What does the GRIT report tell us about the next big leaps in MRX?

In this episode of the podcast, Manny Rodriguez and Anthony Samarasekera from Forsta join us for an in-depth conversation about market research trends and challenges, as highlighted in the Greenbook GRIT report. They delve into the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and technological advancements on the industry, discussing AI's role in enhancing report generation, data interpretation, and integrating visual elements in data analysis. The discussion also touches on the essential cultural and organizational changes required for adopting new technologies, including the importance of continuous learning and embracing emerging tech. They emphasize the need for internal ideation and stakeholder feedback to tailor product development to market demands. Manny and Anthony also share their perspectives on the exciting future of AI in market research, stressing the significance of industry collaboration and staying abreast of tech updates.

You can reach out to Manny on LinkedIn.

You can reach out to Anthony on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Manny and Anthony for being our guests. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.

Transcript

Lenny: Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to spend it with us. And I’m kind of like a broken record with this line, but I think it’s funny that, you know, by ‘us’ I don’t just mean and my alternate personalities. There actually are guests who do take time out of their days to chat as well. And it’s always fun when it’s people I haven’t spoken to before, and that’s what we have today. So we have two great folks from our friends at Forsta, Anthony and Manny. Thank you for joining us. You guys want to introduce yourselves?

Manny: Thanks, Lenny. I’ll jump right in there. Manny Rodriguez, recently named Managing Director of Market Research at Forsta, and previous to that, I was Vice President of Global Sales or Global Business Development here at Forsta. And really a pleasure to be joining you today.

Lenny: Great to have you, Manny. Congratulations.

 Manny: Thank you, sir.

Lenny: That’s great. All right. Anthony?

Anthony: Thank you for having us, Lenny. I’m Anthony Samarasekera, Global Head of Operations for Market Research Services within Forsta. I provide the leadership to the comp. operation teams, supporting data collection and reporting needs as well as interviewing the leadership to our client coordination team, so taking the responsibilities when it comes to scoping, estimates, all of that. And, last but not least, I also provide the leadership when it comes to our partner channels, the sample-demanded services. Sample procurement, that’s a significant business that we have within Forsta, along with many other additions as well, along with these support arms while giving us the—enabling us to scale. So thank you once again for having us.

Lenny: So you’ve got—boy, you have the job that I do not envy, Anthony. So...

Anthony: [laugh]

Lenny: [laugh] And for our audience, I want to give a little context here because we—you know, Forsta, I still often think of as FocusVision. And so here’s the history, right? For my career, all of the companies that now make up Forsta have been incredibly important companies that I have interacted with, starting with FocusVision, then Revelation, Decipher, Confirmit, you know, just everything. I have interacted with those pieces that have now been combined in Forsta for a long, long time because you all kicked ass, right? I mean, you’re a great best-of-breed technologies and great partners over the years. And it’s been interesting watching the evolution the company, of merging these pieces and these technologies to have what I would say, arguably, is the most comprehensive, you know, qual. and quant. solution on the market. Now, you have competitors, obviously, and we’re in a period of disruption. But just wanted to say, for our listeners and to you, from a historical perspective, “Hats off for that.” And I can only imagine the pain that you’ve gone through internally in going through that evolution. Manny, you’re grinning, so [laugh] do you want to chime in?

Manny: From ear to ear, Lenny. Let’s not forget about Dapresy as well, bringing world class—

 Lenny: And Dapresy, yes. Thank you. Sorry. Yes, Dapresy.

Manny: —world class visualization, as well, into the mix. But Anthony and I have both been a part of this kind of evolution of—and both coming from the legacy at FocusVision but the integration of Confirmit, Dapresy, which we were all around to see, and obviously, the acquisition by FocusVision of several brands, including Revelation, Decipher, and that whole genesis as well. And it’s been quite the ride. And, today, I can say that I’d have to agree with you, selfishly, that we do consider ourselves a leader for both quantitative and qualitative solutions. And, as part of this evolution that we’re on right now, it’s trying to really bring to fruition a vison that started all the way back in FocusVision, which is to really deeply integrate the disciplines of quantitative and qualitative research, and really provide agility between the disciplines, which, you know, for the most part in our industry still sits somewhat silent, right? And that’s still the vision and still the goal, and we are in the midst of it right now. So, after becoming Forsta or joining all the brands under the Forsta umbrella in 2022, now it’s—obviously, the legwork involved with tying all of these great industry-leading solutions that on their own—and stood on their own but brining them all together in our human-experience platform, which we’re really, really excited about.

Lenny: That’s great. Anthony, do you want to chime in with your experience on that as well?

 Anthony: Yeah. I think, you know, I was born and raised on the Decipher side of the business. So 16 years back, I joined [audio break] company with 20 employees, right. You know, now, being with so many different acquisitions, mergers, right, you know, we have close to 4,000 employees. And, along this stuff, we call them products. But, if you really look at it, that—you know, they were all independent companies at one point, right? So there’s a lot of ways that, you know, we’re complementing each other. And I know that they’re talking about past, but there’s recent additions to the list too, right. You know, Rio is one, and you know, the list go on, quite honestly. So it’s a very unique offering that they’re presenting in front of the audience. And, yes, there’s a lot of learnings internal, yes. I know, Lenny, you mentioned that, right? You know, how can we integrate these offerings to a level that, you know, where we can present a very stable and a very user-friendly environment is the question that we keep on asking. So all the questions have been asked. The key here would be we are working with a lot of true experts who have been living and breathing within these platforms, really answering the right questions, and presenting things to the audience that we are servicing. So... 

Lenny: All right. So we could probably talk offline with any dirt you have on the days with Kristin and Jamin coming from the Decipher days, but we won’t go there. Yeah. I love both of them very, very much.

Anthony: I’m from Fresno, California, so Jamin is over here. [laugh]

Lenny: [laugh] Yeah. Great, wonderful people. Wonderful people. So I’m just teasing, again, just teasing them. All right. So let’s kind of dive in. And we have the opportunity to work with—you know, meaning Greenbook had the opportunity to work with you as our partner for GRIT, the last wave of GRIT, and for the foreseeable future as well. So what was the value for Forsta in deciding, “Yeah, ye’re going to tackle this big, monstrous survey and partner with Greenbook on this”? What made you think, “Yeah, this is worthwhile,” besides the exposure or the brand exposure, right? That’s an easy one. But what else made you think, “Yeah, we want to do this because we’re going to get some other type of value out of this”?

Manny: Yeah, Lenny. And for me, this is an easy one. It’s all about contributing and giving back to the industry. I mean, this is the industry and the space that we live and breathe in. So any chance to be a part of insights that are going to help drive and leave the industry is something that we’re all super excited about. Just the simple ability to collaborate on something like this is enough. The exposure doesn’t hurt. I won’t lie. But, honestly, knowing that we are helping to shape insights that are driving the future of market research is—yeah, that’s the carrot.

Lenny: Okay. All right. Now, let’s talk about the stick then.

Manny: [laugh] 

Lenny: Because, Anthony, you were tasked with making it happen. And I know our own team and the complexities of GRIT. So are you thinking, “Yeah, thanks, Manny. Appreciate you doing that for us”? [laugh] 

Anthony: [laugh] No, it’s actually—it was a very, very pleasant and a very positive experience that we all had—love the friends at Greenbook. Nelson is a great research director that, you know, we have been closely working with. And, quite honestly, I think, you know, I’m going back to your previous question too. I think the question that we should be asking would be “why not,” right? We got the tools. We have the teams that are supporting it. And the idea is something that we are very closely living, breathing, right? And there’s so much value that we can add to these—the image that we are presenting in front of the industry. So I think this was a journey that we kicked off when Greenbook was looking for the right partner. This is what’s coming from Nelson too, right? I think, you know, we were somewhat behind when it comes to timelines, but, you know, we quickly made that connection. We’re not just a service system who is only focused on programming. I that’s something that differentiates us. We become consultants when it comes to programming needs, reporting needs. It’s not just we look at a questionnaire to see how the questions should be programed. We look at the ways that, you know, how the question should be asked from the audience if they’re going to. It’s not just collecting data. How should we record data, right? You know, in a way that, you know, we can meaningfully present that story back to the industry, right. So I think the knowhow and the wealth of experience and the experience that we carry really help the journey to run smoothly and something that we’re looking forward the next, you know, coming wave of the survey that we’re going to work on too.

Lenny: No, it’s great. And we are a difficult client. We always have been. All right? And truly—so I don’t know that I would’ve kept us as a client when I was running a full-service business. So the [laugh] —and you guys have been a great partner and everything that you said about, you know, adding value. And that’s important, I think, across the board. Let’s face it. Anybody can do research. Not everybody can do research right. And also to do that, not just right from a technical standpoint, but also in a more engaging experience for—let’s face it, I mean, a really a hell of a complex study, right? And it’s [laugh] —it’s not the greatest questionnaire in the world in terms of ‘oh, engagement.’ I’m the first one to talk about engagement. But, yeah, we have—you know, we have GRIT. And we appreciate the effort that you guys made in helping to do that as well, and continuing to do that because we have to evolve, right? And you guys are a great example of that by combining that. So let’s kind of pivot on that a little bit. What were some of the findings of GRIT that you thought, “Oh, okay. We need to pay attention to this ourselves,” that were really important for you as a business?

Anthony: Yeah. I think the biggest finding that we saw was the learnings based on the fraudulent survey constraint. I know that they were reaching out to the industry, our friends at industry, buyers, suppliers, or some individuals as well, right, you know, the decision makers as well as influencers contributing to its industry. But, even though that, you know, we are reaching out to a very secure and a known audience, we still saw that—you know, the fake service, right? And [laugh] it’s a known challenge that we are all living and breathing in. And the key here, or the biggest learning for us, would be most of the submissions that we saw was AI generated, right. We’re promoting AI for a great adoption, right? So that was learning. I think Forsta, as an organization, that this is something that, you know, we have really given that attention to, care, when it comes to security and how we collect data. These are the learnings that, you know, we saw, and there’s a lot of solutions that we can present in the future. Because time was not a luxury that we had. At the time that we got engaged, we were significantly focusing on meeting the research or reporting timelines. But I think, you know, those are the learnings that, you know, we saw that, when we have the solutions, what we need to start talking about it. So that was one of the bigger learnings, for me at least.

Lenny: And that’s a great point. Because it’s actually just occurred to me. It’s kind of a ‘no duh.’ The volume that you see globally is significant. So you get an upfront seat to the issue of fraud that’s impacting the industry as a whole and seeing the advances. And it was a great example of ‘oh, it’s not just, you know, speeders.’ And, you know, we have generative AI functioning as a respondent persona, answering questions in very thoughtful and consistent ways, right? It’s [laugh] the old flags didn’t go off on this. So, as a technology company, obviously you’ve got a big stake in that game. So what can you tell us about what you’re doing now in this brave new world of generative AI on the sample fraud standpoint? And then we can talk about some of the other stuff as well because I think there’s lots of implications. But what are you seeing, and what are you doing? 

Manny: I mean, this is a topic that’s top of my—not just for Forsta but the entire industry. Of course, it’s going to have an impact on insights and confidence in the validity of any kind of qualitative research, right, if you really start to question where am I getting this responses. Are these really valid? And so, for us as an organization, we really have a combination of not only kind of solutions in place for data cleaning, but that’s not always enough, right, and effective. So we’re using a combination of tools and techniques to help minimize fraud. But it's really something that is a bit of a moving target right now, especially with some of the developments and the latest developments in AI. It’s something that, as an industry, we have to kind of keep an eye on. It’s a bit of a game of whack-a-mole right now. You know, the bad actors will find ways to, you know, get around security checks. I mean, even simple things like secure server-to-server connections between our sample partners. Great way to minimize the issue of ghost-completes, right, or those that are totally bypassing a survey to get at incentives. But that doesn’t cover generative AI giving responses and actually—as you said, in some cases very thoughtful responses that you think, “Wow. This is great.” And being able to go ahead and collect, you know, the incentives related to participation in a lot of surveys. Likewise, you know, the speeders and the straighliners, even red herring questions aren’t enough anymore to catch some of the more sophisticated, you know, AI that’s out there. And so it’s not just what we’re doing as a business, but we’re also trying to raise a lot of awareness around this issue. I know me personally I’ve done the conference circuit this year, multiple conversations with not just Forsta and our peers but also several vender partners like Assent, Research Defender. There are several others in the industry that are trying to put solutions at the forefront to really mitigate this—and just make it a conversation that we’re openly addressing in the industry. Obviously, burying our head or pretending it’s not happening is certainly not going to help. But it is something that I think—if there was one takeaway I took from the GRIT Report this year, it was the fact that this is a conversation that we need to continue to highlight. Just my humble opinion.

Lenny: Yep. I agree. Anthony, could you add anything to that?

Anthony: No, I think—thank you, Manny. You covered all the key points. I think the only addition from my end would be, as a company—because we have the ability, and this is, once again an environment that we are living in, breathing with, and sample body is a significant business within Forsta as well. So we try to give the attention to four different areas. One would be pre-survey, which is where we have those—you know, the goals completes. So we provide the technology even to a level, you know, that server-to-server connections. Then we have good controls in place to better manage the server traffic, which is with use of all the digital fingerprinting solutions. And the third would be the data that they are collecting have algorithms to figure out—to better understander speeders, all the basic qualifications that we can look for as well as, you know, we have that. We also bring that human touch, folks reviewing data to see where the data makes sense, right? And the last layer that we are giving that close attention would be post-survey. Once we collect the data, we also take a look—have to double-check to see where the data that we collected is in a good standing for us to share with our customers. So there’s multiple ways that, you know, the solutions are coming. But the solutions are broken into these four layers that we cannot walk away from. Those are the areas that we have given that attention. And I really want to recall that, you know, we as a technology provider, as well as a services team and department—we are really giving that care to the industry because we see the need that close attention should come from all. That is an area that we need to significantly focus on.

Lenny: Yeah. Well, so now let’s pivot on the other side, right. So we were talking—obviously the—all new technologies, the early adopters are porn and bad actors, right, in other ways. They just are. So... [laugh] And that’s great because they help drive innovation by, you know, kind of poking at the holes of ‘oh, we don’t want it used that way.’ So we’re in that arena. That’s great. But we’re also in an era of—and I think particularly even this week. Well, we’re recording this in early/mid-November after the OpenAI event this week, where they rolled out some of their new technologies and the—we won’t dive too much into that, but what we’re seeing now is a rapidly evolving ecosystem that’s looking a hell of a lot like Apple and Google, with both hardware and software developing. So my bet is that we’re going to see, you know, not just continual rapid adoption of these technologies across the board but real disruption of existing form factors that will impact market research directly, and particularly for qual. and quant. So, from a technology standpoint company that you’re one of the global leaders of enterprise software for quantitative and qualitative data collection, we have a new technology emerging that could profoundly impact that—that, rather than screens, it’s going to be voice, and we’re looking at—or even projections, kind of the sci-fi, you know, the moving stuff around with the Humane AI device rolled out this week. So what are you guys thinking about that, right, as a company? Are you hearing or you have customers going—asking you already, “Hey... what are we going to do when we’re—you know, need to conduct all our surveys via voice, you know, [laugh] rather than screens?” What’s that world like for you right now?

Manny: Well, no, Lenny, it’s a question, frankly, that comes up in almost every sales engagement we have. It’s the top of mind, not only for the major brands that we’re supporting but for all of our big agency partners as well is “what are you guys doing with AI? What’s latest with AI?” And, again, we’re taking a very cautious approach is—first off, building, as Anthony talked about, where secure environment is still the most important concern, right? And one of the biggest concerns and things that isn’t talked about too often with AI is the fact that most AI is open source. And, with open source, you kind of leave a little bit of a backdoor and make yourself vulnerable in a lot of ways. So, again, for a lot of our research in sensitive areas, right, or sensitive industries, this is a big concern. The other big thing that everybody wants to know is, “Hey... are you using all of my data to train your models and to kind of build some of this stuff out?” And the answer is, “Roundly, no.” That’s always been a stance and one of the important things in Forsta as a big differentiator of us as a business. We don’t want to be the owner’s of anyone’s data or leverage their data for any purpose outside, right. We want to facilitate market research and enable more meaningful ways of conducting that. And so we are lending our developments in AI all around not only more agility and making not only faster-to-insights kind of developments for our platforms, things like categorization of open-ended responses. And even things, as you pointed out, Lenny, we do see the picture where, gosh, some day someone will likely say, “Wow, you actually used to take surveys. What was that like?” Like—

 Lenny: Right. 

Manny: —like the old rotary—

Lenny: You had a screen?

Manny: You had a screen? On a screen? 

Lenny: You clicked on stuff? Right.

Manny: I’m just used to talking to somebody. And, in some of the generative AI, some of what we’re looking at is even, you know, modeling around—I was just having this conversation with my [Chief] Product Officer—some interesting developments around kind of predictive and even open survey programming, where rather than creating questionnaires in the traditional format where we know which questions we want and which paths, it will be more about the specific insights we are looking to generate from a specific audience, and coaching and training AI to have a more natural dialogue and conversation, where folks are not only screened out dynamically but really follow a survey path that isn’t defined in the traditional sense, much more conversational. So this is the kind of thing that, to me, makes research super exciting, where hey—now, today, you know you’re taking part in a research study. In the future, and even the very near future, you may not know that you’re actually being a part of research and conducting research. So I think there’s a lot of great developments. It’s a really exciting time for us as we explore, and we’re already incorporating some elements of this into the system. AI for—even simple things like the generation of questionnaires. So think about, rather than having to program a survey after you’ve created your lovely Word doc. with all of your notes and everyone else chiming in on it, being able to take that same Word document and have AI screen that and actually create or script your survey. So these are some of the developments that we have in rapid development right now coming live onto the platform, with new additions coming. But you’re absolutely right, Lenny, it’s really interesting to see the rate of adoption and development in some of these technologies. And I think it’s only going to accelerate over the next two to three years.

 Lenny: Yeah. I mean, I think back in the day of—gosh, I mean, Decipher and Confirmit, and, you know, those—and Revelation. They were fighting for mobile-first, right, and really led a lot of the industry of “no, we can’t do GRIT-like surveys.” [laugh]

Manny: No way.

Lenny: You know? “We have to go shorter, and then let’s use sliders,” and, you know, yada, yada, yada. And now we’re in a whole—potentially, you know, a whole other world of ‘wow, we may have to rethink these functional components yet again,’ and probably faster than we had to with mobile, my guess. You know, we had maybe a decade, really, of widespread mobile adoption. I think we hit a tipping point about five years in, but now it’s, like, well, of course it’s adaptative, mobile-adaptive surveys. Of course, everything is. But it took us a long time to get there. I don’t think we have that time.

Manny: I agree.

Lenny: I think we’re talking two, three years max. 

Manny: Oh, I agree. I agree a hundred precent. In fact, I think one of the funny things of COVID and the pandemic is that it actually accelerated, to me, a lot of development within market research. And I’ll give you the best example, Lenny. Try explaining to a qualitative researcher—and I’m talking about somebody who is used to doing in-home IHUTs, and IDIs face-to-face with somebody. Try convincing them that a digital qualitative solution would give them the same insights that they get sitting across from somebody in a living room or watching them interact with the product. And they would’ve told me, “You are out of your mind.”

Lenny: Dude, we had—I was using Adobe Connect in 2008 for virtual focus groups.

Anthony: [laugh]

Lenny: And I couldn’t give it away.

Manny: [laugh]

Lenny: Quite literally.

Anthony: Yeah.

Lenny: Literally.

Manny: Yeah.

Lenny: So, you know... [laugh] And now, right, that’s the flip. You guys are—digital qual. is the dominate now.

Manny: And how the pendulum swings, right? And, again, a lot of that change, though, came absolutely forced when we lost the ability to go into the living room and, you know, that there wasn’t an option. Was the research not going to continue? And so you had folks adopting all of these things. And I think we’re going to see the same with a lot of the AI and a lot of these advancements and developments. Listen, I’ve always said—and I actually love this about the research industry—that we are not an industry of laggards, but certainly not the early adopters, at least not at the forefront, right? The traditional research methods stick and hold true, right? We like—there’s a certain in this space around that. But I think we’ve seen enough disruption, especially with things like the pandemic, where now folks are realizing that you have to stay on with the latest. We need to be at the cutting edge. And so I think a lot of these developments—we’re going to see a much shorter adoption curve. And, really, it’s going to become table stakes faster than, you know, this whole transformation we saw about mobile-first and digital solutions. Again, I really do see that the next two to three years around to be—just really turn the industry kind of on its head.

Lenny: I think so. We have to meet the consumer where they are, and that drives everything. So the whole—with VR, when that started, you know, I—yes, oh, that’s really cool, and it’s fun to talk about. But until consumer adoption reaches a certain level, which means technology infrastructure to support it reaches a certain level, it’s a novelty, right? It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its use-cases. Of course, it does. But they’re going to be niche, you know. But now we’re talking enough potential—again, looking at the Humane AI device, it’s—I bought Google Glass. I quickly realized, one, this is a pain in the ass, and it sucks for me personally because I wear glasses. But, secondly, like, people are not going to walk around with these things on their faces. But a device like Humane, theoretically—all right. It’s, like, well, it’s just, like, pinned to my shirt, and I walk around, and I can do whatever. And it’s like a Bluetooth device. Well, of course, that becomes ubiquitous or has potential to be ubiquitous. So, to your point, the form factors change. And I think what’s really interesting, particularly with a company like Forsta, is I totally agree with you. We’re moving towards a world—no matter what, whether we’re still using screens, or we’re just using voice, or we’re using, you know, like, light forms [laugh] , you know, projected our or something, that the bearish in qual. and quant.—that they’re already, certainly, very amorphous. And I think they go away entirely. I think that we look at far more interactive chat-based form factors that seem more qualitative or quantitative. That’s obviously not going to work for conjoint. You know, there’s always going to be a need to do things that the chat is not necessarily going to work for, but that’s already happening. So, for a company like you, I expect you spend a lot of time thinking about those things and getting pretty excited. I see, Anthony, you’re smiling. Now, you may not be excited because you’re going to be tasked with thinking, “How the hell do we do this—

Anthony: [laugh] Yeah.

Lenny: —from a operational perspective? All right, Manny, great idea, but how do we manage this,” right? [laugh] So what do you think?

Anthony: No, I think we—you know, you’re spot on. We are living in an era that, you know, we—you have to run that race, right? You know, the technology is moving extremely fast along with that, you know, multiple variations as to what we have that has an operation sum. But, you know, we need to reach out to get ourselves trained and, as well as, you know, present those—service our customers that we are presenting those solutions for. So, yes. Is that a challenge? Yes, it is definitely a challenge but a good challenge to have. Because, why? The more solutions that we are presenting and all the discussions that I’ve been involved in behind the scenes that—you know, we’re talking about what are the efficiencies that should now be—the automations that they can bring when it comes to the data collection side that—you know, we even talk about the translation memory banks that, you know, we’re training translation tools to function in a different way, when it could be whatever that, you know, our clients [audio break] , and also reporting solutions, right? We talked about text, auto text, sending [emails] . That’s right, you know, all the ways that, you know, we are recruiting. So, while we invest time to bring those solutions, those are solutions that’s available for us as a service assumptor, right? So there’s good and bad both, and good is that, you know, all the efficiencies are presenting value-adds back to the teams who are using those. But, of course, that, you know, we need to run that race, which is much needed. I think that is the truth behind the reason that we’re doing, right?

Lenny: Yeah. Shout-out to Rudy. I think he recently exited, finally, after many years, the—in Dapresy, which also, at one point, they were a partner for GRIT in helping design the infographic, and you guys did a great job this year with that as well. Anywhere, where I was going. Recently, I was looking at a AI platform called Decktopus that just generates a—you tell it what type of PowerPoint deck you want, and it just generates it, right? So, on the reporting side, Anthony, this is what made me think about that, you know, the open-ended, the text analysis, all that, that’s low-hanging fruit. It’s already table stakes. But it is interesting to think about the creative capabilities to make the translation from data to insights utilizing AI more efficient, and particularly the integration of visuals as well. So kind of what are you thinking about that with maybe, you know, somewhere on the product roadmap? What’s a vision on incorporating those kind of obvious components of AI that work—regardless of what happens to data collection, we still need to present findings, and these are some streamlined things that we think could do that. What does that look like?

Anthony: Yeah. I think the solution should be there with time. But, right now, I think, you know, we’re trying to stay within the swim lanes to give that needed attention, the proper experts being giving that attention to translations, reportion, minor translation, data collection. Then the next level would be reporting, which supports the end deliverable, right, you know, that we’re all looking for. I feel that, you know, we’re in that stage right now. We are giving the in-detailed review as well as, you know, the gross attachment to the swim lanes, and that is contributing to the end result. But, with time, I think, you know, that’s where we should be landing, right. You know, everything that we are doing in a very good way that—you know, our product team along with the key players behind the scenes contributing to these. They’re all working together, and they’re all asking the right questions. My expectation would be, with time, that we should have something very solid and something that, you know, the industries can benefit.

Lenny: Cool. Well, we’ll look forward to it.

Anthony: So, Lenny, when you said that, I was going to say I was thinking about our point-to-click PowerPoint export feature out of Decipher, when that was released, the gamechanger that it was, and how people said, “Oh, my gosh, do you have any idea the amount of time I spent formatting PowerPoint? And, even worse, everything that gets exported—if it’s images, I can’t touch it.” You’re talking about taking something like that completely to the next level when you talk about the ability for AI to literally not only generate that report, but format it in a way that is going to suit your need and your audience. And, again, all these things—we’re not that far. That’s what is crazy to me. If you had talked about that as something that was potential, I would’ve said, “Uh, talk to my product folks. Maybe we’ll get at it in five years.” With AI and the advancements and AI, all of these things are kind of right within reach. So I know Anthony is slow-playing that a little bit, as I would expect my man in service to, but me, as the commercial guy, of course, I’m super excited, all jazzed about it. And I agree that we’re not that far off.

Yes.

Lenny: All right. So, as a commercial guy, you’re like, “Yeah, we’ll have it next month.” And the—

Manny: Of course.

Anthony: [laugh]

Manny: Right.

Lenny: [laugh]

Manny: Of course, we will.

Lenny: But—

Manny: [laugh]

 Lenny: But, I mean, you know, I like—I’m not a tech. guy, but I know enough to be dangerous, and I certainly talk to enough people now to understand kind of where things are going. And you think about—I know that there are companies right now that are incorporating generative AI on the front end of concept tests, which makes perfect sense, right? I mean, the Effie Awards this year rolled out an AI category, right? I think System1—they’re tracking. They’re mongering, “Yeah, this ad was totally AI generated.” So how about facilitating that piece of things when you have clients who say, “All right. We have some creative we want to test. Let’s use that hypothetically.” Do you envision a path where Forsta is integrated in with one of the image-generation platforms to allow them to do something like that organically? Or would they simply just port it in like any other stimuli that we would use today? Just hypothetically. I’m not going to hold you to it on a product roadmap, I promise.

Manny: Oh, please, and I hope my product folks don’t get too excited when they hear me speaking about how quickly we’re going to be releasing all of these update to our platform. No, what I’d say there—I mean, Lenny, we’re big believers in best-of-breed and integrating solutions. I mean, not only it—we built our solution around a whole set of REST-based APIs with the ability to pull, push data, but integrate to other systems, right? We want to be that core, foundational piece of technology that, you know, kind of becomes that hub where you can plug everything into. The last thing anybody wants is another login, another password, another system, right? So the more that we can integrate with other solutions, the more that we can leverage additional tech to broaden our offering. I think that’s certainly the path. That’s certainly the approach that we’ve taken, even with our product roadmap, is we integrate a lot of the solutions that we have together. Short answer would be we don’t have any plans for anything immediate. But I think what’s exciting and most exciting right now, Lenny, is that everything’s on the table. You know, we’re finding out about new and emerging and technologies and new developments in AI almost daily. And so, again, this is why I’m saying that I’m so excited about that curve or the adoption curve really shortening related to AI versus some of the other things that we’ve seen in past. And I think those that are leading the industry are going to lead the charge for some of these things. And I think that it’s just a period of rapid development, where careful what you see on the roadmap today. Frankly, it may have to be scrapped with the newest emerging technology that’ll make it irrelevant six months from now. So I think—you know, in research, I remember when all we talked about was agile, agile, agile, agile. And it was kind of a joke, actually. I forget which conference I went to. I said, “Who’s buying drinks every time the word ‘agile’ is mentioned?”

Anthony: [laugh]

 Manny: “That’s another drink.” The bar tap would’ve been nothing anyone would’ve wanted to expense. But, on that, I think we talk about agile research. Well, from a product development standpoint, it’s also critically important that we stay agile even in our development efforts and what we’re trying to incorporate into the platform. Because, frankly, the way we’ve seen things adopt, we may release what we thing is great feature function, suiting the needs of the market today, may be totally irrelevant six months from now based on some of these new developments. So it’s just an interesting time, and one where—yeah, I would probably less likely to trade with my product folks than even Anthony, who is doing a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. It’s going to be interesting, and it’s certainly going to be a race. We just have to do our best to stay right ahead of it.

Lenny: Well, what are some of the organizational challenges for that though? Because there has to be an exhaustion. Over the past year, there must be a collective ‘holy crap,’ and ‘oh, crap,’ at the same time, right? So, with some of these technologies, as they emerge, thinking, “Oh, all right. We have to change these—not just our product roadmap that—we were thinking we’re trucking along, you know, thinking this. And oh, now there’s something entirely new we have to adapt to.” But organizationally, have there been organizational challenges, culture, structure, et cetera, et cetera, that you’ve had to go through to be positioned to deal with a faster pace of innovation than maybe we have experienced beforehand?

Manny: Hundred percent. And this is where we’re even using our own technology in-house for things like ideations. So we actually ran an entire ideation campaign within Forsta, where we invited all employees to submit their ideas around the latest developments in AI and things that they’d like to see as part of what we’re integrating into the platform. So, yeah, we’re, as we say, trying to drink our own champaign a little bit. And part of that comes back to not just doing what we thinking the industry wants but also listing to those—or the boots that we have on the ground right now, those that are closest to our customers, those that are in the day-to-day and challenged with things like report creation or production, survey programming, you name it, right. So, by opening this up to the entire business, the benefit we got was the ability to really hear from everyone and say, “Here are the things that are going to have the most meaningful impact, not just to our end client and that shiny new toy, but the things that will have a meaningful impact to what we do in our day-to-day.” So, yeah, but that’s—it is a big, cultural shift. And you can imagine bringing in multiple different organizations that, by the way, we brought together in the middle of a pandemic. You know, we went from a 300-person organization to over 3,000 with our latest acquisitions. And, of those, I’ve been fortunate enough to maybe meet a couple hundred of those face to face. So you can imagine the challenges of trying to build a new culture and do it remotely and in a remote environment. So a lot of that comes down to technology adoption, again, and the same, drinking our own champaign, using our own—what a novel concept using our own technology to survey our own populace, create ideation communities to figure out exactly what our folks want to see in the platform, and then try and incorporate that into our roadmaps and what we’re talking to market.

Lenny: Anthony, how about you? Anything you want to add to that?

Anthony: I think, you know, going back to the previous point that we talked about, right, you know, even within us, as Forsta, that the concept that we are following, connecting all the platforms to a single location, which is the focus that we have given, right. You know, we call it a smart hub. You know, all the data gets reported back, regardless of the platform. I could be getting the number wrong over here. Last time, when I checked, we had close to 43 offerings, and that number keeps on increasing as well, technology-wise, the offerings that we have. So it’s the same concept that we are following internally, having that easy way of connecting as well as, you know, communicating between the platforms too. So it’s just a level above that we need to open the gates by external offerings that, you know, to have those connections in place. So the users of our platforms, all our users, while living within that ecosystem, it’s a much easy and a split second for everyone.

Lenny: So I want to conscious of your time, as well our listeners, so let’s kind of move into the wrap-up. Was there anything that you were hoping I would ask or bring up that I did not? 

Manny: Lenny, I was really hoping for an invitation and accommodations to the next IIEX event in Asia, in Bangkok. I haven’t had the pleasure or the privilege.

Anthony: [laugh]

Manny: But I figured an invitation and an opportunity to continue this discussion there would’ve been welcomed by Anthony as well as myself.

Lenny: [laugh] Well, I’ll run that past Dana.

Manny: [laugh]

Lenny: And we’ll go—of course, we would welcome you to come to Bangkok. I won’t be there, so go live—

Manny: [laugh]

Lenny: Let me live vicariously through you.

Anthony: [laugh]

 Lenny: The [laugh] ...

Manny: [laugh]

Lenny: Yeah. So duly noted.

Manny: [laugh]

Lenny: Duly noted.

Anthony: [laugh]

Manny: Joking aside, no, really—I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, Lenny. I appreciate you having us on, of course. And, yeah, no, I thought this was great—certainly a conversation, at least as related to AI, that’s top of mind for everyone right now, so love the path we took here. And, no, couldn’t think of any other questions. Anthony, unless you’re looking for an invitation to maybe the IIEX Europe, which is in Amsterdam this year.

Lenny: [laugh]

Manny: That would’ve been another nice one as well.

Anthony: And the list goes on. The list goes on, right?

Lenny: [laugh]

Anthony: Manny, I can’t beat that. I think, well said. [laugh] No, Lenny, I think, thank you for the opportunity. I think this is just step because, as you know, that, you know, we finished the first wave. But, you know, we are already on to the next wave. So there’s a lot of engagement that needs a partnership that we can expect to move forward with Greenbook and Forsta. So I think I see this as we are just kicking off the journey. There’s a lot of areas that we can engage better. And these conversations could be much more rich in a way that—you know, the way that we learn and that we can keep the discussions open and share any learnings with the industry as well as, you know, learn from the industry.

Lenny: Yeah. Could not agree more. And I’ll give you—Nelson and I are in an ongoing internal battle because I would like to incorporate more qualitative into—and he’s just, “Lenny, no. Just, oh, my God, no.”

 Anthony: [laugh]

Lenny: So, on that note, right, we’ll see who eventually wins. There may be a long term. You know, the next time he may really go, “What the hell are you thinking? I’m trying to do this.” So, anyway...

 Anthony: You’d just be [audio break] , I’ll bring the experts.

Lenny: All right. All right. Well, I will pass that along. And you have been—you have been great partners, so thank you. And, again, I meant what I said in the beginning. You were one of the initial leaders, so it’s wonderful to have this conversation with your perspective on where things are going from a technology perspective overall. It is foundational to what we do. There’s consumers and engagement and quality sample, and there is how we conduct the research. Everything else is—it may be important, but, if we don’t get those two things right, nothing else matters. So I really enjoy talking with companies like Forsta and yourself that are really driving that, and I’m glad we had a good conversation about that. Where can people find you, individually, and the company? You know, give the plug.

Manny: Sure. Lenny, at least for myself and Anthony, we’re both on LinkedIn. So, of course, link with us. Manny Rodriguez of Forsta, Anthony Samarasekera at Forsta as well. And you can find us, again through that. But, of course, the easiest way, if you want to get in on more Forsta tech, go to HYPERLINK "http://www.forsta.com"www.forsta.com. You can request a demo. And, actually, in the notes, you can say, “Hey... I heard that Manny and Anthony give the best demos at Forsta. We’d like to see the tech, but we’d like to see it from them.”

 Lenny: [laugh]

Manny: Anthony, don’t kill me if anybody actually calls you for a demo. I promise I’ll step in and take care of it.

Anthony: No, we actually have help. I think we would love to hear more from everyone, so please connect with us. That’s knowledge sharing, learning from each other, and having that connection matters a lot. That’s how were born and raised, I would say, within the industry, right? So the doors are open. Please.

Manny: Absolutely.

Lenny: That’s great. Is that the tagline? “For a good demo, call Manny and Anthony.” Is that what [laugh] —I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry.

Anthony: [laugh]

Lenny: As soon as you said that, that’s where my brain went. So I kind of like it. “For a good demo, call Manny and Anthony.”

Manny: There you go. There you go.

Lenny: [laugh] The advertising campaign could be really interesting on that. But, anyway, on that note, welcome to the Greenbook Podcast. Sometimes we go in unexpected places. Thank you, guys, so much. [laugh] And now I’m going to give a shout-out before I get myself in any more trouble to our producer, Natalie; our editor, Big Bad Audio; and, of course, to you, our listeners, because without you, we wouldn’t have an excuse to get together like this. And this was a lot of fun, and I hope that you enjoyed it as well. That’s it for now. We’ll see you on another edition of the Greenbook Podcast very soon. Bye-bye.