Traditional market research is slow, expensive, and inaccessible to many businesses. That’s the view of CogniStream AI founders, Alex and Ciarán Harris, who are replacing person-to-person market research with a novel AI tool that can do the job faster and at a fraction of the cost.
“Market research agencies charge upwards of €20,000 per study and take weeks to deliver results. The alternative? Basic surveys that lack depth or conducting interviews in-house which means pulling teams away from critical tasks,” Ciarán Harris says.
“We are transforming this landscape with AI-powered, emotion-aware customer research that delivers critical insights in days, not weeks. Our system can provide a level of understanding previously achievable only through intensive human-led research and it is 90 per cent faster and costs 80 per cent less than traditional methods.
“Most businesses don’t fail because they have bad ideas,” he adds. “They fail because they miss something critical about the market or their customers. We help companies move from guesswork and indecision to clarity and focus, so they can innovate faster, build better, and stop wasting money on products that fail.”
Ciarán Harris is an expert in UX design and founder of UX research and digital design agency Each&Other. Over the past 20 years he has run research projects for companies such as Google, Vodafone and Shopify.
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Alex Harris was on the other side of the equation. She was commissioning research while working in brand marketing with companies such as Unilever and Kellogg’s and then in technology marketing and innovation management.
“My experience exposed me to various research projects and I saw first-hand how slow and expensive research processes can stall innovation. I wanted to fix that,” she says. “Our mission is building a way to make high-quality customer insight fast, affordable, and emotionally intelligent, so more businesses can innovate with confidence and build the products people truly want.”
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CogniStream AI was set up at the end of last year on a bootstrapped budget of about €40,000, while Alex Harris also received a small stipend from her recent participation in the New Frontiers programme at TU Blanchardstown. The company is now looking at building out its team and raising pre-seed funding, although she says that while they are open to a private investor, they are in no rush to find one.
Rapid progress in the development of AI-related voice activation over the past 12 months has been crucial for CogniStream. It has brought big improvements in refinement and quality, which in turn has allowed the founders to push ahead with the development of a sophisticated tool that is currently in closed beta with pilots under way in Ireland, the UK, the US and Europe and a waiting list of would-be users.
The system, which will have its official launch later this year, is a SaaS product and is offered for once-off and repeated use. It is customisable into different languages and accents – a huge technical challenge to overcome in itself – and it has multiple applications in corporate settings. It is also suitable for use by local and national Government, charities, NGOs and sporting and social organisations.
“We’re employing cutting-edge technology to refine the user experience and make it natural, seamless, flowing and intuitive. There is no software or installation required. It is literally tap and play. Key users of the system are likely to be those in marketing, product innovation, advertising and creative messaging, but we are continually coming across potential new users. For example, influencers who want to find out more about their followers,” Ciarán Harris says.
The founders have also offered their system to the Irish Government to speed up public consultation initiatives. “Consultations that currently take years to complete could be done in days with CogniStream AI, leaving the decision-makers free to focus on more important things,” Alex Harris says.
