Deeper Consumer Insights, Faster: The Power of Gen AI
Gen AI greatly enhances the consumer insights gathering process by increased efficiency, improved data accuracy, and deeper consumer insights. Google’s NotebookLM was designed to distill down large amounts of information based on your prompts. The process I followed is outlined below in the Chevrons.
CREATING THE SCOPE DOCUMENT
I used Google’s Gemini AI to help create a scope document for consumer research. The AI of course needs your inputs, yet it can give guidance and ask questions based on your initial requests. I started by telling the AI that my objective was to conduct consumer research and that the work scope spanned from meal planning through serving the meal. I added that the scope was to include meal planning, grocery shopping, all the way to serving the meal. By giving Gemini the big picture view and some details it was able to create a scope document and start filling in the details. The more details I gave the tool the better the document.
The drafting process with AI is very quick because you let the AI worry about formatting. You can just ask the AI to add, delete, or amend information. This process can take some iteration but the AI quickly pieces the document together, usually it will add additional yet relevant information.
Google’s Advanced (paid) version has a Brainstorming Gem which allows some back and forth to get to the root of what you need. This Gem was designed to ask questions for deeper insight. Although this tool would have been helpful I did not use the paid version.
After finishing with the AI I copied the information into a word processor for final editing.
CREATING THE QUESTIONNAIRE
After making final edits to the scoping document I then created a PDF of the scope document, loading it into Google NotebookLM. Once the scope document is in NotebookLM I asked the tool to generate a questionnaire based on the scope document. Again, this may require some back and forth as before but the scope document puts some boundaries around the questionnaire. The AI will generate questions that are in common survey’s giving you a head start.
One key for voice of the customer surveys is to ask an initial question followed by probing questions. I ask the AI to creating the probing questions. It very quickly created a survey which reasonably covered the bases.
THE INTERVIEWS
I am in the process of conducting interviews either over the phone or video with family members using this questionnaire (download below). Each of the interviews will be recorded and loaded into NotebookLM. NotebookLM will create transcripts for each of the loaded audio files making the text available for AI analysis.
Creating a single notebook with the scope document, questionnaire, and audio files provides a complete repository of key information. The true power of Gen AI lies in extracting key insights from this notebook.
THE SUMMARY
I will write about the summary of the consumer insights once the project is complete in a future blog. So far AI has sped up the creation process of the scope and questionnaire. This alone is helpful. The summary of the interviews is the true power of AI!