The Skai 5: Five Questions About Market Intelligence With Skai’s Guy Cohen, Chief Product Officer 

In our Skai 5 series, we discuss digital advertising tips, tricks & trends to keep you one step ahead of the consumers, the market trends and your competition. For this portion of the series, we spoke with Skai’s Chief Product Officer, Guy Cohen, to get answers about Skai’s Ask MI and Market Intelligence.

We’re at a critical moment for data analytics. There’s never been more data available to help guide business decisions, and there’s never been this many tools out there for technical experts to make sense of it. But what’s increasingly clear is that there are very few tools out there that make data understandable to the average person.

Businesses recognize that if everyone had access to the same valuable data, everyone would make better decisions. A recent Google Cloud and Harvard Business Review survey of industry leaders showed that 97% of those surveyed believe organization-wide access to data and analytics is critical to the success of their business. However, only 60% believe their organizations are effectively distributing that access today. 

Skai has changed the game. With the launch of Ask MI, we have made it possible for businesses to democratize their data and make data-driven insights accessible to everyone, on demand.

Watch: Ask MI | Self-Serve Access to Powerful Market Insights

How does Ask MI work? How can business leaders access this new technology?

What motivated Skai to develop Ask MI?

Skai clients love our existing solution, but many of our users are advanced data experts. We realized that everyone else could struggle to find and understand the data they need. In general, we see the democratization of data as a growing priority for many organizations.

People at all levels need data-driven insights in order to make good decisions, but there are a lot of barriers to making that information understandable, actionable, and accessible. Ask MI overcomes those barriers by providing data in response to simple questions, rather than presenting dense, hard-to-understand dashboards, which is what most data analytics solutions use. People think in terms of questions, not dashboards – it’s important to meet users where they are.

The data democratization that Ask MI makes possible has several benefits. Broadly, our clients will accelerate data use across the business, which will increase the ROI of their existing data investments while maintaining data governance. Individual users will no longer have to wait for answers thanks to Ask MI’s self-serve experience. That means they’ll get insights faster and be inspired to think in new ways, leading to more creativity and innovation throughout the business.

Does Ask MI replace Skai’s previous commerce intelligence solutions?

No, Ask MI complements our existing solutions, Explore MI and Connect MI. Explore MI offers data-savvy users advanced market or category insights; Connect MI allows data and analytics teams to access our data via API to augment proprietary solutions. And Ask MI gives everyone, including those who aren’t data-savvy, the ability to access important insights via an intuitive search bar. 

Accessing insights through Ask MI is simple and easy. Does that mean that the behind-the-scenes data and AI that fuels it is simpler as well? Is there any compromise?

Absolutely not. The same data and AI powers all of our solutions.

There are three stages to preparing our data. The first is continuous data collection from a huge number of sources; our models are trained to examine relevant data sources for the attributes that are important in a particular market (like product claims, ingredients, features, and benefits). Irrelevant data is removed by AI; the remaining data is then normalized, validated, and cleansed using ML engines, converting unstructured data into usable structured formats.

Finally, our patented NLP extracts context and sentiment, organizing data around taxonomies at the attribute level. This is the step that makes it possible to drill into the details with data fusion and modeling.

What actually happens when you Ask MI a question?

You can type any word, phrase, or question in natural language into the search bar and Ask MI will return suggested results based on the search terms as well as your search history. The results you get will depend on the specificity of your search. If you’re looking for broad insights into a particular brand, you can access a brand dashboard that includes performance information – things like brand health, consumer interaction and sentiment, claims vs. perception, and the most reviewed and rated products.

Let’s say you’re more interested in a product attribute, like a certain ingredient than a brand. Then you could access product attribute overviews with insights like mentions, consumer sentiment, associations, and top brands, products, and product types associated with that particular attribute. If you have a very specific question – something like “What are consumers saying about my brand?” – Ask MI will return one or two visuals that directly answer that question. If you enter a really broad search term, like “shampoo”, you’ll get interactive overviews that allow you to drill down into a range of different insights on that topic.

The process is intuitive and designed to support continuous exploration. No matter how broad or specific your initial search is, the results will offer opportunities to easily discover more and more data on the topic.

Sounds awesome. How can people get started?

Ask MI is free for existing clients and is already available; check out your Skai MI home page to access it. If you’re not an existing client, get in touch with us!