TMRE Digital Week Attendees Learn How to Use Machine Learning to Find Market Research Insights
Northern Light’s CEO presents virtual conference session about applying AI-enabled enterprise knowledge management systems for competitive intelligence and market research
BOSTON, May 13, 2020 — Northern Light® (www.northernlight.com) CEO C. David Seuss presented a virtual session at The Market Research Event (TMRE) Digital Week on April 30 about how enterprises can use machine learning to find market research insights.
Traditional business search processes require laborious manual efforts to learn what is known about a topic and to monitor the market research landscape for new insights, Seuss explained. What users desire is for the machine to read the research documents for them, telling the users what it learns that they should know about. Also, users want the machine to learn their preferences and proactively find important material for them without them having to search at all.
“We’ve become accustomed to technology like this in our personal lives when we use online shopping sites,” Seuss observed. “But it’s still a rarity, and in many ways much more essential, in business research applications.”
Seuss noted that asking Google or any consumer search engine a question such as “where is the nearest pizza restaurant” is ‘easy search’ compared to what people do in their business lives. “In business research, the user must master a complex topic that he or she may not know much about, in a setting where both the answer and even the question are undefined,” Seuss said. “And the hardest, most complex search question is this one: What should I know about this topic?”
Seuss presented Northern Light SinglePoint™ as an example of an enterprise knowledge management system that uses artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machine learning to address the complexities and nuances of business research in a way that makes it easy for users to glean relevant insights about their topic of interest, rather than to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that may exist about it.
“SinglePoint uses machine learning in several meaningful ways,” Seuss explained. “One is to produce an automated Insights Report, which identifies and presents in a clear, narrative form for the user the most important ideas found in the documents included in any given search result list. The average user will be better informed about the business issue if the user reads the Insights Report than if the user engages in the traditional search process
“Another valuable application of machine learning in SinglePoint is the Recommended Reading List,” Seuss said. “SinglePoint learns what users are interested in by watching their download behavior quietly in the background and builds a model for each user. Then the machine monitors the content flow in the background and reaches out to the user with recommendations. In effect, SinglePoint becomes a personalized digital search assistant for each user.”
Seuss concluded his TMRE Digital Week presentation with this observation: “Machine learning is changing the search paradigm, making it easier and easier to find relevant content and insights.”
About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights to global enterprises since 1996. The company pioneered the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence for the automated analysis and extraction of meaning from large collections of market research and competitive intelligence, and its SinglePoint™ enterprise knowledge management platform was honored as one of KMWorld‘s Trend-Setting Products of 2019. Northern Light’s current clients include Fortune 1000 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. Northern Light has over 250,000 users of its strategic research portals. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique content aggregation partnerships with more than 150 of the world’s leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, aggregates business and technology news from over 6,500 news sources, and is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.