Georgina brings clarity and strategy to everything she writes. She creates content that feels good to read and gets results. She also supports our copy team, sharing ideas and helping them sharpen their skills. Outside of work, she’s usually deep in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or fussing over her cat.
Using AI for market research can save you hours.
It can also feed you confident nonsense if you let it.
OpenAI has published a clear explainer on why language models hallucinate (they can produce plausible but false statements).
So this blog is about using AI in a sensible way.
It’s not a replacement for proper strategy work. AI is the extra support you use alongside that work, and afterwards, to keep your research moving.
Before you use AI for market research, get two basics straight:
AI can sound confident and be wrong, and some tools might use your chats to improve their models unless you change the settings.
If you’re unsure what’s safe for your organisation, speak to your IT provider first. We did exactly that with our partners Blue Hybrid, and it helped us set sensible guardrails without killing momentum.
If you’re handling personal data, you need to be careful about what you share with tools and how your organisation governs it.
By default, the way OpenAI’s consumer version of ChatGPT works is that your conversations can be used to help improve the models through training unless you change your settings. You can change this by going to your settings, selecting Data Controls, and turning off “Improve the model for everyone.”
With ChatGPT Business, your workspace data isn’t used to train models by default, so it’s a safer option for work. Essentially:
Either way, don’t treat AI tools as a place to paste sensitive information. Know what you’re using and what settings are on, so you know what the risks are.
Treat AI output as a draft. Something to pressure-test, not something to publish or bet your budget on.
If it gives you facts, ask where they came from, including a link. At this stage, if they’re made up, it will usually admit it. It’s programmed to be helpful, not to guarantee accuracy, so the responsibility to check still sits with you.
AI can take a lot of the grind out of market research, especially the sorting and sense-checking that slows teams down. Used well, it helps you get to insight faster and spot patterns you might miss. Used badly, it gives you confident noise and a false sense of certainty. The ideas below focus on where AI genuinely earns its keep, and how to use it without losing judgement or trust.
AI is genuinely useful for analysing customer interviews because it saves you wading through hours of notes. It can pull out the common themes and stop the same debate cropping up in every meeting.
A marketing partner can stop you drawing the wrong conclusion from the right data. Pattern-spotting is easy. Turning it into positioning and priorities is the hard bit.
AI competitor analysis for marketing is useful when you need a fast lay of the land, not a perfect truth machine.
How to do it properly
Use AI to speed up the first pass, then verify anything that could change decisions.
A simple workflow:
It’s a good idea to seek an external perspective at this point to understand when your “differentiator” is not a differentiator. A marketing partner can also help you choose a lane you can own.
AI keyword research and search intent mapping is where AI can save time, because people now search with longer, more specific questions (and follow-ups). Google has said this directly in its guidance on succeeding in AI-powered search experiences.
Feed it your real context:
Then ask it to generate search terms and prompts that match that reality.
Note:
SEO research needs live data from search tools and the search results themselves. AI can help you generate ideas and tidy up your findings, but it shouldn’t be the source of truth.
AI for messaging testing and positioning is brilliant for one thing: forcing clarity. If your message is vague, AI will usually reflect that back at you in a way that’s mildly humiliating (which is helpful, sadly).
Give it your current messaging, then ask it to act like sceptical readers.
Positioning is a set of choices. AI can help you explore options. A marketing partner helps you make decisions, then build a campaign around them.
This is where you get your time back. Because the problem is rarely “we didn’t research.” It’s “we researched, then buried it.”
What AI can do well
Ask AI to produce:
This is where good external support stops research turning into a document nobody uses. They help you turn what you’ve found into clear choices and next steps, instead of another round of “we all agree” meetings.
Use AI to cut the grunt work and surface patterns you’d otherwise miss. Let it summarise and challenge your first take.
But keep the decisions with people. The job isn’t to generate answers. It’s to choose what you’ll do next and why.
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