, we've talked in the previous editions on the... Sorry, we lost you again, Niels. It's all right. I was going to kind of riff on the emergence of the agentic supply chains, agentic purchasing. Uh, and how that will effectively just be integrated into centralized platforms. I suspect that's, you know, what Donnify is doing is going after that play, uh, to have the, the point of integration, basically the Shopify, if you will, uh, to some extent for, um, for technology suppliers. All right. Yeah. All right. You're back. Um, uh, what'd you think about neon?
[16:30] Niels Schillewaert: And their play I thought that was interesting as well Yeah, I that too Also had to I was like really so people are basically selling their privacy off, right? That's that's the thing. So it shows that that's a commodity. It's something that has value and people are willing to, you know, sell it off. I would personally not do it to be honest. Not that there's a lot of secrets that I share but you know or that I have a lot of secrets. I did think I would never come up with it. I thought it was clever. On the other hand, I do wonder what about different parts in the world, privacy laws, that's going to be, it's controversial, to say the least, I'm sure, and I hope for them it's legal, technically, but there will be some fallout, I think, somewhere down the road. Hey, it's like you're opting in and you're allowing your internet tracking and getting advertisements in return. It's like the next level of this, that all your phone calls, like we would make a phone call and it would all be recorded. All be recorded.
[17:41] Lenny Murphy: Yeah, the AI training sets. Exactly.
[17:44] Niels Schillewaert: So that's billions, gazillions of conversations. I'm sure there's value there for markets. So word of mouth will be captured for sure. I see a lot of good applications. Um, but on the other hand, yeah, I, I, I think that's a, that's a, uh, a heavy one. And you know, I, again, I'm not a specialist, but, uh, with 30 cents a minute call that they would give to people. So that's quite a bit of money. So, yeah.
[18:12] Lenny Murphy: Yeah. And as well, and you know, I mean, there are so many large companies that have been for, for years functioning like panels, engaging people. You know, record their calls or their videos whatever the case may be as AI training sets This makes it scalable and it's also I guess a social app. I haven't used it but I love the idea of embedding it directly. I'm saying hey, you know, we're gonna be the agent to help you monetize your data, but to your point you're gonna give up privacy so Yeah interesting times. Yeah. And then the last of GWI last week, we talked about Morning Consult launching their multiple agents. I'm sorry, you weren't here. But that was a piece of news. Is a major competitor to Morning Consult this week launching their Spark API. About data synthesis, integration, just another clear signpost on the road that It's not about the silo. It's about utility. And GWI is doing that. You're seeing, well, as much as you can talk about it, is that a demand within Conveo to say, hey, we want to be able to extract this data and plug it into other platforms? Is that something you guys are doing, too?
[19:36] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah. And I think this is an example of in-workflow intelligence, if you want. So you're integrating. Definitely, you know, that's already a possibility to upload your own data, your previous interviews, your marketing plan and contrast that with new data for sure. And if that would be, you know, the media, we haven't done that as an application, but it's definitely something that we're thinking of allowing. And especially, you know, have different silos that are nice silos, different data silos communicate with each other because, yeah, that just increases the utility of it, right? Yeah, absolutely.
[20:17] Lenny Murphy: Yeah All right. So let's go into some of the bigger tech development stuff. We probably get some of these pretty quickly, the first an Adobe survey that US consumers use AI for shopping research and you just present something similar and more right. Sorry.
[20:39] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, what's your take? I'm not surprised, to be honest, because we did a study of 330 people, eight countries, and it clearly shows that people are, you know, AI is a daily shopping companion, if you want. And so I'm not surprised by this statistic. Basically, what AI does, it collapses the funnel, right? You're going from consideration to over, that recommendation part's really crunched. To purchase. And the reason why I'm also saying that is one of the things that was striking to me, Lenny, is a statistic about trust. So we asked people, we had a whole discussion on Conveo, who do you trust more when it comes to recommending products? Is that a brand? Is that peers, friends, family? Or is that AI? And remember, we used to have a discussion, 2008-ish, social media went mainstream, everybody was like, oh no, people go to reviews and what they Read on Facebook is they believe that more than brands. Can you imagine? Now AI, that's true. And now AI outperforms more than twice, has more than twice a higher trust than peers. So, there was some probing and it's interesting as such, but there was some probing on it that people just say other people are not complete and AI gives me the A. They do cross-check, luckily, but it gives me a complete picture. So I'm not surprised, and we haven't seen, you know, with agentic, you know, shop assistance and things like that, we haven't seen just, you know, just the beginning of it, but very interesting influence on consumer behavior, for sure.
[22:26] Lenny Murphy: It is, and the recommendations, yeah, I love perplexity for that. I told a story a couple of years ago, a couple of weeks ago, I had to buy a new robot for our pool. And yeah, I wrote the prompt, fine-tuned my recommendations, what would have taken me hours, I did in minutes. And it was just incredibly more efficient, so absolutely. All right, so there's, I was having a conversation this morning with some folks, actually an investor, who said that he was at an event this week, an investor event, And so the buzz around quantum is similar to the buzz around the beginning of Bitcoin. And there's this sense in the investor community that, all right, the next big thing that we're about to get into is quantum. So this article on the end of user interface around AI agents and quantum computing, how that's going to change interfaces, conversational anticipatory experiences, I just thought it was really interesting, because my sense is, as well, that the revolution of turbocharging, the processing power and the speed with quantum computing combined with AI is probably going to make some pretty profound changes in how we think about engagement of technology overall. So what's your take?
[23:54] Niels Schillewaert: I thought that was a very interesting article, by the way. It went into quite a bit of depth, so I would advise everybody to read it. It became a little bit philosophical, because obviously, what's a user interface? Probably, my reaction was that it's still an interface. It's going to be less of the user, because the machine or the software is going to be more powerful, if you want. But it's still a user interface. But tying it to the AI influence on shopping, And when you think about an AI agent and the whole quantum computing, it really becomes a different version of a shelf or of a category structure on a website. It's just going to all do that for you. It's going to be more fluid, and you're just going to prompt it. I thought that was a very interesting article, and the user interface will indeed be different. It'll probably also be you know, let's say more multi-central, more video-based, more talking-based. Like, we still type, right? In real life, to a store assistant, we talk. I do think that voice and video are also going to be more impactful, and obviously, we need that type of quantum computing and AI agency. Very interesting evolution.
[25:21] Lenny Murphy: Yeah. And there were so many other articles. Have included in this week's themes that were around those same themes. Just really, let's actually jump for a second to since we're on a video and all that, OpenAI announcing their Sora 2 AI video app. So the scaling of video AI across the board. So Sora generates photorealistic videos, the app allows user cameos via Verified recordings. I gotta say I don't quite get it But take is like alright, so it's tick tock for AI Yeah, it was kind of I'm not sure what the value of that is other than open AI getting value from the data itself Which I'm sure is absolutely a piece of it But it's intriguing from if you see influencers start creating content related to specific brands or categories or or whatever, utilizing AI as a whole new influencer channel. I think that's interesting as the next evolution of Instagram or whatever. So I, I'm not sure other than that, that's something to watch. Um, do you have any more insight?
[26:37] Niels Schillewaert: First of all, I thought the, the, the little, uh, movie of the launch was, was, uh, it was quite funny. Uh, I was amazed by it. We still can't get it in Europe. It probably has to do with drones or my immediate reaction was Lenny, it's blowing up creativity, right? Think about stimulus testing. You upload a version of something that you've created. You give it extra prompts, extra dimensions. You can make endless versions of it. That was my first thought. And the second one was in activating insights. You know, turn, you've got quotes, you've got emotional interpretations and reactions of people, and you can turn that into a video. So I think there's a lot of, yeah, a lot of impact on creativity in the insights business. And if that's the case in the insights businesses, in my opinion, yeah, this could be huge. I'm a firm, also being at Conveo, we do video based interviews, it's video by design. So I really believe in it. So yeah, obviously, it's heavy on the computing again. But yeah, I think it's definitely something I would watch.
[27:55] Lenny Murphy: Well, alright, so let's tie this together, we'll go back to the sequentially. OpenAI again, takes on Google and Amazon with a new agentic shopping system. So their instant checkout in conversation purchases on Etsy and Shopify. Using agents, but to your point, conversational. And the, so what is that? There's just this future of then we talked about this a little bit yesterday of when we're actually researching agents, because they're trained on preferences. And you combine this ability to, to your point, you know, create content on the fly. It, it just is really, I, I don't know quite how to put it in words, other than there's a sense of, of the singularity approaching, right? So how do we separate between the authentic human and the, you know, agentic perception from a research standpoint? And I think we're gonna have to deal with that because it doesn't mean it's fraud. If I've trained something on these behaviors that mimic me in so many ways, and even been given license to create content in my name. Yeah, that's authentic.
[29:15] Niels Schillewaert: So the authentic agent. Yes.
[29:18] Lenny Murphy: Yeah. I mean, it's just weird. I know you're much more of a qual guy. So I don't know why you just see these changes. What do you think?
[29:27] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, I think it's only gonna evolve more and these agents. I mean, AI already is doing a really good job. Like we get feedback from people in the 2025 year of moderating experience and they go like, wow, it can already do this. And it's just the beginning. So I'm with you to definitely do a big part if I build my own quote unquote or feed my own, you know, give permission to the agent to do whatever I permitted to do, which is probably going to be a very personal thing, especially in the beginning. You know, there's validity to that. And people will buy just like, you know, if they do it themselves. They will buy stuff they don't need or will buy or book the wrong hotel. But I think it's definitely there. On the point of open AI, though, taking on Google and Amazon, I'm not saying they're into trouble. But if you think about open AI, even a perplexity and a cloud, their category entry points in people's daily lives are much broader. While, to a lesser extent, Google, but definitely Amazon, is more of a commerce player. And how many AI platforms or systems will people use for shopping? It's going to be an interesting dynamic, because if I'm used to using perplexity, or open AI, will I really shift when I, you know, some people do, but will I really shift to the Amazon AI? So it's interesting, especially in that momentary conversation, I think it's a major shift in commerce potential.
[31:03] Lenny Murphy: It is yeah, we can't discount, you know grok as well and that that integration it seems like Amazon is probably with their anthropic and Claude is I Think it's gonna like Amazon Web Services. Yeah, you know, they want to power business but who is the consumer leader I think to your point and I Yeah, I think it's anybody's fight still Alright, there's a couple things Just to touch on before we drop there was one more Development of Accenture. Yeah, exciting employees that they're unable to reskill for AI and a very explicit eight hundred and sixty five million dollar plan to let people go that they think they can't reskill. That was kind of a, oh, I think that's where we are.
[32:08] Niels Schillewaert: I think it's inevitable, right? I don't think you'll be beaten by AI, but you'll be beaten by people who have the skill to use AI. And that's exactly what you see happening. I'm sure they're going to hire people that are very AI literate. I work with a lot of young kids that, you know, sorry.
[32:28] Lenny Murphy: I know. There with you that you're under kid 40 now but I asked them you know they're they're really tech savvy and asked him what what would you done it now let's give it a second see if Neil come back finish that thought something it's probably a good one. So you asked, you're giving this great gesture, I asked them, what would you, and then you froze.
[33:01] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, what would you study if you were 16 or 18 years old now, with all the tech that's going on? And a lot of them are programmers, and they said, definitely not coding, but that's really important. So I think that that's on top of the AI literacy, which I already see with, you know, my kids and a lot of youngsters, they have it in their fingers. They're not digital natives, they are AI natives. And you can take that, you know, definition, you know, widely. So it's a fundamental shift in skills that are needed, going to impact the insights industry for sure. You're going to, you know, you're sitting on so much information, it's going to be about asking the right questions. And that's originally where we come from, of course. But now you're going to have to prompt for it. So my take, because another take on it is, and I often get the question when I'm presenting for Conveo as well, will this Conveo replace the qualitative moderator? And I'm like, no, not really. It could be complementary. It's obviously still different, but you also have to look at AI as a co-worker in your team, a co-working force that gives you superpowers. But if you don't know how to deal with AI or if you don't know about the different platforms, then unfortunately, I think if you can't reskill, you'll get excited as Accenture plans or Accenture shows. Yeah, it's not going to go away.
[34:44] Lenny Murphy: It's not. Well, there are three things we just want to throw out there: recommended reading and segue. One was a LinkedIn post on what's known about evolving jobs and demand skills and strategic moves in the age of AI. We're obviously not alone. US 85% professionals see AI reshaping skills. 58% of marketers report efficiency gains in the superpower. So yes. So really encourage you guys to check that out. Was there anything else from that that you thought was interesting?
[35:18] Niels Schillewaert: No, I'm happy to read those numbers that a lot of people are leaning into. Obviously, this is going to go a little bit zigzag, right? We had the recent MIT study that mentioned that only 5% of the AI initiatives were successful or something like that. And there's a lot of context that we don't know about studies, but I do. I do think that, you know, I'm convinced AI is not gonna go away and it's more transformational than any digital or technological wave that we've had. So we have to do it either way. It's gonna go a little bit up and down. There's gonna be some disillusionment, but I think that that's a good, yeah, that's a good article to read as well.
[35:56] Lenny Murphy: Yeah. And then let's give a shout out to our friends at the ARF, speaking of AI, they're holding a workshop on agentic AI practical workflows for researchers. So if you're trying to get a handle on all this stuff, figure it out, then there's going to be a link to that workshop. The ARF always does good stuff. So one resource out of many that are available and thinking about.
[36:24] Niels Schillewaert: Very important.
[36:25] Lenny Murphy: Yes. I wrote my first GPT last week. I don't mind saying that. I hadn't found it necessary to do that. And, and I'll tell you, for those listeners, I went in like, Oh, man, because I don't want to learn something new. It was so easy. It was, I was like, Why the hell was I scared of this? This was no different than writing a prompt. I mean, it was just a little more structured and thinking about outcomes. But yeah, it's time. Did you get a chance to Read Mark Ryan's post? The AI gap, why clients want more than efficiency. Let's wrap up with that, because it was suggested reading guys. I mean, Mark Ryan is just, I mean, he's brilliant. And, and has the opportunity to kind of think about these big picture things. And, and I just thought it was something really, the industry, you need to hear. There's always this gap. We think about efficiency, because that's what suppliers do, right? That's what we do. We build efficiency but clients still want storytelling and discovery. They want impact. And how do we bridge that gap? Tano, what do you think?
[37:43] Niels Schillewaert: Yeah, I think it's true. I see it as well. It was better, faster, cheaper. And before AI, you could only do two out of the three. And now you can do all three and even go beyond. I think it is indeed more than, well, I do think that speed is important. So the time efficiency is important because it gets you quicker to the storytelling and the discovery. But I'm with you. There's still a place, in my opinion, for definitely consultancies, of course, because there is still critical thinking, creativity needed.
[38:18] Lenny Murphy: Yeah, context. Yeah, absolutely.
[38:20] Niels Schillewaert: Context. What works in a specific company culture or specific market context. So of course, the first thing you look at is get the tediousness out of it and then get to the added value quicker. I'm with a lot of people that ask for storytelling and discovery. And AI still needs to be made, it can already do some. Like our platform, if you prompt it, it's similar to other AI platforms, but if you have 500 interviews and you ask it to develop a product concept, it'll do that for you and it'll do it by mining the transcripts. Or if you upload your own assets and you say, hold it against it, it does a pretty good job, but it still needs work. And that's where the storytelling and the discovery and the context comes in, for sure.
[39:12] Lenny Murphy: Yeah, yeah. Well, Niels, thank you for joining us this week. Thank you to our listeners. Hope that you enjoyed a little different dynamic than between Karen and I. Thank you to Conveo for sponsoring, which you're our first official sponsor, by the way.
[39:29] Niels Schillewaert: Oh, wow.
[39:30] Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So, yeah. So thank you. But I hope you'll come back because this is a great conversation.
[39:36] Niels Schillewaert: I love the- I would love to. I would love to, and I promise I'll have a better connection.
[39:42] Lenny Murphy: Well, you got to get that drone shielding up, right? That's what we do out here in Kentucky. We're out here. Oh, thanks Matt. Uh, Matt Valley says you're one of the best. Um, he's always so kind, isn't he? All right. On that note. Thanks everybody. Uh, we appreciate it. And, uh, we'll be back next week. It'd be Karen and I back next week and that's it for this edition of the exchange. Have a great weekend. Yep. You too. Bye everybody.
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