Revolutionizing Feedback: How Outset Integrates GPT-4 in User Surveys

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. In an age where instant decisions drive the business landscape, I think the pressure to, you know, on research teams essentially to deliver insights and really insightful results, like quickly and effectively, it's at an all time high.

0:42So the traditional process of gathering user insights through really intensive interviews can be time consuming and costly. I come from a marketing background, so this is something like I have a lot of experience with. You know, we're always trying to speak with our customers to figure out exactly what they want. So we are making sure we're actually serving them. So I think this gap between between kind of like the urgency of business decisions and the pace of research insights is what has inspired the creation of Outset. So this is a new company which is spearheading the automation of qualitative interviews and they're integrating AI in a big way.

1:15So Aaron Cannon, who previously was a strategist at Deloitte, he recalled all of the hours spent on client projects. So post the project phase, Cannon and his team had the added task of kind of coordinating and moderating customer interviews. He said, quote, enterprise decision makers expect faster and faster results from insights teams. He also kind of had these concerns that the quickened pace of discussions could make, you know, essentially was going to be making leaving insight functions and everyone working there could be struggling to keep up. It was against this kind of backdrop that he was collaborating with Michael Hess, who's a former colleague from Talent Recruitment.

1:59And I think Hess was actually previously working at Untappd, which is another company in kind of the talent recruitment space. and together they have worked together to create Outset. So Outset is actually backed by Y Combinator and essentially their approach is that they're trying to autonomously conduct and compile interviews. So Canon recently talking about all this said, quote, the broader slowdown and associated layoffs have hit research and insights team disproportionately hard, but the demand from business leaders to make more informed and strategic decisions has not slowed down. I think, you know, this has really kind of created an environment where there's a there's a big expectancy of achieving more with fewer results and of course I don't think this is just in you know for like business analysts and people trying to give these kind of bits of data this is in every department I think we're seeing right now especially because AI can help augment so many different things but I think this is really kind of pushing companies to lean on technology to amplify their tasks so one of Outset's primary technological tools right now is OpenAI's GPT-4.

3:04So this text generating AI model, essentially what they're using it for is to facilitate interviews in research studies by allowing users to craft a survey, share it, and then leverage GPT-4 to follow up with survey participants. Essentially, it's trying to aim to build a, you know, conversational rapport, quote unquote, which they say is going to ensure richer, more in-depth responses. So for every question, GPT-4 is designed to identify themes, count occurrences, and spotlight quotes. And all of this is in an effort to essentially uncover the story of, you know, what really is going on here.

3:42So reflecting on the traditional methods, Cannon recently said, quote, today much of the work to collect and analyze qualitative data is done manually. He really kind of envisions Outset as not just a tool to help researchers process, all of this, but also as a really revolutionary entity that could perhaps expand to the scope of market research altogether. So I think while it's still early stages for Outset, their collaboration with brands like Weight Watchers and a bunch of others, I think indicate like there's a lot of promising prospects here. Weight Watchers managed to execute and analyze over 100 interviews within a day.

4:18And these insights are now kind of assisting Weight Watchers in coming up with a new user segmentation framework. Beyond this, Cannon also said, quote, we're currently working with 15 enterprise insight teams at companies like Opendoor to help them in making swifter, more user-centric decisions. I think Outset's momentum is also kind of evident in its research or in its recent successful fundraising ventures. The company actually recently secured around $3.8 million in a round, which was, I think, led by Adverb Ventures. They had some contributions from, I think, Weekend Fund and Jack Altman, which is a sibling of Sam Altman.

4:57But they have plans essentially to scale their team from four to six full-time members by the end of the year. That's really what they're focusing on using this money for. And Cannon emphasized they're kind of taking a cautious approach to all of this. He said, quote, we're just raising our seed and our team is small, so we're keeping our burn rate low. He's very optimistic from what I've seen about kind of the company's trajectory. And I think the reason for this is he cited a lot of kind of growing demand for AI enhanced tools in daily knowledge work. And this is kind of a positive trend for them that places them in a really strategic position to kind of navigate future challenges they might have.

5:34So definitely a very interesting company to be following along with. It's kind of interesting that they have Jack Altman, which is, of course, Opening Eyes CEO, Sam Altman's brother, investing in this. Definitely an interesting company to follow. And I think this is one I'll be following up with shortly.