Kantar Launches Early-Stage Innovation AI Solution

Kantar has launched ConceptEvaluate AI, an automated service for early-stage evaluation of product and service development, allowing businesses to screen new product and service concepts at scale and speed up R&D and innovation.

The global insights group says ConceptEvaluate AI is 'differentiated by the superiority of the data it is trained on': a proprietary dataset of nearly 40,000 real life innovation tests and incorporating more than six million actual consumer product evaluations. The model has been validated against past survey-based results when predicting outcomes for product and service trials, and their relevance and uniqueness to consumers, and is said to be 'close to 90% accurate'.

The new tool is available immediately on Kantar Marketplace and has the capacity to simultaneously pre-test 10-100 concepts in as little as 24 hours, providing critical insights into which concepts are performing best before moving to in-depth testing. Kantar says it opens new growth avenues in a broad range of categories including FMCG, technology and financial services, and notes that as an automated tool with no consumer or survey panel interaction, it is also 'ideally positioned for testing sensitive concepts'.

According to Jenny Matsui, Director in Kantar's Global Innovation product team, the new tool aims to ease the increasing pressure on innovators. She comments: 'By accelerating the initial phase of the innovation process, we can provide robust early evidence that a concept has the potential for in-market success'. Ashok Kalidas (pictured), Kantar's recently announced Chief AI Scientist, adds: 'ConceptEvaluate AI gives brands the creative license to translate winning ideas into fully formed concepts, knowing there's meaningful evidence to understand what will work best. With this launch, Kantar now has a portfolio of AI-based solutions addressing every phase of the sales and marketing lifecycle, from brand strategy and innovation, through creative and media effectiveness through our LINK AI ad-testing platform, to shopper behaviour, customer experience and total marketing ROI'.

Pricing starts at $5,500 and details are on the Kantar web site .