Transforming Market Intelligence with Generative AI

“The partnership between Mintel and Pureinsights exemplifies the success of an open, collaborative approach. Pureinsights’ flexibility, quality personnel and collaborative spirit have had a profound impact on Mintel’s ability to innovate quickly and effectively.”

Jason Thomson, SVP Innovation, Mintel

Introduction to Mintel – the world’s leading market intelligence agency

From fast answers to deep insights, Mintel has provided market research and market intelligence solutions to consumer-focused businesses for more than 50 years. With a combination of world-class syndicated tools and custom insight solutions, Mintel is their clients’ eyes and ears in the markets that matter and the insights behind their clients’ next big idea.

Realizing a vision

Mintel has long envisioned a seamless connection between client inquiries and the wealth of content, insights and data at their disposal. “It has always been our vision for clients to be able to come to Mintel with their questions and objectives, and Mintel to be able to understand what they are looking for and connect them to the best content, insight and data that we have available in a seamless effortless way,” says Jason Thomson, Mintel’s Senior Vice President (SVP) Innovation. “It’s been part of our vision for a long time.” The advent of Generative AI presented an opportunity to move a step closer to realising their vision and they decided to explore the development of a generative question and answer system.

Speed is of the essence

Mintel recognized the urgency to bring their vision to market swiftly and gain competitive advantage. They wanted a solution that not only aligned with their content but also provided an unparalleled user experience. Pureinsights, a longstanding Mintel partner for Search & AI, introduced the concept of using vector search, a Large Language Model (LLM) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG is a technique for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models by integrating them with information retrieval systems to access and incorporate relevant proprietary content. Their team built a demonstrator to prove the concept. “Pureinsights put together a demo with Mintel data and did it in a short space of time. We showed it to our Chief Executive and it became obvious we wanted to progress with this. Given that everyone is starting to do this kind of thing, speed was of the essence,” says Thomson.

Flexible development

The flexibility of the demo environment provided by Pureinsights allowed Mintel to experiment with various models, prompts, and iterations and facilitated the exploration of different indexing and metadata strategies. Thus, Mintel were able to fine-tune the system in a short space of time. “We got to the heart of what worked for us in about 2 weeks, and it was that rapid iteration and the collaborative working that made it go more quickly,” explains Thomson. “Without Pureinsights it would have taken us months and frankly that would have been too late.” In addition, Mintel were able to quickly identify the most effective Generative language model and optimize their approach. “We tried various different models and came to the conclusion that GPT-4 was the one that we needed to use for the quality of results we required,” continues Thomson.

The launch of Mintel Leap – the future of market intelligence

The result was Mintel Leap – a new AI closed-loop solution built exclusively on Mintel’s proprietary research and human analysis. The developed system acts as a powerful tool for Mintel’s clients, providing quick and insightful responses to their queries.

“From the client perspective, it’s like having a highly capable assistant that can instantly search Mintel’s content, analyse it and summarize the most relevant information to answer questions. Whereas previously this process could take hours, now it happens in seconds,” says Thomson. “It also allows Clients to find things and get answers to questions they didn’t know they would be able to find, so it gives them much better discovery.” The technology not only accelerates the discovery process but also enhances the overall accessibility and value of Mintel’s services. “So one of the challenges all clients have is that they don’t have enough time to use the tools they have available. With this system it massively increases the value of our offering to our clients because it suddenly makes it much more accessible, much quicker to use and they’ll get better quality results out of it,” adds Thomson.

Keys to Success

Mintel was in a unique position in that they had the right material to align with the technology to make the system work exceptionally well. It was a perfect match between their content, its nature, structure and how it’s written with the power afforded by LLMs. “And what Pureinsights helped us do was to explore that, prove the concept very quickly and give us something that we could show to clients to validate it while we were working on our production system,” explains Thomson. “Everyone could see how compelling a use case this technology is with Mintel’s content and data. It’s valuable and it works so well because of the nature of what we write. It’s just the perfect fit.”

Leveraging expertise, especially the thought leadership brought by Pureinsights, also contributed to the project’s success. “Because of Pureinsights expertise and the fact that Pureinsights had already done this and had a framework, it was obvious and really helpful that we could work with them to get something ready quickly.” comments Thomson.

The generative question and answer system enhances Mintel’s long-term competitiveness and client engagement. It positions Mintel at the forefront of innovation, providing a competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving market.

“Working with Pureinsights brought knowledge and expertise from the broader subject area such that it gave us confidence that this was going to work.”

Jason Thomson, SVP Innovation, Mintel