Welcome to twir — the weekly show delivering AI-powered summaries of market research news and insights. Each week, we scan and ingest media from top blogs, podcasts, articles, and reports, distilling the key trends shaping the industry. Best of all, twir episodes learn and get smarter over time, building a POV on an archive of past news and trends.
Curious how twir gets made? Watch the making‑of video and grab the twir prompt template to build your own edition.
Episode Summary: AI, Innovation, and Market Research Trends (May 30 - June 5, 2025)
AI and Tech Innovations in Market Research
- WPP unveiled a new AI-powered tool called Open Intelligence, billed as the industry’s first “Large Marketing Model” for advertising. Developed by WPP’s GroupM (now WPP Media), Open Intelligence is trained on real-time consumer engagement data to predict audience behavior and marketing performance. The system leverages WPP’s recent InfoSum acquisition and clean room tech to target high-intent audiences without relying solely on user IDs.
- HubSpot introduced a “deep research connector” for ChatGPT within its CRM platform, letting marketers query their customer data via AI. Users can ask ChatGPT to segment audiences, forecast demand, and push insights directly into HubSpot — streamlining tasks like prospecting and campaign planning with generative AI.
- Video research firm Voxpopme launched an AI Moderator tool for qualitative research, enabling automated, asynchronous video interviews at scale. The AI conducts interviews in a natural human-like voice and instantly analyzes responses, eliminating the need for live moderators and compressing project timelines for client feedback.
- Meltwater added a chat-based insights assistant named Mira to its social intelligence platform. Part of a mid-year AI upgrade, Mira uses an intuitive conversational interface to deliver instant analytics from social and consumer data, aiming to make insights accessible on demand for marketing and PR teams.
- Conversational AI specialist Uniphore rolled out Marketing Agents, a suite of AI tools to accelerate how marketing teams retrieve and segment data within its customer data platform. The tools tap Uniphore’s enterprise AI platform to automate data access and audience targeting, promising faster insights and efficiency gains for users.
B2B Market Research Developments
- Affinity Solutions (US) launched a platform called Fansactions that links sports sponsorship exposure to actual consumer spending. By analyzing purchase data from 150 million credit/debit cards against sports media engagement, the tool lets advertisers directly measure ROI from sports ads – providing a concrete view of how fan impressions convert to sales.
- In Warsaw, company intelligence provider EMIS expanded its coverage across Central and Eastern Europe. The upgrade adds detailed data on private companies (>$1M revenue) in markets like Romania, Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary, spanning 370 industry sectors. The broader CEE dataset gives B2B analysts and investors deeper insights into high-growth markets.
- UK-based media analytics firm CARMA opened its first Spanish office and introduced Widget Studio, a self-serve dashboard for PR teams. The tool enables communications professionals to create custom data visualizations from their media monitoring results, using templates for competitor benchmarking, audience insights and cross-channel analytics.
Partnerships, Mergers, and Acquisitions
- IBM acquired NYC startup Seek AI, which builds natural language data querying tools, and is folding it into a new Watsonx AI innovation hub in Manhattan. IBM says Seek’s technology – which automates code generation to answer ad hoc data questions – will become the core of its Watsonx AI Labs, connecting IBM’s enterprise know-how with next-gen AI developers to spur business AI solutions.
- Mintel agreed to buy London-based Black Swan Data, known for using social media signals to predict consumer trends. The deal arms Mintel with advanced social data analytics to enhance its market intelligence offerings. Black Swan’s trend-spotting AI will augment Mintel’s insights on emerging consumer needs and fads drawn from online conversations.
- Kantar extended a global partnership with tech services giant Kyndryl to modernize Kantar’s IT infrastructure. Kyndryl will revamp Kantar’s digital workplace with cloud and automation solutions, aiming to improve efficiency and lower costs across the insights firm’s 60+ country operations.
- NIQ (formerly NielsenIQ) formed a data-sharing alliance with beauty retailer Sephora for point-of-sale insights. The collaboration gives NIQ expansive access to Sephora’s sales data, providing a more comprehensive view of the North American prestige beauty market. In return, Sephora gains deeper benchmarking from NIQ’s industry-wide intelligence.
Industry Leadership & Organizational Changes
- SurveyMonkey named Meera Vaidyanathan (a former Twilio and AWS product leader) as its new Chief Product Officer. Vaidyanathan’s remit is to drive product strategy as the survey platform expands beyond DIY polls into enterprise feedback and experience management solutions.
- New York-based startup Sympler rebranded itself as Okay Human to underscore a human-centric approach to research in the AI era. The chat-based insights firm, known for its unconventional “conversational” techniques to probe consumer emotions, says the name change signals a commitment to keeping human empathy at the core of understanding consumers, even as algorithms proliferate.
- Healthcare research provider Konovo (Boston) hired Tim Albury as Chief Financial Officer, tasking him with steering innovation and growth. Konovo was formed just last month via the merger of Apollo Intelligence’s three healthcare insights companies (InCrowd, SurveyHealthcare and GlocalMind), and now spans 13 countries with a mix of physician panels, mobile data collection and AI-driven analytics.
- Industry veteran Hilary DeCamp joined entertainment and tech researcher Interpret as EVP of Research Design & Analytics. DeCamp was previously Chief Methodologist at Material+ (LRW) with 24 years’ experience, and will now lead methodological innovation at Interpret, bringing advanced analytics rigor to media and gaming insights.
Expert Insights & Thought Leadership
- The Insights Association kicked off an educational series, “Integrating AI Into the Insights Workflow,” featuring expert-led webinars on using generative AI at each stage of research. Covering everything from AI-aided survey design to analysis automation, the series (developed by IA’s IDEA Council) guides practitioners on harnessing AI for efficiency while maintaining data quality and ethics.
- Top research leaders continue to weigh in on AI’s potential. At a global insights forum, Ipsos CEO Ben Page hailed synthetic data’s impact – saying the ability to generate data to accelerate innovation research is “truly groundbreaking.” Caroline Frankum, CEO of Kantar’s Profiles division, similarly noted how AI is revolutionizing the speed and scale of data collection and analysis, even as researchers navigate issues of bias and data quality in an AI-driven world.