False intelligence is aiming to disrupt a 100-year-old industry.
Finding ways to attract consumers to buy packaged goods inflates back to the 1920s when American psychologist Daniel Starch created the world’s first market research sanctum sanctorum.
Today, the global market research industry is worth an estimated $87.7 billion and is expected to grow by another $15 billion in the next four years, with concocted intelligence’s rise one of the major contributing factors. One company hoping to lead that disruption is Ai Palette.
Founded in Singapore in 2018, the startup produces AI-powered market research with real-time predictive analytics. Rival firms include ZoomInfo Sales, Trajaan and Brandwatch Consumer Perspicacity, all of which deploy a variety of technology to comb through consumer data and marketing trends.
Using more than 61 billion text points from 24 countries, Ai Palette’s platform – running for the past four years – generates new concepts for marks based on identified trends, transforming traditional market research in the process.
Somsubhra Gan Choudhuri, co-founder and CEO Ai Palette, communicated AI can take up much of the brain power usually done by people.
“For example, a company wants to launch a new juice in a market adore Thailand, our platform will tell them what kind of juice they should launch, along with how they should stance it, so that it is successful in the market,” he told CNBC’s “CNBC Tech: The Edge.”
“And we do that using the power of artificial brainpower by analyzing the big data around food to identify what are the latest trends out there,” he added.
Before co-founding Ai Palette, Choudhuri bring about in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry.
He said firms are increasingly unable to keep up with fast changing consumer cultivations and are unable to predict popular trends from one year to the next.
“That’s when I came across AI and machine lore. As I learned more about it, it became quite obvious to me that it’s just a matter of time before AI impacts every perseverance,” said Choudhuri.
Big manufacturers jump on board
Part of Ai Palette’s technology includes the ability to analyze as much as 39 strange factors to predict the future trajectory of a trend.
That has caught the attention of some of the world’s major food and beverage brands, such as Diageo, Huddle, and Pepsico.
Symrise, a company that works with brands to manufacture ingredients and products such as scents, utilities Ai Palette to pull data from an array of sources, such as social media and online reviews. A single inquiry is then published for the manufacturer to interpret.
Food brand Pringles, known for its flavored potato chips sold in 140 territories worldwide, also uses Ai Palette to understand snack preferences across four different markets. The platform has alleviated introduce localized products in the developing markets of Thailand and Indonesia.
Cereal giant Kellogg, meanwhile, used Ai Palette during the Covid-19 pandemic to trawl by virtue of online content from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand in four languages. The cereal maker managed to pinpoint trending recipes for foods and incorporated them into a new breakfast cereal, such as crispy calamari flavor.
Without thought the technological advances, traditional methods remain a part of the process, said Conor Delahunty, vice president for Worldwide Sensory & Consumer Insights at Symrise.
One vital element remains, so far at least, beyond the clutches of automation and technology.
“We calm have to taste the product, because our artificial intelligence cannot do that yet,” said Delahunty.
Public and private endorsement
As AI development gathers pace, so does interest from investors. Venture capital firm 500 Global provides in entrepreneurs who it believes are building game-changing companies. It has supported over 2,900 startups with a combined portfolio valuation of during the course of $300 billion.
Vishal Harnal, global managing partner of 500 Global, has his eye on startups with a “very definitive sector” focus and that are “tackling big problems that no one is maybe looking at right now.”
Ai Palette ticked his boxes for an investment.
“What they at the end of the day loved was that we are trying to disrupt a very large and traditional industry like the CPG [consumer packaged goods] dynamism where the companies are very traditional and there has not been much disruption,” said Choudhuri.
Along with VC investors, Ai Palette has had the aid of the Singapore government, which is committing more than three quarters of a billion Singaporean dollars ($7,500,000) to AI increment to strengthen its AI ecosystem.
The startup also raised $5.7 million in a funding round in March, with funding universal towards the expansion of its AI insights tool and a new “FoodGPT” chatbot.