Stravito gets conversational with AI Personas that surface richer insights from market research
The knowledge management startup Stravito AB is using artificial intelligence to transform how companies generate insights from their consumer research. Now, with Stravito AI Personas, the company enables marketing and insights teams to conduct natural language conversations with "interactive consumer profiles" that draw on their research.
The idea is to make it easier for these teams to extract insights and traceable answers from their own consumer research data, so they can focus their marketing and innovation efforts on the things consumers care about most of all.
Stravito is all about consumer research. Its knowledge management platform acts as a kind of nerve center for market research data, aggregating things like customer feedback and survey results into a single portal, where it can be accessed quickly and easily. Marketing and product development teams use Stravito to make more informed, consumer-centric decisions by tapping into those insights.
But extracting insights from consumer research is hard, even with something like Stravito. While all of the data is consolidated in one location, most of the key insights and trends that companies need to know remain buried in PDF files and disconnected tools. As a result, humans have to pore over these files for hours, digging around to extract the most useful findings. It's an inefficient process, and no doubt many key insights slip under the radar.
Stravito AI Personas is designed to put an end to those inefficiencies, by making consumer research findings accessible through a conversational interface. It allows companies to create dynamic personas based on different audience segments. For instance, a marketer can use it to create a persona that consolidates the responses of a specific demographic, such as consumers aged 18 to 25 who live in urban areas and belong to a specific ethnicity. Users will then be able to "talk" specifically to those respondents in a natural way.
By chatting with these AI Personas, teams will be able to ask about the impact of marketing messages, new advertisements, product ideas and so on, and receive feedback in real time. It means they can quickly extract more "precise, local insights," the company said. Users will also be able to compare different ideas and campaigns using different AI Personas to identify their differing perspectives.
These precise insights can then inform the company's strategy, leading to more effective marketing campaigns and new products and services based on consumer's real desires.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Thor Olof Philogène said AI Personas are a big deal, representing the next step in his company's evolution. "Stravito AI Personas helps make consumer-centricity a daily reality," he said. "It enables teams to create stronger ideas with consumer insight at the heart of strategic decisions, cutting time, cost and risk."
Humans are fully involved in the process of creating each AI Persona, so they know exactly how each one was built and what research it draws upon. This means they can easily refine the Personas with new data. And there are built-in governance controls to ensure that any sensitive information remains secure and can't be accessed by unauthorized users.
Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. said Stravito's AI Personas are a great example of how AI can potentially be used to "connect the dots" in market research and make it more valuable. "There are so many dots in consumer research that very often, you have to choose the ones you think are most important and leave the others behind," she explained. "The reality of research is that it's very costly and time consuming, and then once it's done you have to digest that research to get the insights and knowledge you need."
With Stravito's AI Personas, companies may have a way to accelerate that process, Miller said. But she believes that the real value will come from whatever else companies manage to layer on top of those insights. "When it comes to knowledge and intelligence, the devil is in the details," she said. "From segmentation insights from a CDP to voice calls from customer contact centers, knowledge about consumers extends far beyond market research. So the way companies define "knowledge" will determine how robust, usable and accurate the insights derived from it will be."
Whether or not it's possible to expand Stravito's AI Personas beyond just research isn't yet clear, but it does seem that early adopters have been impressed with the offering. The Italian coffee making giant Luigi Lavazza S.p.A. said it has benefited immensely. According to Lavazza's head of business intelligence and consumer insights, Simone Ballarini, consumer feedback is fundamental to its business strategy. "Stravito AI Personas stood out for providing reliable feedback, grounded in our own research," he said. "The tool de-risks early ideation, turning weeks of validation into hours of fast, iterative exploration with a small, targeted squad."
Stravito said its AI Personas are available to all platform users now. They will be followed by additional "agentic" AI tools in the coming months that aim to help customers grow their revenues and build deeper connections with their customers.
Founded in 2017, Stravito has raised more than $23 million and counts Heineken N.V. Comcast Corp., and Nestlé S.A. among its customers.
