It’s not enough to just keep up with your customers — you must get out ahead of them. And if you weren’t already focused on that before COVID-19, the requirement for speed and agility is now a given. AI-enabled consumer intelligence technology can help you bust through the key blockers. These solutions use data, both internal and external, from across silos. They enable insights professionals in a variety of roles to work at speed and scale, explore and find insights, then share those insights to power decision making. AI-enabled consumer intelligence solutions partner with a range of human roles in enterprises, including market research, customer or consumer insights, product development and management, marketing, innovation, and customer service.

In the recently published report, “New Tech: AI-Enabled Consumer Intelligence Solutions, Q2 2020,” we’ve identified the 22 key vendors in this emerging category, which fall into three segments. First, software platform providers, which focus on building and selling self-service solutions that enable customer end users to find actionable insights from multiple data types, without programming. Most leverage internal and external data types out of the box, along with capabilities for custom integration. The second segment, hybrid platform/service providers, sells software solutions for end user self-service along with the vendor’s custom services. The third segment, primarily service providers, specializes in strategic services for consumer intelligence and also provides software that customers access themselves.

AI-enabled consumer intelligence solutions have roots in and serve other market segments, including social listening, customer feedback management, voice of the customer, customer analytics, text analytics, and insights services. When evaluating your need for a solution that will turbocharge your firm’s consumer intelligence, consider your current capabilities and the right balance of self-service versus services that would help you with your use cases.

(Daniel Weber, research associate, coauthored this post.)

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