When AI Models Go Rogue and Subscriptions Go Through the Roof

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!

The insights industry is in the middle of a land grab. Vendors are racing to own entire workflows, not just sell you tools. Meanwhile, Anthropic's AI model got so good at hacking that they had to shut it down, subscription prices are climbing so fast that smaller companies might get priced out entirely, and data security is proving to be a never-ending battle that requires actual humans watching it full-time.

Oh, and everyone's trying to turn their data into a revenue stream now. Welcome to the new normal.

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

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Transcript

Lenny Murphy: There we go, all right, I think we nailed that Yeah, we were like mid-sentence and like oh wait Every now and then you just need a Friday in your life you do Absolutely, and the past couple have been like crazy. They felt like Mondays today like I actually see like the end of the tunnel. So there's a lot to talk about.

Karen Lynch: First things first, first things first, IIEX North America.

Lenny Murphy:  Yes.

Karen Lynch: I mean, if you talk to anybody internally here at Green Book, we are like all North America all the time. I mean, from the moment we wake up, I mean, I hate to say this because I do not like my team to burn the candle at both ends when it comes to work. I really like a huge proponent for, you know, shut down your computer at night and don't check emails at night, but not except for April. Maybe in April, pay attention. So we've got a great show, everybody. You really should, you know, you should get to this one. The code, what's that code? The code is just an exchange for 50% off the general admission ticket. At this point, you want to be there. Great brands on stage. Every time I look at the agenda, I get really jazzed about it. We've got some just really good conversations that we're going to be having. And it's beyond the conversations that you'd expect. The topics are just really great. I'm excited for it. So get yourselves there. Be a part of the conversation. Be a part of the future. It's going to be good stuff there this year.

Lenny Murphy: I have always considered IIEX. Is where the future direction of the industry is charted, guys. So it's not just where we are today, but this is where you get a sense of, oh, this is what I better plan for for the rest of the year and the next year. And the way things are changing, which is our segue, you can't afford not to have the signal coming in. So, cause there's a lot of signals and

Karen Lynch: But you know, it's also where I think, I think, we talked about this last week, but I was really just starting with some of the organic talks that were put in front of us with call for speakers and even talking to people about, you know, we are so beyond AI and how it's used and like conversation AI and even AI for qual. And no, we're way beyond that. We are into the nitty gritty like AI for message testing research specifically, for example, or dynamic AI for journey mapping, like very specific use cases. So how we're using AI for specific methodologies and, you know, it's really exciting, but we're also going back to some basics, which I think is really exciting. You know, we've got, by the way, LiveGolf, if you're a golfer, LiveGolf is talking about, you know, their media strategy and, you know, just we've got some B2B brands, which I think is, really cool because I've got them as much as I can on a specific track. Some big B2B companies are talking about segmentation and again, like I said, journey mapping. So like some, some back to basics also for the first time in a while, we've got some really good, um, new takes on older topics. So, um, potatoes, potatoes, but how they're being done in 2026.

Lenny Murphy: So real quick, this will happen. Another conversation. But I was talking to an old client who's doing something new, uh, yesterday and they are building an ethnographic panel for real world training sets for robots. And that is their, that is the business. Um, because there's a whole other thing. So basically think about, think, think about ethnography, but not necessarily just answer the question of here's what I buy or here's how I use this product, but the data. But truly, they have clients lined up who want to utilize that data to train robots for in-home domestic participation. So there's always something new, right? We take these old solutions, these tried and true things, being applied for new use cases that are going to define the world in a whole other way. Because next year, robots will be the topic, or at least one of them, because that's coming down the pike. Very quickly. So anyway, yeah, like robots, I mean, humanoid robots, I want to be clear what I mean by that, not agents. Real things like real things, robots navigating physical environments.

Lenny Murphy: So yeah.

Karen Lynch: Right. Oh, my gosh. Well, in any event, I'm very excited for this year. And you all should be all because it's going to be a great show. And it's always a good time. We were just talking about the energy at IIX and what that is like, We just had our chair call. It's such a big event that we have a chair call with 23 different volunteers who are chairing on the various stages. It's such a good thing, people are just so excited to chair for us. So that was really exciting. So Bridget and I had a call with them yesterday and the energy is just, people are just jazzed and they're happy to be helping us in that way. It's the, just the kind of the love that people have for this event just oozes out of them when they're on that call. So that was exciting. That was one of the first kind of like, okay, here we go in this home stretch. So anyway, super excited. Enough about that. We should also talk about Europe because that's around the corner. So if you are not coming to North America, you can go to Europe because registration is also open for that. It's the same code, right? Exchange. That agenda is also full and also out there and also going to be great. It's not as big of an event as the IIEX North America, but, you know, equally impactful. You know, I can't say enough about these events. And the vibe is different at both of them. I mean, North America does have that kind of almost like New York or New England or East Coast freneticism, almost like it's like, you got to be there because buzzing, you know, it is just absolutely buzzing. The buzz in Europe is almost a bit more European sophisticated. We're still having conversations, but they get philosophical really quickly. You know, and it's more urbane, you know, sophisticated.

Lenny Murphy: So go to both.

Karen Lynch: So that we can have a conversation about what both of them are like, so I love to do that. And the people that know, it's one of those, if you know, you know, so. Yeah, absolutely.

Lenny Murphy: Well, let's jump in, because there's a lot. There is. There is. A big topic we want to make sure we have room for, I guess. You want me to start? You want to start?

Karen Lynch: Yeah, go for it. I just did a lot of talking. I'll take a sip of water.

Lenny Murphy: OK. Well, we'll start with a little bit of M&A activity. A little slower week for that, but there was one that was really interesting of Canva, which of course has been, you know, staking its claim as kind of the design platform, makes some acquisitions, Smithery and Orto, which when you Read the details, they were both owned by the same company. So that was a package deal. Collaboration, agent management, and customer data marketing capabilities to its platform. And I think it was that last piece that really stood out, this was going from just being a design tool into an orchestration tool for the marketing workflow. So there's that, that we'll see that theme come up in some other articles, you know, that we touch on as well. So this, the plot, the new platformification, right, the kind of architecture and orchestration around business workflows, a lot of that is happening now. So moving away from the bespoke, we do one thing, we'll if you're going to use this for this, now we're going to enable all of this other stuff. So interesting, I thought.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting. And for a lot of us, a lot of our listeners who, you know, are probably, uh, doing a lot of scrappy, scrappy marketing. And you know, if you're one of the smaller agencies that don't have a marketing team and your internal people are, you know, working with Canva, check it out, check it out.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. I found this Anderson Consulting.

Karen Lynch: Well, it's just interesting. So Anderson Consulting is collaborating with a CX research and analytics firm, Multiplica, which I've not heard of, but expanding their data and insights offerings. So just another example of a consulting agency that wants to be in on how we are offering that strategic advice? Well, with data to back us up. That we're offering. So we're not necessarily outsourcing that, you know, now we're now delivering it to you straight from our own organization. So not a surprise, not a surprise.

Lenny Murphy: But there you go. Another example. Another big theme, I think, right. So the platformification, the consulting companies, you know, pulling more in to be able to catch more share wallets, and then MRI Simmons and TransUnion partnering to basically put their audience segments in the true audience data marketplace. Um, so data, data monetization, um, you know, data utility utilization, expanding, it's no longer just one place you go to a marketplace, you buy, you know, access to two different data assets, three big trends, right. Um, across the board, uh, I thought it was interesting. And then, uh, friends of disco with a Comcast advertising partnering directly, um, deterministic TV attribution. Across Comcast TV and streaming. So, uh, Disco has a behavioral platform, behavioral panel, uh, and they capture what people are, are actually absorbing. So, you know, that's, it's kind of like if NBC universal bought Nielsen, um, would that, would that pass regulatory muster? I don't know if that would, but it's the same, same concept, right? I mean, really the publishers, you know, uh, uh, which I guess you call Comcast publisher, um, media companies engaging directly to have data assets to be able to help drive advertising revenue.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. It was, um, you know, I, I'm sitting here thinking about, um, these partnerships and you know, the big picture as I, in my own head, kind of ladder up to what people are doing strategically and what all of these partnerships mean. And I'm like, again, I just keep saying, Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm wondering if our listeners sense, like if they, our regular listeners might be saying, yeah, that makes sense also. But if you're a new listener, you know Lenny and I have been talking a long time about, you know, the merging of these companies to make sure that they are able to deliver at the strategic level, which is the table stakes right now. If you know you just can't deliver a service you have to be delivering a c-level strategy. Widgets don't sell. It's the big picture.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you. I always use the analogy of a widget. Oh, I have a purple widget. I have a pink widget. I have a widget that 's left-handed. It's somewhere in that era anymore, right? It's like, OK, how do you put the widgets together to do more things? We're seeing more of that. All right, well, let's talk about this mythos. Yeah, there are other stars.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. So, usually we like to kind of get to the tech stuff later. And we talked about some more like product feature launches, we will get to those because there were a lot of those. But there was a big story this week that we just don't want to shortchange at the end because there's big implications for our industry. So Claude, which you know, you know, the platform and the people at Anthropic, Claude Mythos is their platform that they're working on, is a model that, again, it's internal right now, but it's, they kind of put the brakes on it, right, for lack of a better word. They were like, whoop, whoop, hold on a second, because they discovered that it is actually a cybersecurity risk. Now, it was supposed to expose vulnerabilities, and potential flaws to people's systems. Like it was going to be a little detective.

Lenny Murphy: I mean, but then it became one. It became a vulnerability.

Karen Lynch: I mean, like, that's what you do. I've watched. Here's where I went with this. I watched enough. I love the show Criminal Minds. I love the show Criminal Minds. The woman on Criminal Minds was like the hacker. She was a hacker. They brought her into work for the FBI because she was really good at what she did. That's what they do. Hackers. Get to work for the government because they're really good at infiltrating the system. It works both ways, right? There's people that work for the government that also become hackers. That's been fictionalized for decades. Okay, so if you are a model that is supposed to expose vulnerabilities for good so that you can fix them, don't you think that it's obvious that, hmm, there might be some players out there who would want to see those vulnerabilities and exploit them, that is not a stretch for me. So they've put the brakes on because maybe they're not quite ready for this model to be fully fledged. So that's the big story, the bottom line. And now there's a lot of follow-up spinoffs that are happening. There's more news around it. You could Google it right now. We have a few articles about it. There are commentaries spinning off. There are people saying doomsday. There are people saying, it's not so bad. There are investors panicking. There are investors saying it's going to be fine. It's a big story.

Lenny Murphy: It is a big story. I thought it was interesting, just to put it in perspective for one anecdote that was in Anthropic's paper. They're very transparent. They released a paper like, here's what we did. And it was sandboxed. So it was separated from the internet, this model, and they figured out a way to connect to the internet and escape and email a researcher. So it was just very good at Yeah.

Karen Lynch: She was at a coffee shop, right?

Lenny Murphy: I think she heard me eating a sandwich in a park or whatever.

Karen Lynch: But yeah, that was her on her lunch break or something. It was in the New York Times this morning. So if you're, you know, or in the New York Times newsletter, which I read, which is what I'm like, it's everywhere. Yeah. I'm sorry.

Lenny Murphy: No, no, no. So it's just recognized. So here's and well, let's go mention these next two articles because I think it ties everything together. So, um, uh, the podcast episode that you found, whether anthropic opening, I can reach profitability and IPO scale. Uh, and you know, that's the big buzz, right? Three, three massive IPOs this year that are all AI. Somehow space X doesn't get categorized. I say that's bullshit. They should be because they bought XAI. Yeah, so there's three massive IPOs that will likely happen this year. SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. Part of that's because they need money. Yeah, right. I mean, you're burning through all the venture cash from a scale standpoint. And that's going to change everything, right? It changes business models, it's one thing when you're working in VCs, it's another when you're public. When you're public, you have governance, you have shareholders, you have a greater responsibility to focus on profitability. The only company who really kind of got past that was Amazon. I don't know how they did it for so long, but the, so all of these, there's risk, like the anthropic model, right? If they had played that differently, or imagined they didn't play it differently, imagine they played on, and it gets out and then it causes some havoc, there's no guarantee that Anthropic would be able to survive the lawsuits and the negative impact that came from something like that. And I'm just using it because they mentioned Mythos. We're building so much on these platforms. And there is no guarantee that these platforms have not found the optimal business model yet, right? Exceed their revenues, even though the revenues are in the billions of dollars. 

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So, so there's a, just a cautionary tale here that, you know, in our race to do this, there's existential risk that the models wrong, bad, whatever screws up, it gets out and takes over the world, whatever Skynet that, that is still not beyond the realm of possibility or some of these companies just financially. This, this, this whole system that we're building, we do not know that they will survive the transition from these massively scaling, fast growing companies into profitable businesses. And if they do, you know, what does that do to the business business models? So many people use chat free products right now, right?

Karen Lynch: Like there is demand for these products. That's for damn sure.

Lenny Murphy: At an enterprise level. Absolutely. We haven't seen it yet on the consumer level, not all the way.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, we need these products to exist because we are building more products around that we'll get to, you know, what listening has done, right? Like, like, these products can't go under because there are businesses that are now being built around relying on them.

Lenny Murphy: Right, right. This is like, they're like energy now, right? It's like the Oh, the, you know, General Electric goes under no general. So, yeah, it's interesting.

Karen Lynch: Well then and you know we we I want to come back to mythos before we move on too much But then you know also reading about chat GPT pro subscription being like month, $100 and I'm like Look like it like come on so we've got our month, $20 and then we've got our $200 month then we're gonna have our month, and $100 I'm like I'm getting a little tired of this because That's not gonna be sustainable for some people businesses, right? So some businesses, it's like, okay, I can afford $20 a month for everybody in my company to have a pro to have one level of pro account, whatever it's called, right? I might not be I might not be able to afford $100 a month for every employee on my team for a certain small business, you can't get their enterprises, maybe it's all you know, like, okay, they'll budget it in, you know, if it's a large company, but that is going to be problematic, because that will definitely influence smaller companies ability to compete with the large companies. And that is problematic.

Lenny Murphy: Um, I'm assuming that right now I've, I've been using perplexity pro enterprise pro.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Cause that's like, you know, 30 bucks a month. Yeah. Okay. I can absorb that cost. Right. Right. My usage indicates I should be on perplexity max enterprise. That's like 150 months.

Karen Lynch: I know.

Lenny Murphy: Okay. That's a little more of a trade off, right? No, it's different, yeah. It is like, wait, that's a bill. That's a, you know, I need to buy a car for my 16 year old soon. That's half a car payment.

Karen Lynch: Right. I know it changes everything. So, um, so we'll see what happens there, but you know, the mythos going back to the mythos thing before we move on and cover these product launches, cause here we are. Um, I just think that as I'm thinking about this, and I'm thinking about cybersecurity in general, and I'm thinking about data security and the connection to our industry. And the vulnerabilities in the systems. Don't think for a minute that there aren't systems, that the systems you are putting in place to shore up data quality, that there aren't also systems trying to find the holes in them and the gaps in them. You can't go to sleep on this issue and say, we've got a solution in place. Data quality does not work that way in this era. You have to be 100%. I feel like everybody needs to hire that person, that data security officer at every level of enterprise or organization to make sure this is ongoing work. It's not a one and done. 100%.

Lenny Murphy: Thank you for bringing it back. And actually, I wanted to share. I was talking last week to friends at a major buyer, right? And we're talking about a new supplier for them. You're like, well, they need to be able to pass SOC 2 and yada, yada, yada. So those are, it's not just, oh, I'm ISO certified. That's not, it's like, these companies are putting in significant security systems because they have more risk and and if we're building stuff You know, oh look I built the school, you know AI moderator. Okay. Yeah, is it touching personal data? Well, you know what one now that has to be sock to compliant is the business. Have you done that? So to your point massive implications on all these things that we cannot forget about but for data quality, but also for just business operations. So yeah, yeah, big deal.

Karen Lynch: You need your AI officer, you need your data security officer. You know, these are the jobs, right?

Lenny Murphy: Yep. All right. We said there's a whole bunch of new product launches.

Karen Lynch: Let's get into them. And I kept thinking, like, where do we put this prolific story? Because it's so interesting to me. And I'm like, I really, I feel like we should, uh, I don't know which, which one of these tabs is the prolific story. So why don't you talk about it? Because I clicked on it and then I followed the link.

Lenny Murphy: Well, yeah, well, let's start. So prolific, this was a, a, a, uh, I've always heard they have a very high quality, um, uh, human respondent delivery system. I'm purposely not using the word panel. Right. Um, and they do AI training and they do this around the UK and they're great folks. Um, Uh, and they put out a statement of, okay, well, we're going to guarantee, um, uh, research grade, real human data. Um, uh, and it's either, I think the detail was, uh, if, if you find somebody that's not a human and it's not high quality, then you get it free basically.

Karen Lynch: So the link that we're sharing is to a LinkedIn post in which there's a link to the actual website with the details. But I'm like, well, that's an interesting guarantee. Like, that's a data quality guarantee that I think is worth looking into. I'm like, okay. So anyway, that's the strongest one I've seen yet. You know, there's a lot of people that are saying it, they're saying it so confidently. Anyway, I'm like, all right, paying attention to that one.

Lenny Murphy: Pretty cool. 100%. And I think we'll see more of that. Now, the challenge is, you know, companies like that scaling the model, you know, the, um, but we'll see, we'll see more of that. Um, I think, uh, so, so hats off to them for putting a, you know, drawing the line of Sam, doing something bold.

Karen Lynch: I mean, I think that's the other thing, like this is a bold statement. So, um, bold, bold when there's, when there's a lot of noise, bold stands out. Right. So they're, they're like, all right, let's stand out here with something with a bold statement.

Lenny Murphy: So it does. And that Yes, you'd state equality Conversation is not going away. It's only increasing and this is an example of a company This is a VC back company. They've been raised. I don't know. I mean like 20-30 million dollars. There is a lot of money, right? And they are, yeah , being bold. So there were a bunch of people who were bold too. So, listen. Labs winner of the competition, I mean Alfred. Alfred is just old.

Karen Lynch: I mean, they have it.

Lenny Murphy: Look, we guys would be clear. We love everybody's playing in this space. We the listening labs won the competition. We're closer to them. We have seen them scale. So there's no shade being thrown on anybody else who's doing all types of great work in this category. From a business perspective, I mean like purely the, how they're marketing themselves, how they are, you know, the moves they are making are incredibly interesting. And Alfred, the CEO, is an interesting guy and they've been very bold. Here's the latest. And this makes perfect sense.

Karen Lynch: So basically you can access the Listen platform directly inside Claude, speaking of Claude, and Notion and ChatGBT. What's interesting is Notion, I don't necessarily put Notion in the same category as Claude and ChatGBT, right? It's not necessarily an LLM, even though there's an LLM behind it, there is AI within Notion. We use Notion here for kind of just work sharing documentation.

Lenny Murphy: It's part of the workflow.

Karen Lynch: So I'm like, this is so interesting. And Claw, GPT, Figma, Notion, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, any MCP compatible tool, connect your entire ListenLabs research library and access it inside the tools your company already uses.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So there we go. Yeah, they're becoming infrastructure. Now they're part of the ecosystem, right? And that's so smart. It's like, well, that's so smart. Yeah. I would never bet on ListenLabs becoming the hub, right? There's really very few, I can only think of like maybe one or two companies that maybe have a shot at being the central operating system for an insights organization, like literally one or two. Everybody else is a plugin in some form or fashion. And again, I'm not, I'm not denigrating what they do. They do very specific things. Yeah, listenlabs, first one we've seen because we own that, right? We just want to be part of the workflow. We are embedding into the architecture to be accessible so that you can now utilize this tool and you're no longer locked in a silo. You're pulling all of this out within your workflow and the platforms that you use. And incredibly telling.

Karen Lynch: And here's the other thing that, again, I have Alfred's post pulled up. Here's what he slash they have done well. Since they, I would say the reason they won the competition, they are very adept at simplifying what they do. It says here, we've already seen creative use cases from early users. Pre-study planning and notion. A research lead can reference patterns and gaps to write a tighter discussion guide before a single interview happens. He's boiled down a use case to a single sentence. That's what they did on stage. Captured their entire business premise beautifully in the first 60 seconds on stage. So if you do nothing else, learn from how they've done it, study them as an example of how to communicate your value prop. He's very good at that. They are well educated and have done a great job. So anyway. Nothing about them, but they are a use case.

Lenny Murphy: The last of that, the operational, if you're building technology in our industry or leveraging technology in our industry, start embedding it into the workflow. That foundation will unlock more utility utilization, etc., by not being a discrete separate platform. You know, another tool, but put it where people already use it, put it where they live.

Karen Lynch: Um, and by the way, if you're listening, we don't have a thing for them, but shout out, get IAX West on your radar happening this fall, where they are our biggest sponsor and they will be there with a big presence. Cause it's right in their backyard in San Francisco.

Lenny Murphy: So absolutely. Absolutely. All right. There were a whole bunch of here that I think are still variations on a theme, the trust pilot. No, no.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, go.

Lenny Murphy: Putting AI-oriented customer review insight tools. So use reviews. Again, expanding their capability. They have data, and now they're expanding the utility of that data. And what's the best way to do that? As part of an insights function. So really interesting. They're our good friends at System One. They'll test their ad, put in. They used to be Brain Juicer. Now, AI-ifying that, so that was great. Yeah, more diagnostics. Quantalope, their ad optimizer, AI-driven tool for improving ad and messaging performance. So AI, AI. I thought this stag, well, this is really cool. Their AI assistant, Lou, named after Lou Harris.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I thought that was great. I was like, I love that it's named after Lou Harris. So yeah, I love that. Instant brand tracking, reputation insights, you know, 24-7, talk to Lou, literally. I love that they could talk to Lou.

Lenny Murphy: I like that. Well done. Mark Penn knows his history. I mean, he's been around a long time. That's a pretty cool callback to the origin of Harris, Harris Interactive, it was Lou Harris in Associates, I think is what it was called originally.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I liked that too. I thought that was, I don't know. You know, some of them give you warm fuzzies. That one gave me one.

Lenny Murphy: Me too. I was like, aww. This Oracle one is a big one. Yeah. So, yeah.

Karen Lynch: So, Oracle launched fusion agentic applications for CX to bring agentic AI into customer experience workflows, but through Oracle, which Yeah. Just Oracle, Oracle's in the game.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. I mean, and that, so back, we made the comment for who the platform Oracle is infrastructure. They are foundational infrastructure for virtually every business on the planet in some form or fashion. Right. The, and now they're opening up. It's not just, Oh, we're built on Oracle servers. You know, it's like, well, there's a lot of shit running through our servers. Now here's some tools to use it. Yeah. Very, very, and specifically to call out CX. That specifically, that was interesting.

Karen Lynch: I know it's funny, you know, because I think I've shared with you when sometimes I wish these stories came out, you know, like at a different time in my life, you know, when I'm at Qualtrics they divide us into kind of categories, those of us who travel, there's media and there's, and I've said more than once like sometimes I wish I was in on the analyst conversations because I'd like to know. I'm like, I'm sure they were talking about, you know, if they knew about this, you know, kind of what was going on with Oracle. Like, I'm sure those analysts are aware of all of it, right? People, folks from Forrester in particular. And we sometimes, we sometimes cross, cross mingle. But anyway, I'm like, this would be a conversation that I would love to have had with them, you know, like, all right, so. Yeah, it's interesting.

Lenny Murphy: Qualtrics, that's what they were going for, right? But it was too early. They didn't have the unlock of these tools to make that. Because Oracle and SAS, I would consider them kind of primary competitors, right? But that was the deal with Qualtrics. They wanted to embed enterprise data into Qualtrics and merge it. And it just never quite came off, as far as I could tell. And that's why they spun Qualtrics back out. But now here we are again, right? Same ideas. Yeah, very interesting.

Karen Lynch: So Verisite launched Doc2Survey, a free AI tool turning formatted documents into fully programmed Qualtrics surveys, in particular, in minutes. So, you know, I started thinking about this because I'm thinking about a Word doc. How many times have we, when you're on the supplier side, you have this Word document, this lengthy, you know, kind of, you know, questionnaire survey, even like a screener and it's ridiculous in word and then it's got to be programmed, you know, and that's a task that somebody has to do. Um, and uh, and yeah, so now there's, there's, there's tools that are just making that task simple. Maybe it's not that new by the way. Maybe there are other tools that are doing this, right? This is just one that's being suddenly broadcast.

Lenny Murphy: So I have to give a shout out to Jeffrey Henning. At Perseus because we used Perseus back in 2005. We used Perseus for our online survey programming because they could do exactly that. Take a Word document and you could translate that into a questionnaire to be built.

Karen Lynch: Not quite new.

Lenny Murphy: Not a new concept, but a new way to do it. It's free. So that's cool, too. So yeah.Niq boy, they've been on every freaking week, every week, I was just talking to somebody.

Karen Lynch: Every week, I was just talking to him yesterday. And I'm like, Niq comes up every week, they're doing something growth pathways, AI enabled customer insights and analytics aimed at helping brands drive category and brand growth. So I don't know how this is very different other than it's, you know, in their, their brand tracking? Like, what's this one all about?

Lenny Murphy: And there's like, recommendations. I mean, I think it's not just data. But it is, oh, this is how you know, this brand compares to that brand. And here's what we've seen in the market this week. And here's what you should do. And tying that into the activation flow, right? So for the workflow, it's not just the data, it's the data that drives and not just the not just data, it Uh, from an information standpoint, but connected to implications and outcomes and shortening that process to actually act on it is, was my Read. Um, so again, workflow see in this, you know, this merger to workflow, um, uh, which we've got one more we'll want to touch on. Well, why don't we go ahead, Karley, why don't we bring that up? The Suzy refounding, because it's part of this whole idea, right, of, of a decision engine. Yeah, yeah.

Karen Lynch: Last bullet on the list.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, it's the last bullet, Karley. But the, but it's, it's part of this idea, they're, they want to be the decision engine that manages the workflow. And arguably, they have been, they've, they've, but they weren't positioned that way. They're trying to get more towards the act to drive the action. Same thing NIQ is doing. So hats off to them for that.

Karen Lynch: I'm glad they're doing it because we've been a little worried about knowledge management because, you know, LLMs kind of came in and talked about a business model because right now you build an LLM and everybody can have a knowledge management system, knowledge management system quickly. You know what I mean? So it's like as soon as he got there first, but then kind of, uh, things changed, right? The marketplace changed. And was quite flooded. So I'm glad that they are refounding themselves, you know, in a different business model.

Lenny Murphy: So, yeah. Yeah. From delivering insights to embedding decision support and actionability into insights platforms, which probably the last that's also this last one you want to talk about is Resonate.

Karen Lynch: Well, they've launched something called Ignition, giving independent agencies, proprietors, data, AI activation tools, helping them compete at scale. So I don't know much about Resonate. To me, this is like, yep, you know, kind of just another tool helping, again, agencies that don't have this integrated in their own systems. That's how I interpreted this one.

Lenny Murphy: Me too. And to be clear, agencies are ad agencies, marketing agencies.

Karen Lynch: So they're embedding data tools and utility on the, you know, so there are going to be some that are big enough to have it kind of in-house, and then there are going to be those that are not.

Lenny Murphy: Sure. Right. Right. It, it, it lets, you know, Murphy marketing compete with, uh, with, you know, publicists. Yeah. So, um, which there is no Murphy marketing, but the, uh, maybe one day we'll see, but, um, anyway, all right.

Karen Lynch: You found these last two, I thought, uh, you know, to be, before we wrap, um, and I know Harvard to review is hard for everyone to Read. But for those of you who can, a great article on AI-powered interviews, which I just think every time kind of academia gets, you know, kind of gets their hands on these things that are relevant in the industry, you know, about how it's adapting. It's, you know, how these conversations are happening. They're faster and they're lower cost and anyway, changing workflows. So it's kind of more of the same, but academia kind of supports where the industry has come. And for those of you who are still kind of hanging on to the fact that this shouldn't be happening, I hate to tell you that this is your reality and I hope you've caught up. And that's really all there is to it about this one. The BCG one is really for the brands in the mix. It's an interesting kind of directional, it gives great, like, here's what you need to do, kind of spotting how to turn signal from the noise, right, which we try to do, separating signal from the noise, but really in the world of innovation, how to pull, how to, when you're looking at trends and when you're thinking about white space, how you're really able to then say, where do we execute and innovate? And I just think it's a really smart article. I mean, of course, coming out of BCG, it would be but just, you know, a great Read for those kinds of insights teams on the brand side who are charged with innovation. Good Read for you for, you know, for the weekend or for the week ahead.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, 100%. So another packed week. It seems like we, there's, guys truly understand this is only half.

Karen Lynch: Half.

Lenny Murphy: Of the stuff, if that, right, of what we look at. We, there's just so, It deserves discussion in context. So thank you for, as we've expanded from our original 20 minutes to now, the average seems to be 40.

Karen Lynch: I'm not going to make it to 50. That's my goal. I sure would like to get it back to 30. I don't know if we can do that, but we're going to try.

Lenny Murphy: There's just so much happening and it's important. That for every article, these were the most important, but I understand there are a lot of other things. If it wasn't important, we wouldn't be talking about it. Wouldn't include it in our mix if we didn't think about it. Karen does a fantastic job of cutting this down.

Karen Lynch: Oh, go on, Lenny, go on.

Lenny Murphy: You do. Because I'm just like, throw it all against the wall. I just want to talk about it all.

Karen Lynch: If we talked about it all, we would be here for two hours. And ain't nobody got time for that.

Lenny Murphy: That's right. That's right.

Karen Lynch: I've got an agenda to tag.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. On that note, everybody had a wonderful weekend. We will be back next week.

Karen Lynch: We will be back. We'll see you next week, friends. Have a great one.

Lenny Murphy: Thank you all so much. Bye.

Links from the episode:

Canva acquires Simtheory and Ortto 

Andersen Consulting expands its data and insights offering through a collaboration agreement with CX research and analytics firm Multiplica  

MRI-Simmons and TransUnion expand their relationship 

DISQO and Comcast Advertising partner 

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ChatGPT has a new $100 per month Pro subscription 

Prolific publicly backs its research-grade, real-human data approach with a stronger commercial commitment to authentic data collection 

Listen Labs launches Listen MCP 

Trustpilot launches AI-oriented customer review insight tools 

System1 upgrades Test Your Ad with new AI-enabled diagnostics and more intuitive reporting 

quantilope launches Ad Optimizer 

Stagwell adds AI assistant Lou to HarrisQuest to deliver near-instant brand tracking and reputation insights across 24 markets 

Oracle launches Fusion Agentic Applications for CX 

Verasight launches Doc2Survey 

NIQ launches Growth Pathways 

Suzy 'Refounded' with Decision Engine Focus 

Resonate launches Ignition 

How AI Helps Scale Qualitative Customer Research 

How Big Brands Can Spot the Next Big Thing