Conveo, founded in April 2024, has raised a $5.3 million Seed round backed by Y Combinator, 6 Degrees Capital, Entourage, Pitchdrive, Syndicate One and others.
Conveo is building the first AI-powered research coworker, delivering deep customer insights at scale with AI-powered video interviews.
I spoke to CEO and Co-founder Dieter De Mesmaeker to learn more.
Traditional qualitative research is slow and costly, and it often leads to companies not conducting any research or making decisions with incomplete knowledge, which often leads to missed opportunities and expensive mistakes.
In his previous scale-up, De Mesmaeker saw how businesses made high-stakes decisions with insufficient research, leading to costly mistakes and missed opportunities.
Conveo's aims make customer insights instantly accessible to any team, from researchers and marketers to the CEO.
Its AI research coworker runs hundreds of AI-moderated video interviews overnight, in any language, and at a fraction of the cost.
As AI capabilities rapidly progress, Conveo is building the AI research 'coworker' within organisations.
Anyone, from research or marketing to the CEO, can ask Conveo a question about the customer. Conveo can instantly surface previous research, integrate third-party data, or launch new research in real time. This lowers the barriers to gathering insights, driving better decisions, and ultimately creating better products, and services.
Saving time and money at scale
Conveo is extremely time-efficient. For example, De Mesmaeker shared how Conveo saves time in automating the study setup, interviewing autonomously, and analysis.
"Our customers tell us that setting up a great study that keeps people engaged and does not bias responses is actually very difficult and therefore slow.
With our AI research coworker, you simply tell it what your business goals or questions are, and it will help you draft the perfect research guide. This saves days in going back and forth, but it especially ensures you do great interviews with relevant analysis."
A typical study with Conveo is anywhere from 30 to 300 people or more, with interviews being typically 15 to 60 minutes.
Include scheduling interviews, preparing, taking and cleaning notes, and market researchers save anywhere from 3 days if everything is perfectly planned to 10 or more weeks.
De Mesmaeker detailed:
"Analysis is also extremely time-consuming, especially when you now interview many more people. Our AI thinks for a few minutes, and you get the whole analysis as soon as you close the study. This easily saves days to weeks, and we often uncover relationships or insights human researchers would miss."
We can't imagine anyone doing it the old way two years from now. 90 per cent of the time in qualitative research is spent on activities that can be automated, so researchers can spend time actually creating value from these insights.
Increasing access to diverse research participants
Conveo helps ensure its AI algorithms fairly represent diverse consumer insights without skewing results toward a dominant demographic group.
According to De Mesmaeker, the researcher can choose the participants' demographics if they use our integrated panel, "or they can just share our interview link with their customers. It's of course, still up to the researcher to choose who to interview.
Further, reaching diverse audiences is actually much easier with Conveo than with previous methods.
"For one, Conveo speaks over 50 languages, so harder-to-reach communities can now take the interview in their own native languages.
There's also no social stigma. People report being much more open and comfortable sharing with an AI interviewer than a human, especially when there are cultural or socio-economic differences.
And lastly, because our interviews are with voice and our interface is so simple, people who are less comfortable with computers or less tech-savvy, are much more comfortable sharing."
Tackling bias in AI research with safeguards and one-click verification
Further, Conveo's AI agent has a large number of checks for bias of many kinds, including societal biases.
De Mesmaeker shared:
"This is actually one of our most important differentiators. Every data point that surfaces in our analysis, a chart, a quote, or an insight, links back to the original transcripts.
So, every data point is easily verifiable in one click. This ensures there are no hallucinations and builds trust with the researcher."
Conveo has done a few studies on political news, for example the election of Trump, but also on Rebuild Europe. According to De Mesmaeker, these timely, sensitive and nuanced topics are perfect for Conveo.
"You can immediately reach a very large number of people, say 100 or more, and get their unfiltered thoughts, because 83 per cent of people are more comfortable sharing with an AI than a human interviewer and you get the required nuance with our in-depth interviews, which you could not get with a survey."
Top brands like Unilever, Orange, and Google rely on Conveo to run hundreds of AI-powered video interviews across use cases, from branding, customer experience, and behavioural research to innovation, and communication.
According to Wendy Francois, Market Researcher at Orange:
"Of course, we were sceptical about how our customers would react to AI interviews. But after thorough testing, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive."
Pieter Van Paemel, Senior Insights Manager, Edgard & Cooper, shared:
"We don't see Conveo as a replacement for face-to-face interviews but as a new research method combining the best of qualitative and quantitative approaches.
We can now execute projects that were previously impossible. Combining quantitative data with hearing customers in their own words is super powerful in aligning our teams."
De Mesmaeker shared that some of Conveo's next innovations include "multimodal video interviews, where our AI can, for example, recognise brands people show on camera. We'll also analyse across studies so no knowledge gets lost. And there are many more things coming."
Lead image: Conveo. Photo: uncredited.
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