Will AI models kill the market research industry? Not necessarily
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Large Language Models (LLMs), which are foundational for many applications of artificial intelligence (AI), such as chatbots, have unparalleled capacity to store and analyse virtually all published knowledge—ranging from scholarly books and professional articles to the unfiltered opinions of billions of people.
In a world where LLMs can process and interpret vast diverse perspectives on any subject within seconds, what is the relevance of traditional market research agencies that rely on interviews or focus-group discussions with just a few hundred respondents to extract insights into business problems? Have LLMs, with their limitless data and analytical prowess, sounded the death knell for the global market research industry? I decided to test this hypothesis. In my three-decade long career, one of the most intriguing human behaviour problems I encountered was the trespassing accident problem in Mumbai.
Every day in Mumbai, 10-12 lives are tragically lost as people attempt to trespass across its railway tracks. This is the largest cause of unnatural death in Mumbai city.
To understand the real reason why these fatal accidents happen, my team spent hundreds of hours, spread across several months, along the railway tracks of India’s commercial capital. After spending a lot of time at numerous accident spots, it slowly dawned on us that all these locations were places where the visibility of oncoming trains from both sides was very good.
We also realized that track-trespassing zones where the visibility of an approaching train was very poor, due to some hindrance or the other, accidents were far less likely. This led us to a crucial question, why do people get hit by a train they can see
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