How Guided AI is transforming B2B secondary market research

Guided AI is democratizing secondary market research, making it accessible to engineers, scientists and other B2B professionals. It will completely change who does the research, why they do it, and how often. Early adopters will penetrate adjacent markets and develop new products faster and better. Let’s see how.

In the pre-AI age, most B2B secondary market research was initiated by strategic marketers and product managers. They might purchase a multi-client study for $3000 or commission a research project for $30,000.

Some of this will continue in the AI age, especially if the research vendor includes primary research (customer interviews) or has accumulated specialized industry expertise. But traditional market research will play a much smaller role as the sheer amount of AI-based market research explodes.

Also, see 4-minute video at www.B2BRapidResearch.com

Guided AI secondary market research… a very different experience

Get ready for Guided AI market research to change how you do your job. You’ll experience a shocking expansion of what you can learn about B2B markets in a dramatic contraction of time invested.

You’ll experience a shocking expansion of what you can learn about B2B markets in a dramatic contraction of time invested.

Guided AI secondary market research is immediate, interactive, and instructive.

Immediate: Want to learn about a possible application for your product? In the time it used to take just to find a multi-client study, you’ll have incredible insights at your fingertips. And unlike that five-year old multi-client study, you’ll have current insights.

Interactive: What you learn about a market should naturally lead to more questions. You’ll ask them as they arise… and then ask more questions as your learning deepens. It’s like having a brilliant industry expert patiently waiting for your next question.

Instructive: What if you’re an engineer or chemist, and can’t think of the best market research questions to ask? No problem. With Guided AI, your brilliant industry expert is also a brilliant marketing expert, suggesting helpful lines of enquiry for you to pursue.

How would this compare to planning a European vacation? Imagine a travel agent who could describe in detail every European hotel, restaurant, museum, village, railway station, and cathedral. And he didn’t just answer your questions: He learned your wants and needs, made suggestions, compared destinations, and helped you plan your entire itinerary. That’s how Guided AI works.

Compared to traditional research, Guided AI market research is cost-efficient, at just tens of dollars monthly. And time-efficient. Most multi-client studies are filled with information you don’t need but must sift through. With Guided AI, you create your own customized report in real time, focusing only on what interests you.

With Guided AI, you create your own customized report in real time, focusing only on what interests you.

It’s long been true that thoughtful research pays off. As the tongue-in-cheek saying reminds us, “a month in the lab can save you a day in the library.”

Guided AI takes “library research” to a completely new level, returning incredible insights for minimal effort. This research will precisely “aim” your work afterwards on the best opportunities. If the cost of learning is cheap, chasing unexamined opportunities is indefensible.

If the cost of learning is cheap, chasing unexamined opportunities is indefensible.

How Guided AI works

There may be many future versions of Guided AI, but lets explore the one we developed at The AIM Institute. We call it “MAC”… your Marketing Application Consultant. (It’s included at no extra cost for New Product Blueprinting users in the Rapid Research section of their Blueprinting Center.)

MAC has two primary modes… Product-First and Application-First. In the Product-First mode, you describe your product or technology to MAC. He identifies the customer problems your product might solve and shows you many possible customer applications. MAC provides a menu of options, letting you rank and score applications, and then study any single application in great detail.

In the Application-First mode, you specify a customer application—either existing or new to your business. MAC quickly finds and ranks problems in this application. You select any of these problems for deep exploration, including possible brainstormed solution paths for your product.

Why is MAC set up this way? All market-facing growth must begin with either applications or products. But notice in the last graphics that customer problems are central to success, not your product.

All market-facing growth must begin with either applications or products. But customer problems are central to success.

How Guided AI democratizes market research

Initiating market research studies used to be the domain of strategic marketers and product managers. But what if you’re a scientist with an idea for cut-resistant gloves? Will you nag your busy marketing counterpart to research the best applications for this? Not any more. Within an hour, Guided AI will help you find the most attractive market application(s).

Product-First: You begin with a Product-First session with MAC, and get a list of many possible applications: After scoring and ranking these by various criteria—potential revenue, premium price potential, ease of entry—you decide to focus on “glass handling in window assembly.” As shown below, you can estimate the market size for this application, identify buyer segments, and much more.

Application-First: If “glass handling in window assembly” looks attractive, you can study ways to pursue it in the Application-First mode. MAC delivers a list of many possible problems, so you can rank and score them. Do you see a problem your new glove technology might solve? As shown below you can study this problem in great detail, even asking MAC to brainstorm possible solutions.

8 Use cases for AI Guided Research

Our cut-resistant glove example is just one of many ways to apply Guided AI. Here are four use cases for Product-First research:

• P1: Further segment your markets: Identify niche sub-segments that are struggling with “market-averaged” products that don’t meet their unique
• P2: Find homes for new technologies: After your laboratory “aha” moment, explore all its possible market applications and find the best to pursue.
• P3: Find unknown adjacent markets: Describe what your product technology does well, and find the best adjacent markets to pursue.
• P4: Perform M&A due diligence: As part of M&A due diligence, learn if your candidate is positioned to solve their customers’ most important problems.

We believe P2 and P3 will be especially common Product-First use cases.

We see four use cases for Application-First research:

• A1: Develop incremental products: Compared to customer interviews, Guided AI offers lower-resolution prioritization that is “good enough” for small projects.
• A2: Acquire adjacent technologies: Want to expand your technology portfolio? Uncover problems that could be solved with a technology acquisition.
• A3: Explore known adjacent markets: Are your competitors in markets you aren’t? Study their market segments for unresolved problem you could pursue.
• A4: Shape your business strategy: Use AI’s scoring system during strategic planning to assess markets’ attractiveness and fit with your competencies.

It’s likely A1 and A4 will be very popular. Note that A1 actually includes two use cases:

1. If your incremental new product is too small to justify customer interviews, you can let MAC prioritize customer problems. (This is a low-resolution alternative to quantitative Preference interviews.)
2. Before conducting customer interviews, MAC helps you scope your project so you can target the best market applications.

Three important questions

1. Is AI Reliable? Can you fully trust the results from AI? The short answer is “no.” AI tools can only access information that has been digitally published. And not all of that is reliable.

Can you fully trust the results from AI? The short answer is “no.”

As with any market research, you need to validate the data before making large investments. You’ll find Guided AI is especially useful in the early exploratory phases. Before you spend much time and money pursuing new opportunities, seek additional sources of truth.

That said, our “MAC” Guided AI includes protections not always present with AI tools:

• MAC provides source citation links so you can read the articles he relied on.
• MAC tells you how confident he is, based on triangulation, data transparency, etc.
• MAC has a list of “do-not-use” market research sources known to lack credibility.

2. Why use “Guided” AI? You already use ChatGPT, Claude, or other “standard” AI tool: Can’t this do your secondary market research? Maybe, but you’ll likely incur these shortcomings:

• Research omissions: MAC includes menus with built-in prompts for research tasks you wouldn’t think of unless you’re a full-time market researcher.
• Time-consuming: If you did think of the above research tasks, the time you’d need to develop & test reliable prompts would be onerous.
• Data reliability: Standard AI lacks built-in guardrails and safeguards built into MAC. It’s not perfect… but it’s surprisingly good.
• Report management: Instead of copy/pasting a ChatGPT dialogue, MAC delivers an organized PDF report with a hyperlinked table of contents.

3. Can I forego customer interviews? In some cases you can. Guide AI can be a handy “middle ground” between guessing at customer needs and conducting customer interviews.

Guided AI delivers more reliable insights than reacting to the most recent customer request, because it displays and ranks needs representing many customers. And yet it will take less time than “guessing & debating” customer needs with colleagues or asking your sales team. This makes it ideal for incremental new product development.

For more significant product development, though, conduct voice-of-customer interviews to be confident of customer needs. Our research shows quantitative “Preference” interviews strongly correlate with new product success… and you need human VOC for these.

Beyond this confidence, we see three more reasons to conduct customer interviews:

• Only human interviews allow you to engage and impress customers, often positioning them to eagerly anticipate your product launch.
• By conducting customer interviews, your people will develop an outside-in mentality and probing skills they can use in day-to-day customer meetings..
• Our research shows unexpected information is uncovered in 86% of Discovery interviews. You only find these hidden insights in customer interviews below the digital waterline.

Next Steps

It seems likely that Guided AI will become commonplace for B2B market research. So perhaps the question is when will your business use these new tools? If the answer is “before our competitors”… consider two paths forward:

• Learn more at B2BRapidResearch.com.
• Contact us for a complimentary demo. We’ll be glad to have a 15-minute conversation with you and MAC on any topic of your