AI-fuelled Sensory: Driving agility through AI technologies

The world of consumer research is evolving rapidly, creating a whirlwind of change with new and different ways of interacting with consumers. And AI technologies are at the centre of this storm, often generating the dynamism for this change.

You may have already changed how you operate – where you gain insights, how these learnings are synthesised and disseminated and even if you engage consumers at all! At the same time, timings (and often budgets) are tighter than ever before, so there’s a need to lean into these changes and learn at pace, on the job.

Advances in consumer research and generative AI are yet to have the same impact on product and sensory understanding as other fields, mainly due to specific challenges associated with striking the required balance between pragmatism and capturing the key sensory touchpoints of product experiences. However, with this increased focus placed on product experience by consumers today, we’re keen to ensure our clients can benefit from rapid, objective insight into the product experience. By leveraging our sensory panel’s expertise and AI technologies to sift through the many sensory touchpoints involved in consuming products, we can identify which touchpoints are unique or essential for driving differentiation. It’s pragmatism fuelled with AI know-how.

Whether in isolation to get a qualitative snapshot view of your category or competitive set, to aid product selection of prototypes, or to quantitatively highlight the multi-modal attributes which define your product experience – we’re well on the journey to a suite of solutions which will allow you to benefit from sensory insight that complements and builds on consumer understanding.

Phiala, our Sensory Experience Director, is spearheading innovation in this space and perfectly embodies the transition from traditional sensory to exciting future applications – building on her vast experience in all things sensory to identify where compromises can be made but more importantly where they absolutely can’t, to ensure the reliability of these agile insights. It’s so exciting to see how development has been embraced by our global sensory team. It brings decades of advanced sensory science to bear to optimize logistics, data inputs, and analysis in a more creative, pragmatic and tech-driven way, working closely with our Data Science experts, Nova tech innovation team and Method Excellence function. And there’s nothing quite like seeing the eyes light up of clients who have had an early glimpse of some of our new capabilities in this space!

Keep an eye out for the following methodologies coming soon:

AI-fuelled quantitative outputs on the key 10-12 sensory touchpoints which are driving your product's uniqueness or similarity with other products, to help to unpack the consumer experience and better capture the sensory linkage with consumer data.

Sensory Bot – our sensory expertise, experience and data are channelled into an interactive chatbot! We’re particularly excited about this one which brings a multitude of benefits and applications. For example:

• Allowing our sensory panel to capture the holistic sensory experience of products in context, out of the lab.
• To screen consumers rapidly and cost effectively in terms of their sensory acuity and articulacy.
• To dig deeper and better understand the consumer reaction to products in their own words rather than forcing them down a pre-scripted assessment which may not fit with their priorities and experience of the product at all.

Rapid Appearance Tool – we know that appearance has a huge bearing on consumer perceptions and ultimate experience of a product (as well as the trigger for decision making in many categories). Yet it’s a dimension missing from the sensory predictive tools currently being marketed on the back of AI advancements. Why? Because it’s complex, nuanced and hard to capture within the constraints of a standardised sensory vocabulary. However, we’re excited to leverage tech inputs and outputs to allow us to capture appearance attributes, fast.

All solutions are designed to work with consumer research, thus avoiding sole reliance on consumers for diagnostics (and many will have experienced the limitations of this), with fewer questions to load onto consumers being a happy side benefit! They’ll work best at an earlier stage of scoping, fuelling faster problem identification and optimization opportunities as well as supporting rapid product development and co-creation sprints.

This is just the start. We’re committed to exploring and bringing our clients creative ways to better understand the product experience and how this can be optimized. If you want to get involved, join the waitlist and we'll explore how this can support your product development lifecycle and facilitate faster yet more informed decision making.