Sascha Eder of NewtonX on Trust in Synthetic Personas

NewtonX CEO and co-founder Sascha Eder joins Karen Lynch on the CEO Series to discuss how strategic consulting and entrepreneurial resilience shaped his approach to leadership. Sascha explains why hiring, actionable feedback, mentorship, and cultural alignment are essential when scaling a company through uncertainty. He also shares NewtonX’s perspective on synthetic personas and their potential to support faster, always-on B2B research when used alongside primary data.

Rather than treating synthetic research as a universal solution, Sascha emphasizes transparent methodologies, appropriate use cases, and evidence that builds researcher confidence. The conversation also explores AI’s rapidly evolving capabilities, the continued importance of human connection, and why the future of insights will depend on welcoming new technologies and professionals from diverse professional backgrounds.

Key Discussion Points

• How Sascha’s background shaped his resilience, mental discipline, teamwork, and leadership style.
• The strategy skills he gained at McKinsey—and what he had to unlearn when moving from advising companies to building one.
• Why hiring quality, cultural alignment, regular feedback, and career development are critical to scaling and employee retention.
• How synthetic personas can complement primary research and enable faster, always-on decision support for B2B organizations.
• Why the future of insights depends on technological experimentation, methodological transparency, mentorship, and diverse professional backgrounds.

Resources and Links

• NewtonX
• 2025 GRIT Insights Practice Report
• ⁠IIEX West

You can reach out to Sascha Eder on LinkedIn

Many thanks to Sascha Eder for being our guest. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.

Transcript

Karen Lynch: Hi, everyone. I'm Karen Lynch. I am here today for an edition of the CEO series. You might be used to seeing me on the Green Book podcast, and you might be used to seeing Lenny Murphy on the CEO series. Sasha, you may not even know this, but this is actually my first time interviewing on the CEO series. Lenny and I are shaking things up a little bit. I know. So I'm really honored to be talking to you. Sasha Eater, CEO of Newton X. Newton X has been a partner of Green Books on the Grit Report.

Sascha Eder: Well

Karen Lynch: Every wave since I think 2023. So thank you for that. We'll dig into that. But Sasha, you've also been you were a 2022 futurist honori. You have been featured in articles, I believe, that at least I track back to to 2021. thank you for all of that. Thank you for being here.

Sascha Eder: Thanks for having me, Karen. 

Karen Lynch: I'm I'm just so jazzed to talk to you. So for those for those who are not privy to all of that, why don't you just take a hot second and introduce people to you, kind of and your company. Tell kind of who you are and what you do.

Sascha Eder: Course. my name is Sasha. I'm the CEO and founder of Newton X. We are an AI native B2B research intelligence company. And I think I can really make the claim to be AI native because back in twenty seventeen, when really no one was talking about AI, we from the very beginning, you know, position ourselves as an AI powered B2B research company. And back then people at conferences would be like, What are they talking about? And now you know you go and everyone has AI everywhere, obviously. And what we do is we work with firms. To help them get access to how to recruit audiences, specifically B2B audiences, to then collect data from them through various methodologies to answer really their hardest and most important business questions.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. thus our partnership on grit, B2B audience and also very important questions. So, you know, again, thank you for your partnership on that. extremely important industry information and intel that we get for that. you know, when I you know, kind of digging into your background to to make sure that I'm fully prepped for this, I'm like, you had such a an interesting start to your career, if you will. you know, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group.

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: I love when people start out there because you're a strategist. So talk to me a little bit about that, about your your origin.

Sascha Eder: Yeah, I would say in order to really talk about my origin, I would go even further back because pretty much the first twenty years of my life had nothing to do with business. I started playing soccer when I was about two years old. And the first twenty years were all about becoming a professional athlete. So I first played soccer until I was about sixteen in you know, the the junior Bundesliga in Germany, which was the highest league, and then transitioned over to run track and field for the German national team. And I bring this up because that experience plays a big role in my entrepreneurial journey and just gave me a lot of tools that I can use, you know, when things get tough or when we try to achieve really ambitious ambitious things. And then from there I did my studies, transitioned over to at some point saying, Okay, you know, now I'm gonna focus on on a professional career and did a master in the US, and then afterwards joined McKinsey for

For about two years on the West Coast. And that's where I really started getting deep into cutting-edge technology. I was part of the tech practice. We were advising some of the most innovative companies in San Francisco and Seattle. You can probably guess which which ones those are, on big data strategy, AI, VR, and and mixed reality, and then AI. Again, back in the day around 2015, way before it became mainstream.

And we needed a lot of experts from the field because even for us, these were like newer topics. And so we worked with research companies, we worked with expert networks. And that's when I first time really, you know, got in touch with this industry from the client side and faced my challenges, let's just say, and and that ultimately led to the inspiration to start Newton X.

Karen Lynch: I think that's great. I did have just a lag there. So I apologize if it was on my end and if I have disrupted the audience at all with that. I I want to go back to something really important to talk about, and that is your background as an athlete, because something that you said really inspired me. When you talk about what you gained from that experience, I want to dig further into that because I'll give you some backstory. I'm a mom.And one of my one of my children, my daughter, she was a dancer. She was pre-professional. and and and stayed competitive in competitive dance all the way through through college and then stayed dancing as a college athlete. And a lot of people said, You're investing a lot of money in this, in this, you know, in this event. You I mean, to the tune of, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, which is is definitely a privilege that she had and that we were able to provide for her.

You know, what is she gaining from all this? And I just kept saying the the the level of teamwork that she is showing me every day, the level of grit and perseverance that she shows every day, showing up for her team, performing at her best, learning, you know, how to take disappointment, trying new things, you know, kind of persevering during failure, like. All of these lessons that she I could see play out on s literally on stage, and never giving up and showing up the next day and trying again and and going to the next event and trying again. I just kept saying this is priceless and will serve her well in life. are there lessons that you think to this day from those first 20 years still stay with you?

Sascha Eder: Absolutely. I think, you know, today when people think about professional sports, you know, and what you're sort of being told by the media, it's always about, you know, fame and and and obviously, you know, the potential to make a lot of money and and and that makes a lot of sense. But that's obviously not the case for every sport. It most certainly is not the case for track and field. So especially when I made the move from soccer to track and field, you know, I already knew through this very deliberate choice that this was likely not gonna become, you know, my my full time career. But I think, you know, there's another another element that people also see, which is passion. It's very, very important, right? You often pick a sport because you're very passionate about it. And then, you know, to your question, I mean you learn things to the sport that I don't think can be taught in any other way. Whether it is the team bonding, you know, if it's a team sport and you're about to go out, let's say for a match, you know, and you're in the locker room and you sort of get together and just get yourself ready for the game, right? These

These sort of moments or the training moments, as well as the ability to really push yourself, which especially in trek and field where I was a sprinter, it's very black and white, right? Either you're the fastest or you're not. And so when it comes to the finish line, and it's this last like one hundredth of a second that makes a difference. You really learn to push way beyond what you thought was possible. And then the third back aspect, and that I think is extremely valuable for later on in your career, is the mental aspect, right? We were training with mental coaches because you hear this often 90% of what happens right in sports is a mental thing. If you tell yourself from the beginning, I'm gonna fail, I have no chance, right? You have no chance. But you have these outsiders coming into a competition and they win because they're mentally so strong. And so these, and I could talk about this for hours, but these things among others are just so valuable and and they have helped me so many times throughout my life.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I love that. I I wish more people did kind of did that reflection about what what are the lessons they learned from the years that they think are just about, you know, just about growing up. Cause they're not just about that. You there's so much that you learn about you know, who you become as you enter into the the work world. So I'm so glad we talked about that. Thank you. So you so you you get out there and you're you're working at McKinsey and you're working at BCG and you're you're this strategist. And and clearly you're learning you're learning how to think like a strategist because they're they're teaching you this high-level consultancy type work. the best of the best, right? Now you're top tier, learning from the best of the best. And I'm sure you've taken on many of those qualities i in your work. but there's probably some other things that, you know, that you have to throw to the side when you want to become an entrepreneur, also, right? So, talk to me about some of that. What lessons you learned or lessons that you had to unlearn then when you started your own business?

Sascha Eder: Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. I think there are these two sides. So I always joke saying, you know, I was at McKinsey long enough to see sort of some of the best sites, but not too long where I would become too much of a consultant. And and what I mean by that is really, you know, I had really an incredible time there. I went through probably, like you said, some of the world's best training you can get, strategy training. there are so many training programs you go through as a consultant. You have really these excellent mentorship programs. And even as you go through projects, consulting projects, right? There are these frameworks you learn. And it's just probably the best, I would say, generalist strategy training you can get in the world. Better than any MBA and really like because it's also combined with obviously the real-world practice that you see with firms in the field. Now, when we started the company, we were able to use a lot of these learnings. For example, when you hire someone new.

Having a structured onboarding in place, right? And that's just very important. And, you know, how do you train them early on, et cetera? So for all of these things, it's very valuable. Where it's not valuable is, or or or rather doesn't apply anymore, is, you know, in consulting, you give a lot of advice. And that that has changed as well, where these days, you know, consultants more and more also do the implementation. But ultimately, especially as a strategy consultant, you hand over your recommendation, but you don't implement it. So you don't see the messy world of what you thought is gonna work is not gonna work, or not the way you expected it, right? And so as an entrepreneur, you obviously are doing things. You're actually building a company, which means you're working with clients and you're putting things, you know, in out there in the business, and and things don't always work. They don't work the way you expected. You deal with a lot of unexpected things. I mean, if we talk over the last couple of years, right? Think about COVID, think about you know, the tariff situation, all these macroeconomic factors that all of a sudden exp affect your business. That's where as an entrepreneur, you gotta find ways to deal with it, think out of the box, and there's no framework in the world that's really gonna tell you, you know, how to deal with this.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you certainly experienced a couple of bumps in your early years, right? So did you have like did did you have kind of a a philosophy that you or or something that you held on to during during these bumpy times? Like you know, how how how'd you get through it all?

Sascha Eder: Yeah. Yeah, I would say the philosophy, put very simply for us was there's really nothing we can't overcome. And at first it's just a saying, right? But I think now nine year nine plus years later, we can really look back and say, we've shown so much resilience. And not only that, every time we've come out of it stronger than before, we're growing faster than ever before. And the you know, and and that's really because when a situation happens and early on you

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah.

Sascha Eder: Panic, you get nervous, right? And then you figure it out. Now again, it's still things might happen, but you look at it and you first remind yourself that there have been many different situations you have made it through, even even if this is a completely new scenario. And then most importantly, you have a strong team to rely on. That's that's probably the single most important part for us. It was always we we can't control the circumstances. We don't know what the issue might be, but we have an incredibly strong team. With really, really smart brains, we can put in a room different backgrounds, technical and business and whatnot. And so depending on whatever the challenge is, we throw the smartest people at it, and then we figure it out. 

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine, you know, again, y you're scaling up during you scaled up first of all during COVID. That must have been something. You're scaling up at a time when the world is is sort of pulling back and scaling down. but you're also scaling up at a time when there's a lot of people who are looking for work. So you must have had a lot of you know, a lot of you must have a lot of stories to tell, a lot of a lot of battle wounds during that time about

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: You know, growing that staff, during this time as well and and finding those those humans that are that are behind the work you do. Any words of advice for people who are scaling up that way?

Sascha Eder: Yeah, I think, you know, hiring is is a topic we could have our own episode about. It's such a, you know, big and and ever-evolving topic. I would say, you know, and this is founder-to-founder advice, people are probably not not probably people are the most important part of a company. Yes, there's the product, there's the market, there's tailwinds, there's all these other things, but the people

Karen Lynch: Seriously. Yeah, yeah.

Sascha Eder: The smaller the company, even more so. But even as you scale up, you know, it matters. And so as you scale, you know, you really need to make sure to balance speed against quality. Because once you hire a couple of people that either don't feel culturally or from a skill set, you really start to feel it and it affects everyone, including your top performers. And so you really gotta find a way to say, okay, I'm gonna scale up. And I need, you know, twenty five, fifty hundred people, but I have systems in place that allow me to do this without diluting, you know, the culture and the quality that we built so hard, you know, to put in place.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. We have Green Book's a small company, but we have spent a lot of time working on employee retention. We really try hard to have a culture here where people stay. And I was just pointing out to Lukash, our managing director, that next year there are a a a significant percentage of us, a significant percentage compared to the number of staff that we have that are hitting, you know, the five year mark. For us, which is significant for the size company that we are, because we offer sabbaticals at five years. So if if five out of twenty of us are on a one month sabbatical next year, we've got to do some planning because because we love employee retention and yet we have a we're gonna have a big we're gonna have a big year next year when we're trying to plan for a lot of people taking a lot of time off. what are some of the things you think you have in place that are forming the culture at your company?

Sascha Eder: Yeah. Yeah, this is really I mean, first of all, kudos to you know to that milestone. I think generally in this market, getting to five years tenure for a number of employees is is a very big achievement, right? Because there's more and more this notion of like jumping from company to company, staying one to two years somewhere. So it says a lot about the culture when someone stays three, four, five plus years. We have a similar situation where we have, you know, people that have been with us for five, six, seven years and because it's no longer the norm in this job market, I think it goes to show it says a lot about the the the culture. And so for us, I mean, it really starts with the interview process. It sounds very cliche, but we're just so focused on making sure we only let the right people into the company that fit. And that doesn't mean that they need to be similar to we already have, right? Diversity is incredibly important from a mindset and background standpoint, but just culturally.

Karen Lynch: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sascha Eder: Value wise and what you try to achieve that there is cohesion, otherwise it's just disruptive and and also not good for for the people joining. So that's very, very important. And then you know the thing is we we always say you can't build culture by throwing a couple of happy hours, right? Or doing doing these sort of superficial things, but they they are important. And so it it's very holistic. It starts with, you know, regular feedback. One of the things by the way I learned in consulting, feedback is such a gift.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah.

Sascha Eder: But it's so important and so important to do regularly and do it proactively and do it well, right? If I tell you, hey, you got to do better, that's not helping, right? So it's gotta be concrete, it's gotta be actionable, it's gotta be evidence-based. That's a big thing. So feedback, making sure you know, you have a clear view on what people want and that that's in line with their career trajectory and making that work for them inside of the company, having these opportunities to prove themselves, to, to move upwards.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Sascha Eder: You know, and then outside of that, obviously activities, you know, that are outside of just the day to day. One of our biggest things is we have an annual retreat that we're very proud of. that's become a tradition because we now have people all over the world. And so it's this one time a year where really everyone comes together and everyone leaves extremely energized, you know, and you meet your colleagues that otherwise you're only connecting with through through video. and there's many other aspects, but it's really a a constant you know piece of work that you really gotta invest in, otherwise it it doesn't work.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are huge supporters of that as well. I don't know if you know, after IAX North America, we we you know, everybody gets together for that particular event and then we have we have a the day the day that follows, we have a team day and we do something together, you know, kind of a team it's almost like a retreat 'cause we do something together that day as a team and we have a team celebration that night and..

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: that is so important to us as a team. It's like we all look yes, we look forward to that event, but we really look forward to the day after that event. Even more than the event itself. We look forward to that Friday. That's pretty fun. So I you know, I have to call out I I there's some there's some other things I really want to talk to you about, but you know, I mentioned in the beginning that you are you or you were one of our futurist honorees. So you're always an honoree, but you were in a cohort in 2022.

Sascha Eder: Yeah, no, that's really cool. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: I I will not forget that because that was also my first year at Green Book. So so that that's an anchor year for me. but I then I found out you also, you know, were on the Forbes 30 under 30 at one point. So, you know, you kind of you staked out this place as as somebody who was making things happen at a young age. And I think you know, as I'm I'm listening to you talk about what it's like to being kind of, you know, a founder, CEO, entrepreneur. 

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: And I'm thinking about what it takes to be a leader. And I'm thinking about, you know, for many people, what it takes to be a manager. there's a lot of things that you've to pull together to not just run a company, but to lead people and to form company culture and to, you know, stay abreast of industry trends, to, you know, start a business and maintain a business. what advice do you have for other people who might aspire to doing the sorts of things that you have done, especially young people who maybe are like coming out of.. Coming out of school and they're and they're listening, saying, I want to be a CEO one day, but boy, that's a big mountain to climb. What advice do you have for some of the the younger people listening? 

Sascha Eder: Yeah. You know, when you look these days, right, at new founders and startups in in in the media and so on, right? I think you notice that the it's younger and younger, right? There's this sort of sentiment you're getting, people are younger and younger and feel this pressure to become founders and and whatnot. Then I think it's a great trend, to to to a degree in in the sense that, you know, young people should be encouraged to feel, Hey, I can, you know, try something and it it can work and even if it doesn't work by the way you learn from it and then it might work at another point in time. I also would say people shouldn't feel the pressure though to have to do it right away. There's nothing wrong with first going into a job and and learn some experience and then start something. And I'm saying this not to provide a path either way, but I think for me what was most fundamental in in everything I managed to achieve was really the environment.

And the mentorship I achieved, whether it was all the way through my professional sports career where I had just incredible coaches that pushed me to limits, which ultimately taught me values I didn't know before, to later on then you know partner with the right people. When we were first time founders, having you know people around me that have done it before, whether it was fundraising or already starting companies. And that's what got me to the point. And to this day, I have networks of CEOs, founders, we get together and and and still exchange problems, you know, that we encounter where one has maybe done it and can help the other. And that's probably the most important thing. you know, as a founder, you are forced by design to do so many things you don't have the experience of doing and and encountered it before. And so the only way to overcome it, apart from you know, being very obviously persistent and.. And smart in many other ways, is to talk to people who have done it. And that, by the way, sort of in a selfish way goes back to what we do as a company, right? The whole model of Newton X is talk to people who have done it before, right? It's the expert model, the research model, but it really applies to entrepreneurs as well. And so I would really advise people do not think it is a sign of weakness and try to do everything on your own and don't ask for advice and just do it yourself. Ask people that have done it. They will help you. It's a giving and taking. You get to a point where you will start then passing down your advice. But that's probably the single most important factor to be able to succeed. And it's quite frankly also a reason YSF and New York are, you know, these ecosystems, because it's such a high density of people helping each other.

 Karen Lynch: Yeah. I think it's interesting because the idea of entrepreneurship does not mean do it alone. You know, those that that is not the case. You can be an entrepreneur and very much be in connection with other people and get a lot of advice and have a lot of connections and a and a huge network. Doesn't mean you have to go at it alone, right? Entrepreneurship means something else. What what does it mean to you being an entrepreneur?

Sascha Eder: Absolutely. That's a deep question, but I like it. I think being an entrepreneur means to me a couple things. It's the courage to do things that others haven't done, you know, venture into uncharted territories. And I think that's part of the reason why humanity progresses and why, you know, we're doing a lot of things we've never done before. And that's I think what a lot of things

Karen Lynch: Ha ha ha.

Sascha Eder: A lot a lot of people associate it with entrepreneurship. it also means something that I have always said, as an entrepreneur, you need to be proactive about the things you do. There's nobody gonna be on top of you and say, hey, have you thought today about doing this or hey, you should launch this new product, right? Nobody's gonna tell you. You need to develop a sense of, okay, where are we in the market? What are the signals and and make decisions that otherwise never happen. And then you know, you need to embrace the unknown. You know, it's just you need to be comfortable with you can be a control freak or or try to plan through everything, but there will be just inevitably so many things happening you can control. So you gotta learn with whenever something happens to be able to deal with it in moment.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. So super segue, by the way, to the next topic I really want to talk about, which I know is something that you want to talk about too. let's venture into the unknown territory of synthetic personas and synthetic data. So you know, it is territory that you are moving into. So so let's just let's just go there. Tell me how you are moving into that that world.

Sascha Eder: Yeah, I think, you know, synthetic, you know this this very well as well, being deeply embedded in the industry is probably one of the most discussed topics over the last few months and years. I think mostly because there's just so many approaches to it, and as a result, there's so many different opinions on what works, what doesn't work, and whatnot. For us, the way we approach it is the way we have always approached everything. 

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Sascha Eder: Which is, you know, on the one hand, embracing something we believe is valuable, but being very realistic about the constraints, what's the current state of it, and being very transparent with you know those we work with on this of what works and doesn't work, and instead of trying to sell, you know, this magic solution that's gonna address all your problems, right? Like the way we think about in particular is in this day and age, and it's it's quite interesting.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah.

Sascha Eder: It's something you know that the CMO of Zoom said in con when when her and I were on on stage together. You know, when you go from launching, for example, as a SaaS company, 20 features a year to two and a half thousand features as a company, right? The research that comes along with it has to fundamentally change. You can no longer get away with I'm running, you know, four big studies a year. Right, where I spent like eight to twelve weeks to plan it, run it, analyze it. Just the pace of innovation has changed. And as a result, research needs to go along with it. And I think Synthetic is one of several tools that allows us, combined with primary research, to get closer to what companies need these days, which is what we call this always-on solution, where you know, you might run primary research, let's say a couple of times a year.

But in between, maybe for the most part, you operate almost blindly, whether it's based on these decisions, based on the data you have that are a couple months old, or just on your gut feeling. And so now if you have this tool, let's say synthetic persona, again, assuming it's constructed the right way, you know, scientifically, mathematically, et cetera, you can now tap into something that makes a difference between, you know, guessing or having foundational input. and I think that's that's quite exciting.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. So i there's lots of people that are excited about it, right? And then there's then there's the other the other side of people that are that are going to be shaking their heads. I know this just because I've I've talked to both at our events, in in the audience, at our events, just attendees at our events and there's suppliers that are all on board and then there's attendees, many whom are on board and many whom are just like, yeah no, I just can't go there yet. And I have a lot of these conversations. What's your response to the people that are shaking their heads? You know, that are saying, Gosh, I'm just not there with you. you know, how how how are you how are you explaining to people that that it's okay?

Sascha Eder: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, my first response would be I respect someone's opinion. So if that's someone's opinion, that's totally fair. if someone, you know, either doesn't want to believe it or they have been through an experience where it didn't work for them, that's very fair. What ultimately matters is the clients that use it get value out of it. I think we're all in you know the business of serving clients and making sure they get value out of it. and I think specifically in the context of synthetic personas, that you can tied to real results or to tests that are run with real research, that can back this up. I think we're we're we're in the stage right now of creating credibility around this this new technology. And you know, if you look at specific use cases around you know ad message testing and and and and and other things, you know, and you look at again.

We can go more into the details, but if you struck if you construct the B2B persona, synthetic persona in in the right way with the right data foundation, and you then say, okay, does directionally this persona give me an answer to this, you know, app copy variation that I'm trying to test versus how I would do real research? And then you look in the real world, you know what that looks like, and you see, okay, this is, you know, getting me there. I think that's what matters, you know. And then it's a lot less about who believes in it, who doesn't believe in it, you know. I think that will sort of sort itself over time. Right now we focus on those who are what we believe good candidates for this technology, who, you know, are willing to try it out, and then working with them on setting it up in a in a way that they can really, you know, buy into the output. Because what we always say is, you know. Behind every researcher is a career, a reputation, and that's always what's on the line, right? When they when they when they try something like this. And so that's what we're really optimizing. 

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. I was just saying to somebody, you know, very recently, and I forget who and I forget the context, but somebody I used to work with said, you know, every single employee everywhere is always concerned at the end of the day, am I going to lose my job? Right. So if they're gonna if they're gonna take on a new methodology, at the end of the day, they're gonna be concerned that what they try might in the end cost them their job. Will they ruin will they mess up a research project, waste their company's money, and lose their job?

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Well, you know, that that's really what what it boils down to. So we can't take for granted how scary that risk is for them because their job security is what is on the line. They may, you know, yes, they're worried about losing their company money, sure, but it's so much more than that on a personal level, right? So we got to respect that.

Sascha Eder: Yes. I fully agree. I mean, the this is again its own topic, right? if you look at at the news, you're now hearing again about lots of companies who originally made headlines by claiming that AI allowed them to replace a lot of headcount, are no adding back peek people, right? You have the one side of the coin who says AI is gonna replace people, you have the other side who says it's gonna actually cause you to hire more people because now you gotta manage all these agents. And so there's so many many views, but I think, again, this is a personal opinion, but we are very, very far away from having AI in a place where it just being put in place works perfectly, does not hallucinate, does not make any mistakes, and fully replaces someone and that applies to many, many industries, not just market research.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah, no. I I'm with you on that one. I I I don't have I I I don't have that that pessimism that a lot of people have for our industry. I I see it as I see it as I see it as all all all positive and just a ch a change that we're in the midst of. what I'm curious about for you is just when you think about this, then obviously for your company synthetic data is significant. Or synthetic sample is significant and synthetic personas, digital twins, all of that. That is the, that is the the landscape you run on, to use that sports analogy or that track analogy. That is, that is your playing field. you know, what do you see coming down the pike for that? Do you see it growing in frequency and usage? Do you see it changing, evolving? Like what's what's your overall take just on it, on it,

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: You know, across the industry.

Sascha Eder: The first thing I would say, and you sort of hinted at that, right? I think we really need to differentiate between the different types of synthetic, because to your point, there is, you know, there is synthetic boosting, which you know, that's what we call when you have a survey and you have niche you know, quotas, for example, and you're trying to increase the sample size. You have digital twins, you have synthetic personas, and then you have you know, sort of pure LLM. You know, direct responses. And those are all different, you know, groups. And I think they will have the different you know, use cases, let's just say, right? Either way, you know, for us, for example, specifically, we we believe synthetic personas, which is really, you know, under the hood, the you know, representation of a specific audience, is very relevant in B2B, where decisions often come down to buyer groups and not to individuals. So if I, you know, interview the digital twin and the rep it's the representation of a 30-year-old woman in the Midwest who likes to go shopping at Target. That in the B2B context is not gonna be very relevant, right? So that's that's like like just one big piece where we also work with our clients to help them understand what actually within synthetic even makes sense in the first place. Because you can already fail by using the wrong methodology and then say, well, synthetic doesn't work. That that's a very important.

Now to the overall state of the technology, which I think applies sort of across these categories, you know, I compared a little bit to the weather forecast. And again, you can quote me on this, might not be the best, you know, metaphor, but if you think about it, the weather forecast, let's say, I don't know, 30 years ago, right? it started off with, I don't know, you hang a thermostat outside and you look at the temperature, right? And then you would look at maybe, you know, the humidity and you would start having sort of sensors out there, right? Now, we have satellites, you know, floating around the space who can give you sort of accurate predictions, you know, predicting the weather, not just looking at is it gonna rain in 10 minutes or not. So what I'm trying to say is we have come so far and we're probably at the early stages of the thermostat right now when it comes to synthetic. You know, there's again so many approaches out there in the market where you have entire teams of behavioral.

Scientists mixed up with data scientists, you know, trying to map the world to then synthetically you know, forecast behaviors. And so there's gonna be so many different approaches, of which some are gonna crystallize to be better than others. and and things are gonna get better, right? Are we ever gonna get to a point where you can say I can have a fully synthetic representation of real human, irrational behavior, right? Which is really the

Karen Lynch: Right.

Sascha Eder: Oftentimes key point in market research, the unpredictability which makes it exciting, nobody knows, right? But will it become a tool set that gets better and better in its respective use cases? It's highly likely.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What's the thing that you think is gonna surprise all of us? Like what's the thing that's that's that's out there that's coming in the future that you're like, you know what, this is coming? You've probably thought it. Say it out loud.

Sascha Eder: Mm-hmm. I mean, you know, I I I think if you look at AI in general, right, and I don't mean looking at, have you used Claude or, you know, have you, you know, I don't know, written a prompt, right? But if you really go deep, deep at the very, very frontier of what's happening, it it is truly to me one of the most exciting times ever. And this is not about replacing someone or not or what can be done. It's just the the capabilities are so mind blowing.

And I think what will surprise people is that AI is not gonna go away far from it, but the shape it's gonna take five years from now is gonna be so fundamentally different than way the way we're seeing it today. And like what I mean by this, for example, is right, there's a big talk right now about open models versus closed models, right? And so I think five years from now you're gonna have this sort of you know, collaboration of different types of models with different capabilities, open, closed, in whatever way to do things we are not even I think thinking about right now. Like use cases that are humanly not possible. and I think that's just incredibly exciting.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know it's it's I think it's a I think it's interesting for my brain when I start to think about I don't even know what's possible right now, but I'm excited for it to start to happen. And I I that's what gets me really excited about all this because I can't believe what I'm doing personally today that I didn't think I was gonna be capable of doing a year ago. And I project that out to people like you who are who are living in this world. At a greater level doing kind of with business and business use cases as such. And then, you know, I I projected out to the engineers and the anyway, and the people doing even higher level tech work. what is possible that is coming? I just I am ready for it because I just can't wait to see it. I'm fascinated. So

Sascha Eder: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, let me give you a very plain example. It has very little to do with, you know, work. But I recently came back from Italy. Yeah, I I so I recently came back from Italy and I absolutely love Italian coffee. And every time I come back, I'm just, you know, to me Italian coffee tastes so incredible, so creamy and and and light, you know, you don't need any sugar and whatnot. So I came back to the US and I was like, you know

Karen Lynch: That's cool.

Sascha Eder: I really, really want to recreate it. And I've never been able to. Like every time I go back to my coffee shops, it just tastes different, it tastes more bitter, right? And so I took one of the AI models. It does it honestly doesn't matter so much which one. And I took a picture of you know the coffee machine. And then I really went iterative iteratively through it. And I was like, tell me what I need to do. Which milk, which coffee beans, which grind. And and over time, and I got

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Sascha Eder: So close to the actual taste that I had in Italy. It we're not fully there yet, but almost. And this is something I was would have never been able to do, right? Like a few years ago with such a challenge. It's just one of so many, so many examples.

Karen Lynch: Pretty cool. So many. Well, and my husband and I were talking about this just yesterday. We're talking about how how personalized our interactions with our own AI, our own platform is. how really because it is doing nothing else but focusing on you and your needs. it is not it is having it it has the intelligence of the world, but it is focused on you. In these kind of one-on-one conversations it's having and how brilliant that is. It is there to solve our problems with the intelligence of the world. And that is why we are responding to it so well right now if we have if we are proficient with it the way many of us are, and why it's getting better and better for us on personal levels and why it's like it's going to solve that problem for you. I'm sure of it, because, you know, then you will share a picture or something. It it today I had it

Sascha Eder: Yes.

Karen Lynch: I shared a visual and I said, see this visual, I need it to I want to bring something else to life. And I gave it a few ideas and it said, You mean like this? And it kind of gave me a sketch, and I'm like, Yes, I mean like that. Like it knows enough about me. It knows enough about me and the work that I do that it was able to bring my my thinking to life in a sketch so that I could visually represent my thinking.

Sascha Eder: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: That's pretty good. That's pretty good because I'm not visually inclined, but it was able to capture my thinking visually for me. I'm not it's not a it's not a work of art that I'm gonna share anywhere, but it was able to capture a visual rendering of my thoughts. That's pretty good. Anyway, we digress.

Sascha Eder: Yeah. That's really cool. No, I agree. I think you know, everyone is worried about what AI is gonna do, right? Everyone is amazed by the progress, and all of this is great. I do think it's important for everyone, including all of us, to every once in a while go touch some grass and really remember that you know, life and and you know, part of what makes us humans is also the human connection.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Sascha Eder: Right. And and to not lose that part. It sounds very cliche and a bit meta, but but I think that's really, really important. And that's also what makes life beautiful. We don't want to at some point sit around a dinner table and have D.I. talk on our behalf to each other, right? I think that's a little bit of a dystopian scenario.

Karen Lynch: Right. Right. Yes. Well, you know what? Now that I know you're going to IAX West, you and I will have a cup of coffee and look at the water in San Francisco. There may not be grass there, but there will be water and we will have a human we will have a human conversation looking out at the water over a really really mediocre cup of coffee. All right. Last question before I let you go. the future

Sascha Eder: Love it. It's great.

Karen Lynch: The future of the industry. We always say what are the future of insights? That's one of the one of the questions I pretty much ask everybody because it's our tagline here at Green Book. The future of insights. What do you what do you think? Beyond beyond just AI, synthetic data, beyond, you know, beyond anything else that we've talked about today, what do you think is the future of insights?

Sascha Eder: Yes, I mean look, I'll give you an answer maybe from a slightly different angle than what you are looking for, but please tell me. I think rather than say, okay, what is the insights industry look gonna going to look like? You know, what are certain in technologies that are gonna emerge and whatnot, I, you know, wanna go back to how I entered the industry, which is, you know, I came from a non-research background. Which I think enabled me in a way to look at the industry from a perspective that, you know, is just very fresh. And as a result, led me to, you know, start Newton X with our customer recruiting and in many ways that maybe a traditional researcher wouldn't have done. And now, you know, again, you have this new class of really amazing and impressive startups entering the space, you know, covering anything from you know, AI moderated interviews to synthetic and not whatnot. So I would really say the future of Insights, I hope, is going to be an environment that really promotes and fosters people entering the industry, including people from a non-traditional research background that bring they diverse perspectives, because that's what ultimately makes the industry better. You know, that brings new ideas in, new technologies that we can all benefit from. And I think that's the best that the future of the insights industry can can hope for.

Karen Lynch: I love that vision. I am I am absolutely with you on that. I think that would be fantastic for all of us. So Sasha, thank you so very much for being here with me today. Really, what a pleasure to have this conversation with you.

Sascha Eder: It was great. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Karen Lynch: Good, good, good. Well that's really all she wrote. Anything else you want to say? Any final words of wisdom? 

Sascha Eder: No? Really enjoyed the discussion. 

Karen Lynch: All right. Well then that's all for our show today, friends. Thank you so much. Thank you for showing up week after week to listen to us on these episodes. This is us signing off on the CEO series. And we'll see you next time. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Sasha. Thanks again.