When AI Takes the Wheel: The Future of Consumer Intelligence

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!

 

Karen Lynch and Lenny Murphy tackle the seismic shifts reshaping market research and consumer intelligence. From the Middle East's emergence as a technology powerhouse to AI tools that are compressing the entire purchase funnel into milliseconds, the industry is evolving faster than ever. The conversation cuts through the hype to address what really matters: how companies can bridge the gap between what consumers say and do, whether smaller firms can survive the automation race, and how much control we're willing to surrender to AI systems that can reprogram themselves.

As virtual worlds become trivially easy to create and customer intelligence platforms consolidate into unified ecosystems, one question looms large: are businesses prepared to adapt their strategies for an increasingly automated future, or will they be left behind?

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

Use code EXCHANGE to get a 15% discount on your general admission IIEX tickets!

IIEX North America

IIEX Europe

Take the GRIT Survey 

Stay Ahead of the Curve! Subscribe to The Exchange Newsletter on LinkedIn Today! 

Transcript

Lenny Murphy: Here. And we're live. There we go. As always, right up to The second of like...

Karen Lynch: Right up to The second.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Technically, I think I'm a second behind here, but whatever. It's all good.

Lenny Murphy: It's all good. Happy Friday.

Karen Lynch: Happy Friday. I hope everybody is safe and secure after the ridiculous storm system that moved in last week. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. This one, what I haven't looked at this morning, but The, uh, uh, like who basically whoever didn't get nailed last week, uh, last weekend is going to get nailed this weekend. I think it is The way that plays out. So yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. The Carolinas, I think, are, um, poor jazz. We should talk to Jasmine, but The Carolinas, I think are about to get walloped is The coast.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. And we are still, we are still, uh, uh, ice bound here in Kentucky. And I know you guys are as well, so.

Karen Lynch: Well, we're not ice. See, the thing is we, we didn't really get the ice. We got snow. So, you know, we had, we still have about, cause it's too cold to melt. So we still have, you know, about a foot of snow everywhere. I mean, it's not Buffalo, right?

Lenny Murphy: It's not, um, at least it's not Buffalo.

Karen Lynch: My gauge is going to Buffalo in the winter. It's like, it's like, yeah, well, so, um, anyway, my guess. Friends in Buffalo would probably get a kick out of that. But yeah, I mean, we're, we're fine. We're, it's cold. That's all. It's just cold. I don't know when the temperatures get down like this, it's just really too hard to even get the fresh air that I think we all need. 

Lenny Murphy: Well, even down in Florida this weekend, I mean, there you'll, you know, The joke about The falling iguanas, right. But literally that will be an issue this weekend for our friends in South Florida, uh, watch for The falling iguanas.

Karen Lynch: No, it's so sad. It's so sad. Yeah, no, I know I feel pretty. I do . I feel for it for you know wild animals because it's wild out there for heaven's sake.

Lenny Murphy: So yes, we know it's also wild The news this week actually, you know, you know what you wish The grits wild to Charlie we're staying on topic, right? That's right grits wild to it if there's so much wild change This is how we track those changes from your perspective. So please, if you have not taken a few minutes to participate in The latest GRIT survey, please do. Help us help you.

Karen Lynch: Help us help you, for sure. I think that, yeah, yeah. More completions will make for a better output.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely, right. The more the merrier. So yeah, so please, please take a few minutes and then, because things are wild, there's, we got APAC coming up, that's wild. You're going to QRCA, that's wild.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, you know, yeah, you know, shout out to The folks that are going to The APAC event. I think it's going to be great. Cara and Bridget, you know, our events, our events team, they will be out there working with The production team, of course. And Mariah is visiting from our sales department. She will be meeting all of the exhibitors out there and talking to our sponsors, you know, one-to-one. So good luck to all of them. I think they're all in the air. Actually, they're all probably in the air right now. I think they left last night and they're on that 24-hour trek, 24-plus-hour trek. So good luck to them. And yeah, I'm going to QRCA. I'm going, you know, Monday, but I will be back on Thursday, you know, flying west to east. I'll be back Thursday night. So I will be here on Friday. But that just means heavy lift for you because I don't know what I'll be curating when I'm out there. I'll come back prepared to talk about some kind of word on the street. I'm very curious how that segment of our industry is looking, feeling, I wanna know that is really my motivation for going other than to see many, many dear friends is really doing a pulse check out there and finding out kind of how everybody's feeling, what everybody's thinking, what The vibe is, what The word on The street is. Seeing new players that are entering that space. I'll also be, Green Book has a kiosk, so I'll be talking to anybody who wants to talk to us, so I'm kind of wearing many hats when I'm there. But facilitating a round table on thought leadership, so excited for that, to kind of get thought leaders' thoughts on thought leadership for this whole meta-conversation.

Lenny Murphy: That's right, no navel-gazing.

Karen Lynch: So yeah, so anyways, come back next Friday, I will be back, you know, ready to talk about that and then whatever else transpires in The next few days.

Lenny Murphy: Let's see. It was a weird week this week. I mean, there was, there was like a lot of news, but not a lot of research specific news. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. I kept thinking it's because of The weather that people were just like, you know, disrupted a bit because of The weather, certainly here in The U S it was like half our country was disrupted. But, um, but let's get into it. Cause there were, you know, a lot of good stories largely, um, that you found. So thank you because I was deep into agenda work this week. So thanks for the heavy lifting, Lenny.

Lenny Murphy: You know, what can I say? The, uh, uh, yeah, a lot of, in some ways kind of my take was more of the same, right? I mean, the trajectory we've been seeing, uh, Ipsos acquiring a seventh decimal for their Mina audience measure. So that's interesting as Ipsos continues to expand their global footprint. And audience measurement continues to be a big deal. So that when I could see about seven decimal apps, a behavioral app, you know, with a panel and they're metering, you know, folks' feedback, et cetera, et cetera. I thought that was really interesting. Focus just on the mean of the market, which is not the easiest market to do. To do those things in.

Karen Lynch: For those who don't know the acronym, Middle East, Northern Africa. That's what we're talking about there. Good to check it out. It's interesting to me just regionally when we go overseas and we're at Europe or we're at our APAC event, kind of where certainly at our Europe event last year, we had folks from The Middle East joining us talking about their perspective in The Middle Eastern region. And I just think it's fascinating. And there are lots of our colleagues that have that region rolled into their portfolios of what they manage, so.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. And a lot of the investment dollars flowing into technology in our space and in general coming from there. I mean, Dubai's going to end up owning the entire AI industry.

Karen Lynch: So we had at our Europe event, IAX Europe, we had a woman from Dubai on stage. I had a fireside chat with her and she was kind of talking about one of their sustainable cities. Anyway, and the insights that go into building kind of literally a new city within The city. Anyway, but I said to Lukasz, I was like, maybe we need to do an IAX release in Dubai.

Lenny Murphy: Buy when you're like, just because, I mean, that is like it, let's take too far down that rabbit hole. But I mean, from a tech standpoint, it's just, it's just really interesting, right? That, that specifically to buy UAE, uh, I, they are, it's kind of like Singapore, right? I mean, they are a tech centric leading, uh, country and, uh, very high, very interesting.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, and I think what's interesting, again, as we talked about this Expo City is The name of The city that I was referring to, she was saying that in Dubai it has The highest number of expats from other countries, The highest number of countries represented by expats within that country. No other country has as many countries represented within it.

Lenny Murphy: How about that?

Karen Lynch: I was like, that's so cool. So The insights work is Beyond multicultural, you know, it is a cult it is The most number of cultures within a culture that you will find anywhere in The world.

Lenny Murphy: Sure, right, you know used to be Hong Kong and Singapore and you think of those cities, but London But you know, Dubai really emerged there. Anyway, so yeah Middle East Well, but last thing on that growth market, right so that is it is emerging as a growth market So if you're in The US and you're building technology, uh, don't, don't ignore a, uh, a Middle East strategy. Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: And good for Ipsos, you know, kind of working too, to measure the audience there too, because you know, again, audience behavior, very interesting.

Lenny Murphy: So absolutely, absolutely. Then another, uh, another partnership part that was an acquisition as a partnership, um, Medallia and ADA, uh, combining Medallia's customer intelligence platform with Ada's agentic AI for CX. So there's, you know, Medallia has been kind of quiet recently, I think, uh, with their, so they're flexing their muscles again to, uh, say, Oh, wait, we're, we are adapting to The, uh, The agentic workflow model. So, uh, it will be interesting to watch them. Remember people forget a couple of years ago, Medallia was making a concerted play directly into The market research space. They seem to pull back a little bit from that. Um, but I think they were just retooling their raw strategy and now we're seeing them come out and saying, we're still here and we're doing lots of good stuff.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Good for them. I'll probably get, uh, we're, we're deep in, um, sidebar, The other conference that I'll be attending this spring outside of QRCA will be Qualtrics. So we're deep in kind of planning for that, um, with that team. And I am sure obviously Medallia always comes up, um, at that event with other people that go to both. So I'll be, I'll be. Curious and listening in and hopefully can report back on that too. So yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, I, I really, on that note, Qualtrics is leaning so heavily into synthetic. Uh, I am intensely curious on how that plays, uh, coming out of, uh, of that event. So, uh, good, good little sharing updates.

Karen Lynch: Real time.

Lenny Murphy: We're really hand-to-hand flexing your type.

Karen Lynch: Been, we're, uh, I know it's that kind of a day, right? We must, we must seem like we're all over the place, but, but really, you know, this is just talking about Medallia leads us right into intelligence. I was like, look how many stories about intelligence in general. Yes. Like, you know, just, this is how businesses are getting smarter and we're talking about it because you all, you all are, you know, should be privy to what people are doing in The intelligence space because it's beyond just, you know, CX work. So Harris Poll launches QuestRQ and always on reputation intelligence platform. So, you know, getting those live, live brand reads or reputation reads, more than just a tracker, right? Real time for issues popping up, allowing you to, you know, react real time to the intelligence you're gathering. So, cool.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. And plugged into that broader Stagwell cloud, right? Stag, you know, Keras owned by Stagwell, you know, they do lots of different things. And so seeing that integration, um, for that intelligence layer, uh, which on that note, so companies, we don't talk about that often. Um, but they are now firmly talking about our language, uh, global data, their strategic intelligence platform, uh, consolidating thematic research tools, advisory, so lots of different data sources. The research fits in to is one of those but Positioning obviously for their subscribers as your first stop. Yeah, you synthesize all of this information And then, you know, make your appropriate decisions based on that constant feed of intelligence. The same thing about Bloomberg I thought was so interesting because it's Bloomberg right and I and and anyway, so Bloomberg is adding alternate data entitlements to their terminals.

Karen Lynch: So expanding their discovery tools for investments is like feeding investment research. And I, you know, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about this one this morning. And I was thinking, you know, our play, The players in our industry, our listeners may not, may not be doing investment research. So I really want to talk about why this one feels important to us to be sharing out because I think there's a lot to it. You know, it's important beyond just investors. So what's your take? And then I'll piggyback.

Lenny Murphy: I mean, I have done a ton of investment research for the last two or three months. That's probably eaten up most of my time on The Gen 2 of my day. And that is very comprehensive. It incorporates lots of different data sources, including primary research, qualitative research, et cetera, et cetera. So, uh, I mean, Bloomberg is taking it up a little bit, right? They're looking at, you know, capital markets and trades and all that type of good stuff. I don't pay much attention to that specifically. Um, but it is still a synthesis of that. And, uh, a lot of The companies that a lot of The startups, uh, early stage companies in our space, The investment community is a big client base for them. A lot of the qualitative scale platforms, private equity, investors, funds, those are big clients. A lot of synthetic, a lot of the investor community lies in synthetic. So those worlds are integrating.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And I mean, so yeah, so it makes a lot of sense for you with The Gen 2 work that you do as a consultant, but I think also for insights business, businesses, The ones that we primarily serve at Green Book that are not also collaborating with you on all things M&A potential, et cetera, et cetera. Being tapped into this kind of data, this investment research data and what they're offering, this discovery data, it's helpful for them to just look at it and learn about their own, you know, for their own forecasting processes and what they're doing for their strategic thinking, you know, it's, it just is showing you to go broader in your thinking about your own business and kind of look to, you know, look to discover The insights that you can glean because during this time, Lenny, tell me if you agree, during this time when, you know, five-year planning might seem really hard because we are, we've been so disruptive and we don't really have a clear roadmap, what are you to do? Well, The more you glean from other areas and The more you discover and think about and look at adjacencies and look at competing businesses, The more accurately maybe you can plot out a path for The next six months, which might be what you have to do is work incrementally instead of trying to say, here's our five-year plan for our business. People might call out on that.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. I always created it two years ago. I think I told the story, but I'll tell it again. It was at an AMA event, and the head of research for Batesville caskets was presenting. And it was fascinating because you don't do primary research on caskets, right? Instead, they were looking at all these different signals from lots of other categories to help them understand if cup sizes in cars were getting bigger, well, we need to have bigger caskets because people are going to be heavier. It's that type of stuff. The point was, and this was 15 years ago, The, uh, this idea of, of synthesizing signals from lots of different sources, whether you are doing it for your own business or, you know, to benefit clients, uh, is. Absolutely important. And, and now getting much, much easier because of AI. So vitally important in companies like this, Blendy or Blendy, sorry, Bloomberg. Global data, they already play in that arena. They are The aggregator, The curation engine, and they continue to expand on that.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look at, so think, so think, what types of alternate data can we be looking at for your business? So use that as kind of The, if that's what, if alternate data is a thing, what kind of alternate data, you know, maybe it's just beyond social media listening. Maybe you're looking at something else. What, anyway, so to help inform your own businesses.

Lenny Murphy: 100, secondary research. And speaking of QRCA, I'm sure our old friend Shamsu is back with another company. So you want to talk about that? I'm sure that you're very familiar with it. I'll be around next week.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. What a nice guy. Yeah. So Bello's debuting an online call platform. It's all conversational, lightweight conversation first, test ideas quickly, kind of like, you know, it's all about agility. I think that, um, I think that The, you know, The key takeaway here is going to be usability, you know, not, not The first one doing this, not The first iteration either, but highly usable and, um, you know, you know, quick test tool.

Lenny Murphy: So wasn't it, I mean, uh, Shamsu, right. I mean, he's built multiple platforms over the years through The iteration.

Karen Lynch: Digital qual and so I really I liked it because I he is a qualitative researcher who is also a technologist and is he keeps iterating and building new tools based on The new capability so I love that yeah in that particular arena we have some you know there's someone who just keeps you know hey and The first one was hatch first tank yeah The first one out and it was so much more usable like it was hard to actually get was one One of those things, I don't know if you know this because I know you're on Windows, but when you were on Windows and then you switched to a Mac, you thought everything was so much more complicated, but it was actually designed to be very user-friendly. So you had this cognitive disconnect when you were switching to the more user-friendly platform because your brain was like, isn't it much more complicated than this? And the answer was no. So that's how I felt about Hashtag. It was like, at the time, it was so much easier. And yet it was hard to transition because I'm like, but wait, anyways. So, yeah, it'd be cool. I'd love to see a demo of this actually and see, you know, how that usability is manifesting with today's tech.

Lenny Murphy: So I'll bet he'll be there next week. I'm sure it's going to happen. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: No, I'm really excited to see The tech and The tech and The tech in The arena.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, and that, that ties in with the idea of, and we are, I think there are more of that. We're pulling with the folks in usability, UX pulling experts, right. I mean, make it purpose built. For The users, you know, and this is a great example of that. Speaking of user testing with a Figma plugin. Yeah. Duh. Right. I mean, why not? So they're utilizing all of The workflows built into Figma and taking The data to make it more, more interesting. My love affair with notebook LM continues, right? It's revelatory. To take information like, oh, this is so much cooler now to be able to see it and visualize it.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I think that the key here is, like we use Figma here at Green Book, right? And so there are AI tools to help you create things in Figma, like help a layman create something in Figma. But now this layer of, and by the way, also now take what you've created by The help, with The help of AI, and now let's go out and do a UX test right inside these design workflows that they've built. So designers or wannabe designers who are now dabbling in Figma, not only can create, but then you can also test all within that platform. So I think it's pretty cool.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, yeah. And glad you turned it around from the way I was thinking about it. So that works both ways, and that's We're seeing these two-way integrations that enable so many interesting things. The NIQ, I thought this was really interesting. We all know that The issues between say and do, The say-do gap, The purchase intent, not a particularly good metric, but we all do it. Rolling out a new solution based on behalf behavioral data, purchase data, combined with attitudinal data with a layer of behavioral science to try and bridge that gap. Their stay-due gap measurement framework.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. What I like about it is we're not going to change the behavior that has, that gap is going to exist. We're not going to, people are going to tell you what they're going to tell you then their behavior is going to say otherwise. So identifying the gap, sure. But now if we can overlay The two things, The two measurements to show like, we can't necessarily, The gap is going to exist, we can't necessarily close it, but we can maybe correlate how to act on it as if we've closed it. How would I have interpreted this? Like, you know, if they're if they're saying they're doing this, but they're actually doing this, here's what we can maybe put our money or something like that, so.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. And I think that Delta is an interesting opportunity as well. Well, why aren't they doing what they said they were going to do? I know. So how can we drive greater activation there? So that's the first thing I've seen at scale, and certainly NIQ has scaled to just tackle that. Because there's always been kind of a dirty little secret in The industry, I think, of that. Oh, ask for purchase intent, why? Because we don't have any other way?

Karen Lynch: No, because we really need to know if they're going to buy this thing or not. No, I know. As a qualitative researcher, that was probably my least favorite question to always ask because, you know, how likely are you to buy this? Or, you know, would you buy it? There were times when I had to point blank, say like, would you buy it? Because that's what The client insisted on hearing in the back. And the people are like, yeah, you know, they'd like, they kind of like they're on the spot and they're doing the best they can, but it's not accurate information. You know, it's, it's a lot of variables.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: A lot of variables. So, and people know it. People are like, yeah, maybe, probably. I mean, every now and then there would be a product that I was talking to people about and they'd say, absolutely. And if they say something like that, it's like, cool, tell me, give it to me now. Or if they said, oh, hell no. Then I'm like, all right, cool. Tell me why not. You know, that kind of information becomes useful then, but yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Well, it's interesting that they are leveraging purchase data and behavioral data. We've talked about this for weeks, months, The explosion of demand for that type of data. And here's one more example of that. So another rollout, Blendy, with their just end-to-end automation. So we've talked about workflows, agentic workflows. Here's another example. I didn't even know that Blendy had an in-house data collection platform workflow. But they do. And they have made that, they've just made it easy.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. And also it's allowing their teams to, it is allowing their teams to then do The work of The thinking and The consultancy kind of mindset. Coming up with The insights, creating The narrative, whatever they need to do. I just think, Blenny, what's interesting before we kind of shift into tech developments, what's interesting about these is this is where we are starting to see, I think, at this point in The industry or this point in time in The disruption that we're in, how The big guys are really making The moves. You know, they are, you know, hate to say it, going to be harder and harder to compete with. People have to work harder to compete with the bigs. That's all they can do because they are putting money towards the development of these new products. So I was talking to somebody this week, a company struggling and, you know, and that's my fear for them as not one of the large companies is, you know, are they going to be able to keep competing, you know, like what, what, what happens to them. So I really think that people need to just do the strategic thinking we're encouraging them to do, um, and, and aggressively plan to compete.

Lenny Murphy: Agreed. And, and maybe, and that does go into our segue for The, this last little bit, The, well, what I am increasingly realizing and thinking about my time is, you know, uh, building and running research companies. I wanted to own the entire workflow internally from a control standpoint, which meant labor, labor and licensing software, right? I mean, fundamentally, The and that was existential to deliver on The real value, but it's so easy to get caught up as a CEO into The process and forget The value creation, value creation is in The answers we provide customers. And I think that we're rapidly emerging a place where, and driven by some stuff we're gonna talk about in a minute with all The AI, we just need to rethink that The process isn't ours, that may be value creation for us, it is not value creation for clients. And it may be time to rethink your strategy and let go of The process and have a stack of relationships that deal with The process that are inexpensive and just focus on being The expert and delivering good answers, because that's where The rubber hits The road. Everything else is noise. These companies are building technologies that do that, which goes, too. So Google, their autobrowse AI agent, was really interesting.

Karen Lynch: So we operate in Chrome. So this is kind of a Chrome's agendic work. And there's some features like, I don't know, other people who are working in Chrome, like this week we were able to have split screen happening. So in the same tab, two screens going, and those two screens can kind of interact with one another. And, you know, Gemini's been, you know, kind of an AI tool, like, you know, have your email opened up and have Gemini opened up. And then the next thing, you know, Gemini's telling you which emails you have to respond to first, that kind of thing. So there's this, excuse me, integration is happening. It's very much like The Atlas browser that I started using, um, you know, months ago now where it's like, you know, chat GPT was kind of built right in and then would do things for me if I'm like, Ooh, you know, please do this, take, please, you know, create an Asana task based on this email. So I don't forget. And like, you know, I, it was just taking over my screen and doing it for me. So this is definitely moving into that, um, into that space as well. Uh, and it's, you know, arguably, um, you know, if you're not in The Microsoft ecosystem, you know, when you're in a Google ecosystem, like it's just going to be happening, whether you're asking for it or not. So you might as well, you know, experiment and start to use it because this is your new workspace.

Lenny Murphy: Right. Uh, and then, then we get to malt bot, uh, formerly Claude bot, um, which is that on steroids. If you guys have not been, did you, I mean, literally this for me exploded last week out of the blue. Right. The, I, I was not, this was not on my radar of this proactive agent. Like literally The stories that I have Read and some of these here, like even The developers, it's open source software, open source AI that you just tell, here's The objective. And it does what is necessary, including reprogramming itself, you know, like scary. I mean, there were literally, you Read this and there's people going, Oh my God, this thing is like managing my entire life now without me even asking it to just giving it The ingress. So it's that, that Chrome agent.

Karen Lynch: So The Chrome agent and, and Atlas, um, you know, with The, The, uh, chatty PT integration, like all of that is you are still in control of, you are still telling it what to do as The primary user, you're still typing it in, please do this. So, yeah, what we're talking about is this open source model that will just do those things if you dial it up. So, you know, I think that Tim just shared, husband, Tim Lynch, we had it running in our home Sunday through Thursday. It's very fun for those who want to geek out.

Lenny Murphy: What was it managing, Tim? Did it? I mean, what story was this?

Karen Lynch: Were you using this to map out our Saturday? Is this what you were using? No, no, no, no. Maybe not. He'll let me know in just a minute. Now I know he's listening. So, you know, anyway, not running to Starbucks and getting me a coffee. But the reality is, what's creepy about this to me is, yes, they're making it open source. So developers can do this and start to build this in. And it's that taking that step out where you're directing it. That makes me very uncomfortable. So I was looking at it and I was looking at the examples. And you know, a lot of it is we can integrate from WhatsApp to Discord to, you know, to whatever other platforms to Slack and kind of manage all your conversations and pick up a thread here. And I'm like, no, I don't really want to give it that much power. So that would make me very uncomfortable if our development team went in and started, you know, playing with this. Well, I hope they actually play with it to learn from it, but I don't necessarily want to see it in action too quickly.

Lenny Murphy: So, yeah, I'm there with you. It freaks me out that The, and especially The, I mean, it's just some of The stories with The developers of like, yeah, I loaded an audio file and suddenly it was talking to me.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Wait, how are you talking? Well, I decided that The app or The agent decided, well, you're using audio, so we figured you want audio. It programmed itself to now be a verbal platform.

Karen Lynch: That's all well and good if it's accurate. But like anybody who's ever used a GPT and said, that's not quite right. If you ask it to craft messaging or if you ask it to craft communication is where I see it the most. And I'm like, no, that is not something I would say. Like, no, like going back to the drawing board. I was working with my daughter who wanted to send an email last night and she was kind of reading me, you know, what she had, what she and ChatGPT had cooked up. And I'm like, that's not quite right. That's not how you would speak to them. Don't, don't write it that way, et cetera, et cetera. So because it sometimes is imperfect in its answer, how could we trust it to switch between messaging platforms? How can it take something from our Slack channel and put it in a WhatsApp group and have it be accurate if we are not checks and balances for it? So super unnerving.

Lenny Murphy: It is. But Tim, thank you, Tim. Also, I think Tom Anderson is listening to us as well based on some of the comments we're seeing. But anyway, hi, Tom. Hi, Tim. We are rapidly emerging where as managers, we are teams of agents and that is a new skill set that we have to be able to to utilize I am I have not gotten there yet personally I'm not there you know I just used my perplexity and you know my tools and it's still The old-fashioned way right but The benefits of doing something so in this is really I want to get to I know we're getting close time The The ability to compete effectively we think we have these massive barriers Tools like this can be a very effective force multiplier and equalizer, right? They can do a lot of work to build stuff and help and make all these things happen in a much more efficient way. But that's a whole new world when they are proactively doing things. I mean, there's stories right now of people that they're using this agent to build businesses without any human intervention whatsoever. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So what The hell does that look like,

Karen Lynch: You're at the top of a slippery slope. So, you know, let's all walk carefully along that.

Lenny Murphy:  Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. All right. That trail on the top is Metta. Let's talk about what Metta is doing. Right. So speaking of agentic work, there's a lot of stuff about agents right now. Right. So Metta is highlighting right now their agentic commerce tools. Right. So personalized shopping assistance. Basically, if you're shopping is going to be kind of, you know, agentically organized so that you see something on Instagram. I'm on Instagram. So, you know, you see, you really need to, you know, shop now or, or learn more about a certain thing. But now we've got agentic shopping assistance in there that now I might not just see one thing and decide yay or nay, but now an agent really takes it and runs with it.

Lenny Murphy: Well, that takes away the saying gap, doesn't it? So it's just doing for you. You saw the ad. Now you're going.

Karen Lynch: Oh, yes, I am curious about this toy that's perfectly targeted to my, you know, 15 year old grandson. But now Meta might, you know, have their little shopping assistant say, you know, like, yes, she's interested in enough that I, you know, probably should just, you know, get it for and put it in a cart.

Lenny Murphy: That I stayed on that ad for more than 10 seconds. So therefore you're interested.

Karen Lynch: So, uh, shopping assistance coming, coming and coming at us fast across platforms where we may not be used to shopping. You know, I think we joked last year about Tik TOK shock, The TikTok shop, you and I, because you're not on Tik TOK, but you know, like there's this whole thing of like The Tik TOK shop serves up a short form video explaining why you need to have a product. And then you click on it and you're like, I'm pretty convinced I need this product. But then you're like, but it's The Tik Tok. Do I really want to buy this thing that I know nothing about except they made pretty cool content? Like it's super unnerving But then you do you make this assessment? Well, it's like well, it's less than 20 bucks for less than 20 bucks I can buy something on The tick-tock shop and and like you have this whole and I've had this conversation with lots of people this whole kind of mental decision-making Shopping on social media. Well, here we go. Social media is gonna make it even easier for that shopping to happen. So hmm.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah on That note, interesting data, Exchange Wire, a Taboola, Columbia, covered a Taboola, Columbia field study. Gen AI ads perform on par with human creativity at scale. Now, there's, you know, it's really interesting that there's, that's on a blanket statement. You know, some AI slop, people recognize and they tune out and it's not cool. But some things that are fully AI generated, if done correctly and well and appropriately, people are responding to them just like you would any other ad.

Karen Lynch: Here's why that's interesting. Do you remember, there was something that I saw in my newsfeed where, you know, The person had, you know, maybe it was even this, anyway, The person had a foot for a hand. And so it was, but like, when, when, when AI imagery first came out, we were noticing, we were counting features, Yes, it was weird.

Lenny Murphy: Yes.

Karen Lynch: And I realized when I looked at it, circled in this ad, that it was clearly AI generated. And I was looking at those. And I was blind to The AI hand blind, totally, like, didn't even notice, because it's not brand new to us. We're not analyzing them the way they were before. And The more and more prolific AI advertising becomes, you know, The harder it is The harder it will be for us to discern, especially if it feels effective.

Lenny Murphy: Well, and the quality of the content creation and everybody, it's that leapfrog is happening. Whether it's XAI or Google or OpenAI, they're all leapfrogging in these capabilities to create incredibly immersive long form, in realistic visuals. Let's cover that last thing, The DeepMind. And then we can move on.

Karen Lynch: Well, before we do that, just because we did want to share out this Firefish's AI counseling governance. So the reason we save it, it's a Read now, it's a Read later sort of thing. Right. But it's a framework for AI deployment. And, you know, you can look at this if you are that person. I don't know who I'm speaking to specifically now, but if you are that person who is in charge of kind of AI deployment, in your organization, it's a good idea to right now be looking at kind of these AI governance principles for anything that you develop, anything that you're using, just get yourself some documentation that ensures human oversight, et cetera, et cetera. Like if you're going to be using AI ads, come up with some ground rules and some stipulations, like get a little bit ahead of it. And these are some good principles to kind of just start to look at so that you can build your own.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. And then last thing we were talking about visuals and the play off of that, Google just rolled out their Project Genie, a research prototype, pretty damn sophisticated prototype based on what I saw, for creating and exploring editable virtual worlds. Now, the first thing you look at that one, it's just visually stunning, and the simplicity of basically creating an immersive world game, effectively. But think about the research applications for that, right? I mean, the ability for us to be able to now change The questionnaire into something that is actually incredibly visually engaging. You put examples of a prompt like, oh, load a picture of you, right? And suddenly that's converted into an avatar, a movable player in this virtual world going through a store. I mean, thinking through the capabilities in this technology is incredibly easy. It's you're just saying what you want to do. All of our conversations about gamification over the years, The barrier was, it was a pain in the ass and expensive.

Lenny Murphy: So.

Karen Lynch: Well, and I even remember when Hello Aura, you know, a couple of years ago, like kind of took to The scene and, and they were showing us their virtual environment for conducting research, right? So people log in just like it was a gaming platform. They log in, they have that avatar and they are, you know, they meet another avatar person entity and they have a conversation like a focus group. In a virtual environment. And we joked about, we, you and I, Lenny, talked about in Fortnite, if they can have concerts in Fortnite, we could be doing focus groups in Fortnite. That was all the rage. This is showing you that you don't need a platform, right? You just need to be able to access and work with Project Genie to create your own environment.

Lenny Murphy: As an individual user.

Karen Lynch: As an individual user. So that, I think, is a little, obviously unnerving for people that are building a business there. So I'd love to hear from you, or like, like, hello, what are your thoughts for real? Because I don't know how this feels for you. And I'm sure there are points of difference that you could happily call out. So please do.

Lenny Murphy: But there's nothing like The Metaverse stuff, right? I mean, this is incredibly real. I mean, it's up to you, you want to do something photorealistic, you want to do something abstract, you define it, but whatever it is, it's amazing. Visually.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. What you will about synthetic participants or synthetic respondents, synthetic, you know, not real people conducting The research. Synthetic environments are very different. So, um, the visual shelf testing.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: It's really going to be very interesting. So have fun with that for the rest of this week and over The weekend.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. There you go. Go play. I think it's free for, uh, one level of Chrome users on their AI stuff, but it's, yeah, it's pretty cool. All right, as usual, we guys, I think we're just gonna have to accept.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I really scaled back. I was like, we've got to get back to The, we used to say like, no more than 10, more than nine stories. Okay, 10, okay, 11, here we go. But anyway, it is what it is. They can turn us off if they want.

Lenny Murphy: That's right. That's right. I think we, I think we give good value for time.

Karen Lynch: So let's, let's, uh, let's, let's hope we do until we get feedback that we're, that we're not, you know, that feedbook is The exchange at greenbook.org.

Lenny Murphy: So absolutely. All right. On that note, everybody stay safe, stay warm, uh, stay dry. Karen, good, uh, safe travels next week.

Karen Lynch: Everybody in The next wave of The storm until y'all in The Carolinas.

Lenny Murphy: I hope you say farewell.

Karen Lynch: Yes.

Lenny Murphy: Great. That's it. Have a great weekend.

Karen Lynch: Bye everyone.

Lenny Murphy: Bye.

Links from the episode:

Ipsos acquires Seventh Decimal to bolster MENA audience measurement expertise 

Medallia and Ada announce a strategic partnership 

The Harris Poll launches QuestRQ 

GlobalData rolls out a revamped Strategic Intelligence platform 

Bloomberg Introduces Alternative Data Entitlements on the Terminal for Increased Alpha Discovery 

Bello launches online qual platform 

UserTesting, Inc. Unveils User Testing for Figma 

NIQ launches a Say–Do Gap Measurement Framework 

Bilendi Discuss Promises End-to-End Project Automation 

Google begins rolling out Chrome’s “Auto Browse” AI agent today 

Moltbot: The Ultimate Personal AI Assistant Guide for 2026 

Meta highlights upcoming agentic commerce tools 

ExchangeWire covers a Taboola–Columbia field study finding GenAI ads perform on par with human creative at scale 

Firefish Launches its AI Council and Introduces a New Set of AI Governance Principles 

DeepMind previews Project Genie