I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately after coming across a cluster of startups trying to upend market research using AI. Within the span of the last couple months, companies like Simile and Aaru have raised hundreds of millions of dollars chasing the same idea: replace traditional consumer research with AI-generated simulations. It caught my attention because it cuts right to a problem I’ve run into throughout my career in BD. One of the harder parts of business development and partnerships is figuring out how customers will respond to something before you’ve built it. Will they actually want this product? Will they adopt this feature? Will the new product/service cannibalize other areas of your business? These questions typically sit at the center of most BD decisions and yet we often have to answer them with surprisingly limited information using more “gut” instinct.
At the Margins