Small business Tribe 9 Foods was looking for a system that would give them more insight into how their customers view their products without spending a lot of money to get the information. rice field.
Food manufacturing company specializing in pasta and gluten-free foods. The company’s brands include RP’s Pasta, Taste Republic, Yumbutter and Ona Foods. With less than his 50 employees, Tribe 9 Foods wanted to be able to allocate both funding and resources to the right technology.
“Sometimes you can choose one or the other and spend a lot of money and be more efficient when you don’t have people, or you can spend a little money and put a lot of effort into it.” To make up for that,” said Andrew Allcock, senior marketing director at Tribe 9 Foods. “I can do neither.”
Native AI technology
Tribe 9 Foods, based in Madison, Wisconsin, stumbled upon native AI when searching for a tool that could provide information about what consumers were thinking while meeting cost and staffing requirements.
Native AI is an AI startup that pulls data from public datasets such as reviews and comments posted on Amazon. That data can be used to create digital twins or synthetic users that business customers can use to learn more about what consumers think of their products. The startup takes care not to capture personally identifiable information by tokenizing it via its servers into his S3 bucket (a storage service) on Amazon.
The vendor gives companies the same knowledge that brand managers and insight managers get when they use surveys, chatbot panels, and research projects to find out what consumers think about specific products. I’m trying
“After looking at things like natural language processing and the vast amount of data that consumers leave behind about products and services online, there is a right way to use AI to reduce the time to insight. I knew it,” said Frank Pica. , Co-founder and CEO of Native AI. “By using natural language processing, or AI, instead of humans, that cost has been significantly reduced.”
[It] This allows you to always know the pulse about something instantly. Andrew AllcockTribe 9 Foods Senior Marketing Director
For Tribe 9 Foods, Native AI collected all reviews about food manufacturing companies from public databases. Tribe 9 Foods has imported that information into its platform, allowing it to see overall consumer sentiment regarding texture, flavor, packaging and other attributes of various products.
This allows marketers to dig deeper into reviews and get a sense of what consumers are saying without having to manually read the reviews themselves.
”[It] It gives you instant pulse on anything at any given time,” Allcock said.
Digital twins and synthetic users
Most recently, Native AI’s digital twin technology has allowed Tribe 9 Foods to be more proactive, rather than reactive, about what consumers think about new products the company is considering.
Using product reviews, native AI generates digital twins of consumers who may be interested in the products customers launch, such as Tribe 9 Foods.
For example, if Tribe 9 Foods wants to release a pasta product, they can ask their digital twin what consumers think of the product or what ingredients make a difference. The question the manufacturer asked the system is what is the difference between fresh and dried pasta.
Tribe 9 Foods uses Native AI digital twin technology to gain insight into consumer opinion.
“Consumer research is expensive, so this is very valuable to us.” [and] “It takes a long time,” said Mr. Alcock. “Being able to do something here and be pretty close to doing it almost instantly is a huge advantage for us and allows us to compete with bigger brands with bigger budgets.” ”
As with most recommendation systems, such as those provided by native AI, the challenge usually arises as to whether the system will provide the correct answer.
For Tribe 9 Foods, trusting technology is about belief and business judgment.
“The only way to truly verify all of them [responses] That would mean conducting actual surveys with consumers, which I don’t have the luxury of. So I have no choice but to work with faith. said Allcock.
But if the digital twin provided answers that seemed out of character with what companies were accustomed to getting, the company would investigate further, he added.
“This is one of those things where you can’t trust anything blindly,” Alcock said. Therefore, in such situations, the company’s team is working on formulating more targeted questions to synthetic users that provide valuable and efficient answers, he said.
Additionally, the company had instances where the AI technology incorrectly coded reviews based on different slang the reviewers might have used. So the team had to go back and change the code from negative or positive.
Despite some challenges with the technology, cost and time constraints influenced Tribe 9 Foods’ decision not to explore alternative tools, Allcock said. Native AI competitors include Foresttreet and Crayon.
The food manufacturer is paying a discounted price of $1,500 per month for this technology and believes it is a necessary risk to remain competitive.
“These are all fairly new and many may be hesitant to use some of these,” Allcock added. “Some things we do out of necessity, but taking a little more risk on some of them could give us a competitive advantage over others who aren’t willing to take that risk and try new things. I am doing it because there is
Esther Ajao is a news writer covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
