by 4 Ways AI is Redefining Social Intelligence for Market Research and Consumer Insights
By Tarun Dhamija, Co-Founder, Convotrack.ai
Editor’s note: In the lead-up to QUAL360 APAC 2025, we are spotlighting cutting-edge approaches shaping qualitative research. In this feature, our partner Convotrack explores how AI-driven social intelligence is transforming the way insights are captured from video and audio, helping brands decode not just what consumers say, but what they show and feel—turning rich, complex data into actionable strategies at unprecedented speed.
For years, social intelligence has been about one thing: extracting meaning from unstructured data. Traditionally, that meant mining text—tweets, reviews, forum posts—to understand what people were saying. But consumer expression has moved on. Today, the most authentic conversations happen in video and audio: a TikTok creator explaining a routine, a YouTube reviewer unpacking a product, a podcast capturing tone and sentiment. These are rich signals—but historically, they were too complex and too resource-intensive for most teams to process at scale.
Artificial Intelligence is changing that. With the combination of advanced large language models, computer vision, and the raw compute power of GPUs, we can now analyze millions of video frames, audio cues, and cross-language content in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
Where AI Accelerates Social Intelligence
1. Speed of Insights
AI collapses the time between question and answer. What once required pulling large amounts of data using Boolean queries, then cleaning it, and producing reports over weeks can now be done in minutes. Agentic AI frameworks—modular, task-specific agents—allow brand, content, innovation, and insights teams to simply ask their own questions in natural language and get structured, validated outputs.
2. Richer Consumer Understanding
Video intelligence sharpens the quality of insight. Text alone misses tone, emotion, or visual cues. AI makes it possible to decode:
- the emotions in a consumer’s voice,
- how a protagonist demonstrates or integrates a brand in their story,
- subtle brand mentions in visuals or captions invisible to text analysis.
As Laura Antoniello of Dell Technologies emphasized during a recent panel, meaningful insights are about “volume and value.” AI ensures we’re not just measuring chatter, but understanding context.
3. Structuring Outputs & Reports
For many insights professionals, the hardest part isn’t data collection—it’s synthesis. AI can instantly summarize conversations, cluster themes, and structure findings into actionable frameworks. At Convotrack, we’ve extended this framework of research, by making research reports interacting. All our research reports can be further delved into using a simple Q&A agent for quickly asking follow-on questions that typically come during report presentations to stakeholders.
4. Unlocking the Previously Impossible
Without AI, analyzing millions of short-form videos or hours of audio across languages was unthinkable. Today, it’s practical. As Paige Walker from Hershey’s noted during her recent panel with Tamanna (Convotrack CEO), stakeholders often just want to know “what’s happening on TikTok.” AI is what makes it feasible to answer that question directionally, without drowning in data or waiting weeks for manual review.
Where Caution is Needed
AI brings transformative potential, but it’s not a magic button. Three areas need deliberate care:
- Data Density: AI can easily spin a story from three mentions. That’s not insight—it’s anecdote. Insight teams must set thresholds and triangulate across multiple sources.
- Workflow Complexity: Agentic systems are powerful, but without quality gates they risk producing irrelevant or misleading outputs. Every workflow should embed validation steps.
- Human Judgment: It’s not an either/or, it’s an and. AI accelerates processing, but context, ethics, and empathy remain distinctly human responsibilities. Consumers are real people, not synthetic data points.
The Power of Adoption
When implemented well, AI repositions social intelligence inside organizations in three powerful ways:
- Faster Decision-Making
Questions that once took weeks can be addressed in hours, enabling teams to respond at the speed of culture. - Democratization
By lowering the technical barrier—removing Boolean queries and dashboards—AI empowers brand, content, innovation, and digital teams to engage directly with insights. This breaks down silos and expands usage. - Collaboration at Scale
With more teams accessing the same validated insights, social intelligence evolves from a specialist function to a shared language across the enterprise. As Paige, Laura, and Makenzie have each highlighted in different ways, this cross-pollination is where real organizational impact happens.
Conclusion
Social intelligence is at an inflection point. AI doesn’t replace the insight professional—it supercharges them. It allows us to capture richer signals, process more data, and distribute knowledge more widely. But its true promise lies in creating an enablement function: one where insights are accessible, defensible, and embedded across every business decision.
At Convotrack, that’s our mission: helping organizations decode not just what consumers type, but what they show, say, and feel—turning social video into strategy, at the speed of a question.
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