Thor Olof Philogène is the CEO and Founder of Stravito, an award-winning Swedish SaaS Scale-up whose AI-powered enterprise insights platform allows the world’s largest companies to easily store, discover, and integrate market and consumer insights.
What inspired you to co-found Stravito, and how has your experience at Zettle influenced the way you approached building this platform?
I met my co-founder Sarah Lee whilst working as VP Growth and Chief Revenue Officer at the Swedish fintech Zettle (formerly known as iZettle, acquired by PayPal in 2018). During our time here, we experienced how difficult it was to bring knowledge of the customer to everyone in our teams – despite having access to a large trove of data.
In 2017, we founded Stravito with a mission to simplify knowledge discovery and bring insights to everyone in an organization. We want to produce software that ensures everyone in global and decentralized organizations can easily store, discover and integrate research and data to better understand their consumers and make informed business decisions.
Stravito was founded with the mission to simplify knowledge discovery within organizations. How has this mission evolved, especially with the integration of generative AI into your platform?
Simplifying knowledge discovery still remains a core focus for us as we continue to help employees in the world’s largest organizations access insights that enable them to better understand their customers.
As our technology has evolved so has our mission and we’re now working to empower our global customer base to truly know what they know so they can find and maximize the impact of their insights. For example, our latest tool Assistant, which is powered by generative AI technology, is a conversational search engine that allows individuals to easily navigate complex knowledge spaces in an inspiring and engaging way. Individuals type their query into Assistant’s search bar and work collaboratively with the tool to find answers faster, ask better questions, and leverage relevant insights.
With the rapid adoption of generative AI across industries, what unique challenges did you face in integrating this technology into Stravito, particularly with the creation of the Stravito Assistant?
Implementing generative AI solutions can provide organizations with more power and speed to parse large volumes of data and insight, delivering a productivity boost, and promoting exploration and inspiration through a seamless interface.
However, the challenges of incorporating generative AI into systems are multi-dimensional: enterprises need to make sure they only work with trusted vendors for their AI solutions, and that the data that they use in AI-enabled systems is handled in a secure and compliant manner. For enterprises who are reliant on market and consumer research to make business decisions, it’s pivotal that any tool they implement only uses vetted data to generate AI-enabled answers – unlike open AI apps that pull from the public domain. Furthermore, when it comes time to integrate, ensure that the generative AI tool is complemented by a human-run service layer.
That’s why we have built Assistant with a focus on trust, reliability, privacy and security. Assistant draws information only from each client’s owned data. When referencing sources, the system always prioritizes fresh data and flags if older source material is used. If there are conflicting data points or if no data is available, Assistant tells the user – enabling them to discover potential research gaps.
Additionally, Stravito was recently recertified for the updated ISO/IEC 27001 standard for information security.
How does Stravito Assistant enhance the process of market research and insights management compared to traditional methods?
Stravito Assistant enables employees to engage in two-way conversations with the technology, allowing for deeper exploration of their research queries. By making Stravito Assistant conversational and context-aware, we’ve ensured users can easily navigate a knowledge space and reduce time-to-insight in a secure and transparent way.
Following Stravito’s first generative AI offering where users could ask a question and get an answer based on a company’s research housed in the platform, users can now have a full conversation with Stravito Assistant. The system will gently prompt users to ask follow-up and clarifying questions, thus drilling deeper into their research so that users can be served the most useful and applicable information for their context. Each response is properly footnoted throughout, so users can have full trust in the answer provided and can easily click through to the source material for more details. Responses can also be drilled down by time and location to accurately reflect the dynamic nature of insights and how they can vary by region.
For example, an employee at a beverage company might ask: “How do European millennials feel about non-alcoholic beers?”, “What are consumer barriers/motivations for buying cider?” or “What are some trends in sustainable packaging in 2024?”
Through prompts and clarifying questions, Stravito Assistant can then delve deeper into users’ research allowing employees to easily navigate a knowledge space and reduce time-to-insight in a secure and transparent way.
What’s more, after a productive conversation, Assistant can summarize key takeaways in bullet points, tables or create a presentation draft that can be downloaded and worked on with others. This makes it easier to action insights and integrate them directly into projects.
Trustworthiness in AI is a significant concern for many organizations. How does Stravito ensure the reliability and security of the generative AI tools it offers, especially in handling sensitive market research data?
Stravito takes security and privacy extremely seriously and we are proud to have built Assistant with a huge focus on trust, reliability, privacy and security. We were recently recertified for the updated ISO/IEC 27001 standard for information security.
The Assistant tool only draws information from each client’s owned data. Each response is properly footnoted throughout, so users can have full trust in the answer provided and can easily click through to the source material for more details. Responses can also be drilled down by time and location to accurately reflect the dynamic nature of insights and how they can vary by region. When referencing sources, the system always prioritizes fresh data and flags if older source material is used. If there are conflicting data points or if no data is available, Assistant tells the user – enabling them to discover potential research gaps.
How has the adoption of Stravito Assistant varied across different industries, and what feedback have you received from clients who are using the tool?
It is still early days but we are seeing strong demand for the tool across a wide range of industries and sectors – from financial services right through to food and beverage and CPG.
Our customer HEINEKEN was quick to see the potential of generative AI in insights management, so it comes as no surprise that they were one of the first Stravito customers to pilot the new Assistant feature. Partnering with Stravito, their feedback was an essential part of the feature’s development, ensuring that the power of generative AI would be harnessed in a way that would bring value to insights teams and their stakeholders.
After a few months, the team found that Assistant improved the user experience significantly, with a more than 50% increase in unique users across the organization, as well as 71% more of the content in their platform being used! They also estimated that they’ve been saving 1,553 hours per week just receiving and answering questions.
As a platform that promises to centralize and simplify access to knowledge, how do you balance the need for advanced AI features with ensuring the platform remains user-friendly for all levels of users?
This is a major priority for us; evolving our platform with cutting-edge technology cannot come at the expense of user-friendliness. The Stravito platform was built to offer an intuitive and interactive experience that inspires and engages individuals so they find relevant insights that allow them to make the most informed business decisions. In fact, some customers have even called us the ‘Netflix for insights’!
Stravito Assistant is no exception to this and has been built with the same user-friendly mindset. We are proud to have turned generative AI into an easy-to-use product that our customers actually enjoy using!
Looking ahead, how do you envision the role of generative AI evolving in the market research industry? What new features or innovations can we expect from Stravito in the coming years?
I believe that AI in general will continue to increase the productivity and efficiency in day-to-day operations for the world’s largest brands.
Stravito is a customer-centric company, so we are continuously monitoring for ways that we can use new technologies to solve problems and bring enjoyable and beneficial products to our customers. We have a number of exciting improvements in the pipeline that we hope to share with our customers and the world soon.
Currently, we’re focused on adding more capabilities to Stravito Assistant – but development in the area of generative AI is happening at lightning speed, and what’s not possible with the technology today may very well be just a few months from now. We’re excited to see what the future holds and expect generative AI to bring even more value to the research industry in the years ahead.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to enter the AI or market research space today?
My advice for those embarking on the journey towards successful and responsible generative AI integration is that it requires meticulous planning, a clear sense of purpose, and verifiable outputs.
Incorporating AI without a clear purpose or business case can actually lead to inefficient resource allocation and limited returns on investment. Organizations should first identify tangible pain points within their businesses that generative AI tools can effectively address to pinpoint where and how generative AI applications can be used most optimally.
Plus, if you are in the field of market research and insights, combining generative AI with verifiable data is key to success. There are well known cases of generative AI generating false insights by pulling data from unverified sources. The risk is too great for global organizations using AI-enabled tools to support decision-making if they disseminate or make decisions based on incorrect information. That’s why using only trustworthy and traceable data is a pivotal step toward successful adoption of generative AI in this space.
All of that is to say that we have to approach generative AI with equal amounts of excitement and caution. Whether using a third-party’s generative AI product, or designing your own, harnessing generative AI requires responsible and methodical decision-making – and a willingness to test, learn and iterate.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Stravito.
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