Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help you conduct market research—and understand your data—faster than ever before.
Check out these seven AI market research tools to better understand your industry and customers.
1. Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is a trend-spotting and social listening platform.
We use AI to spot trends early. We then verify accuracy and relevance with the help of human analysts.
This AI + human combo allows us to source data about new and growing trends quickly, while also ensuring only the most relevant trends make it into our database.
Plus, we update our data sets daily. This means that Exploding Topics users are often the first to know about trends affecting their business and customers.
By using Exploding Topics as part of your market research approach, you can easily gather reliable information about:
- Trending products, services, and companies
- Trend popularity across different social media platforms
- Changes in topic popularity over the past 15 years
- Emerging startups
- Future growth forecasts of any trend, product category or company
Who Should Use Exploding Topics?
Exploding Topics is a useful tool for anyone conducting market research focused on analyzing growing industries or product categories.
For example, you can use our platform to understand which startups are trending in the AI space right now. Or see which beauty products are seeing growing demand from consumers.
It’s great for use early in the research process and can help you narrow down the topics you need to focus on during your focus panels, interviews, and more.
That said, Exploding Topics is pretty limited when it comes to audience and demographic research. You can’t see the types of consumers interested in each trend. Only aggregate data.
So if your market research is mostly focused on customers and audience-level data, you may want to try one of the other AI market research platforms on this list.
How Much Does Exploding Topics Cost?
Exploding Topics is free to use. You can browse a portion of our database right now—no login required.
To unlock our full database and more features that are useful for market research you’ll want to subscribe to an Exploding Topics Pro plan. Options start at just $39, billed annually.
You can give Exploding Topics Pro a try before committing, too—it’s just $1 for your first week of access.
2. Gong
Gong is an AI-powered call recording and customer intelligence platform.
Sales, marketing, and research teams can use Gong to record video and audio from calls with customers or survey participants.
Gong will automatically transcribe your calls and produce AI-generated summaries that include:
- Key highlights
- Contextual insights and discussion points
- Keywords that appear frequently during the call
- Insights including references to meetings and times
- Action steps for each person on the call
It works in multiple languages as well.
Who Should Use Gong?
Gong is a good choice for marketers and researchers that intend to do a lot of audience interviews. You’ll need to regularly plan, schedule, and hold calls with Gong in order to make the tool worthwhile.
If you’re seeking a service that conducts research for you, though, you’ll want to try a top market research firm.
How Much Does Gong Cost?
Gong prices its licenses per user; you’ll need to get in touch with the company to discuss a customized quote.
3. Speak
Speak is a data visualization service.
The platform uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract data and actionable insights from video, audio, or text files.
Like Gong, Speak can automatically record and transcribe your customer interviews. However, it’s not limited to content captured directly through Speak.
You can upload files from any source, including public URLs, and have Speak extract data using AI.
From there, Speak can turn the data points into shareable visualizations. You can even ask the Speak AI questions about your data and get responses in a conversational format.
Who Should Use Speak?
Speak is a good choice if you plan to capture research data in multiple mediums, including text-based surveys and pre-recorded video responses.
It’s also worth looking at Speak if you’re interested in using AI to examine and report on your data using prompts—similar to how you interact with an AI chatbot.
How Much Does Speak Cost?
You can use Speak’s basic AI transcription service on a pay-as-you go basis. To unlock everything that Speak offers, including chatting with the AI, you’ll need to subscribe to a monthly paid plan.
Options start at $29 per month or $278.40 per year.
4. SurveyMonkey Genius
SurveyMonkey Genius is an AI-powered survey builder.
The team at SurveyMonkey trained their AI on data gleaned from over 25 years’ worth of surveys hosted on the platform.
You can start the process by describing your goals for the survey, or by using one of SurveyMonkey’s prepared prompts.
From there, the AI will generate an entire editable survey for you to review and tweak.
SurveyMonkey Genius can also:
- Suggest the best type of question to use for a topic
- Prepare balanced multiple choice answer options that help to remove bias
- Conduct sentiment analysis on open-ended question responses
- Highlight trends in your survey responses
- Evaluate the quality of each response and eliminate any that aren’t readable or aren’t in line with your quality standards
When we gave the Genius feature a try, we could create a complete survey in less than five minutes.
If you find that the SurveyMonkey AI doesn’t perform as expected, though, you can give feedback directly in the app. SurveyMonkey will then use this feedback to continue training the AI.
Who Should Use SurveyMonkey Genius?
If you’re already a SurveyMonkey user, it’s worth checking out Genius to see if it can accelerate your workflow.
New users interested in an easier way to make surveys might also want to check out SurveyMonkey Genius, as it may help you launch market research initiatives (and get results) faster.
How Much Does SurveyMonkey Genius Cost?
You can use SurveyMonkey Genius as part of a free SurveyMonkey account.
5. Poll the People
Poll the People is a panel analysis program.
If you like the AI-powered aspect of SurveyMonkey Genius, but don’t have an audience to survey, then Poll the People is a solid alternative.
The platform uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to help users create, distribute, and analyze the results of market research surveys.
You can use Poll the People to:
- Build surveys using prepared templates
- Select a panel from the platform’s pool of over 500,000 respondents
- View, filter, sort, and analyze results with the help of ChatGPT
As with Speak, you can chat with Poll the People’s AI about your survey results and get direct answers that reference the data.
Who Should Use Poll the People?
Poll the People is a good choice for anyone who wants to collect primary research data from groups of people like their target audience.
It’s a particularly good fit if you don’t already have access to a survey panel.
How Much Does Poll the People Cost?
Poll the People offers a pay-as-you-go plan. It’s free to sign up—you just pay $1 per response, and get access to all of the platform’s features.
If you plan to run multiple large surveys, then you may prefer the Plus plan. It costs $50 monthly and lets you run up to 10 surveys with 500 responses each every month.
6. Remesh
Remesh is a focus group platform that uses AI.
You can use Remesh to:
- Establish a focus group schedule
- Build a discussion guide
- Upload media to share with your groups
- Create questions to ask each participant
- Ask participants open-ended and multiple-choice questions about your content
- Have participants vote on how closely they agree with statements made by other focus group members
While you run the focus group, the Remesh AI works to analyze feedback, find common themes, and highlight key points for your review.
This AI analysis happens at the same time you talk to your target audience. If you see specific consumer behavior reflected in the findings and want to learn more about it, you can change your discussion questions on the fly.
Remesh also lets you export ready-to-share slide decks and CSV files with your data once the focus group ends.
Who Should Use Remesh?
Remesh is a good choice for teams that plan to run their own focus groups. The included AI features can help you get a better understanding of your results in real time, without waiting for the session to end.
How Much Does Remesh Cost?
Unfortunately, Remesh doesn’t publish their pricing publicly, so you’ll need to schedule a demo to get a custom quote.
7. Lexalytics
Lexalytics is a text analytics platform.
The service uses NLP to evaluate text based documents and extract information including:
- Sentiment and intent
- Names of people, places, dates, products, and companies
- Common factors to create groups of related text
It’s suitable for use when conducting all kinds of market research—even for pharmaceuticals, finance, and other heavily regulated industries.
Plus, you can incorporate Lexalytics technology into your own applications—giving it great versatility when compared to other AI analysis programs.
Who Should Use Lexalytics?
Lexalytics is a nice choice for any research teams that plan to develop their own custom survey, panel, or focus group platform.
If you’re already paying to use a full-featured tool like Speak or Remesh, though, you might find Lexalytics to be an unnecessary add-on.
How Much Does Lexalytics Cost?
Lexalytics plans are customized based on your needs, so you’ll have to get in touch with the company and get a price quote.
8. Claude
Claude is a self-contained conversational AI chatbot.
Claude doesn’t access the internet, so it can’t conduct research for you.
You can feed your own data files into it and use the AI as a data analysis assistant.
When you share data with Claude, you can ask the AI a variety of questions about the content of your data upload. You can even have it create summaries and customer personas based on your research.
During a test, we fed a CSV file with 95 lines of data into Claude. Within a few seconds, Claude could start answering questions about our findings—eliminating the need to read through each data point ourselves.
Who Should Use Claude?
Claude is a useful tool for anyone who spends a lot of time reading data-rich reports and spreadsheets.
How Much Does Claude Cost?
It’s free to try out Claude, though you’re limited in the number of questions you can ask it each day.
To increase your usage limits, you’ll need to sign up for Claude Pro—it costs $20 per month.
9. YouScan
YouScan is a social media analysis tool.
The platform uses AI to extract data from images and text shared across social media platforms like Instagram.
It doesn’t rely on post captions and hashtags, either—YouScan can recognize text and subjects depicted in images.
Use the tool to:
- Evaluate how frequently a brand or product appears in social media pictures
- Assess the sentiment of social media posts made by your target audience
- Compare brands and products that appear together in users’ photos
- Discover the platforms that attract discussions or posts about specific brands
And, as with Poll the People and Claude, YouScan includes a chatbot you can use to gather insights into your data. Simply ask it a question about the information you’re looking for, and YouScan’s AI will respond.
Who Should Use YouScan?
Companies that have a very social media friendly product line can use YouScan to learn more about how and where their brand is depicted on social media.
How Much Does YouScan Cost?
YouScan plans start at $299 per month, billed annually, and include unlimited user seats.
10. Crayon
Crayon.co is a competitive intelligence tool with a number of AI features.
Crayon helps you track the activities of key competitors in your space. And they use AI to summarize what they find.
Use the tool to:
- Understand the big (and small) moves competitors in your space are making
- Have Crayon’s AI sort and score their findings by relative impact
- Receive email updates on competitors that you’re tracking
- Sort and scan findings by tags and categories that are auto-assigned with AI
Who Should Use Crayon?
Businesses focused on their competitive landscape would find value from Crayon’s offerings. Not only does the platform help you uncover more competitive intelligence than researching manually, but it can do it much faster as well.
How Much Does Crayon Cost?
Crayon’s pricing depends on your team size and exact needs. You’ll need to reach out to them for a demo to get a personalized Enterprise contract.
Conclusion
Deciding to use AI tools is a great way to streamline your market research process—and how you interpret related metrics. While each of the tools on this list still requires some human involvement, each service can help you find and understand data faster.
Whether you’re uncovering new trends to research with Exploding Topics, conducting surveys with Remesh and Poll the People, or exploring your data in depth with Claude, the AI-powered tools on this list are some of the best options for conducting market research this year.
