Webinar – Innovation Reignited: C-Suite Insights into the State of Innovation

Joining us for today’s webinar panel discussion, exploring new insights on innovation from C suite leaders. Throughout today’s session, you will remain in listen only mode. However, throughout the webinar, you may submit questions online using the Q and A feature. Time permitting, we’ll answer questions at the end of today’s session. However, if time runs short, then your question will be answered by email. Today’s webinar is also being recorded and will be directly emailed to you. So now without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome today’s first speaker, Aaron Golonsky, Head of Innovation for Ipsos in the US. Aaron, you have the floor. Thanks so much, Ellen. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to people depending on where you’re tuning in from. Thanks so much for joining the closing webinar for Innovation Reignited. This is a first of its kind C suite study we’ve done on the state of innovation. And I wanna set the table for what you’re gonna see and hear over about the next thirty minutes. The top line is innovation is seen as essential. We’re gonna see it’s not being prioritized enough and how. Most of the innovation we’re seeing today is actually renovation. True innovation is gonna start from consumer insights and there are some real benefits to that that we’ll go through on what that is and why. You’re gonna need to track your innovation like a growth engine. This is gonna be critical and I’ll hit the point home why when we get into the data there a little later on. And finally, what would any conversation be without AI? We’re gonna be talking about AI as a catalyst, but I would suggest most importantly, where it can be helpful in your innovation journey and where it could end up leading you astray and trying to avoid that. Just a quick commercial here, Innovation Reignited is a series in collaboration with IPSOS, Market Logic and Alchemy Rx. This was created because all three organizations noted that there was a problem, is that historically innovation has fueled growth. But lately we’re seeing less true innovation. People are getting a little more cautious saying that innovation is too slow, too risky, too incremental. So we’ve put together a series that has flagship research, that has expert opinions. You’re gonna hear from some experts in a moment and we’ll get into that. And then really it’s finishing with practical advice. Ultimately, what we wanna do is give you tools that you can use today when you leave the webinar, as well as afterwards that are going to help you in your innovation journey. So our speakers, I am going to introduce both of our speakers here, and I’m gonna take a moment and make sure I’m referring to my notes because these are two incredibly accomplished individuals and we’re lucky to have them with us. First, I’m really glad to introduce Richard Davies. Richard is the founder and co lead at AlchemyRx. Richard is a rare inside the machine innovation career, thirty years across two fifty brands and fifty plus categories with senior leadership at Unilever spanning innovation, brand strategy, and consumer insights. He then moved into enterprise leadership at Newell Brands as CMO and chief development officer, where he led marketing and R and D and helped generate four thousand plus new product innovations across iconic brands such as Sharpie, Rubbermaid, Graco, and Yankee Candle. Since twenty eighteen, through AlchemyRx, he’s been helping brands find and accelerate growth. Richard, can you give a quick hello? Hi, guys. Glad to be here. Awesome. We are thrilled to have you. And next, Olaf Linsman. He’s the Chief Innovation and Product Officer at Market Logic Software. And Olaf is one of those rare builders who sits right at the intersection of insights, innovation and product execution. He co founded Market Logic to change how organizations find and use insight at speed, and he grew the engineering and product organization from three developers to a hundred plus person team that serves global clients like Mars, Colgate Palmolive, eBay, Philips, No Fortis. Under his leadership, Market Logic launched DeepSights, which is one of the first generative AI solutions purpose built for consumer insight, focused on really having trustworthy insight that actually improves decisions. Olaf, quick hello. Yeah. Thanks for the flattering introduction, Aaron. Glad to be here. Thrilled to have you as well. So let’s dive into what the research is. So we spoke with a C suite audience, CEOs, also a number of CMOs. This is focused on CPG, retail, healthcare, so both pharma and OTC. And we can see we’re looking at mid market to some very large enterprises. One call out here, if you see the number of questions we have, there’s a lot. We have a great deal of insight. We’re only gonna be scraping the surface of that today. What we’re going to do is have a published report on our website that you’ll be able to go to to get more of this, as well as all the materials that have led up to this series are going to continue being available. So without further ado, it would be good to get into what the data looks like. So top line is innovation is clearly a priority. If we see here, the number one priority for growth is introducing new products and services. As well, we can see eighty two percent of our leaders, so more than four out of five expect innovation to become more important to their growth strategy over the next three years. So that’s a great setup. We know that innovation matters. They’re really critical. But now how well positioned are they to deliver against this? So we’ll be diving in there. In general, as we think about it, it’s really critical when you’re thinking about your innovation. It’s not a series of one off projects. What you really need to do is have an end to end measurement and learning system. So it connects, you learn within the specific innovations you’re doing, you allow for the knowledge to accumulate, but also across. So let’s dig in there a little bit. Okay, so little bit of a potential surprise, we see a bit of a capability gap potentially. A majority of our leaders said that they are not effective at generating and executing innovation. More than that, what jumped out at me that really threw me for a loop, can say, is twothree of leaders expect in the next three years for their innovation to account for less than twenty percent of their revenue. So if we just saw what the priority was there and now we’re seeing what they’re expecting to get from it, I would suggest these numbers are surprisingly modest. So that to me signals some sort of a system problem is that what we’re looking at is maybe they’re under resourced. Things are happening too incrementally. What I’d love to do is call on Richard. Richard, I want to bring you in here. When you hear that innovation is a priority, but the revenue expectations are really modest, what’s your take? And what does that healthy contribution look like in CPG over a three year period? Yeah, thanks, Aaron. It’s a great question, or a great couple of questions in there. Let try and tackle them in the order you asked. So to start off with, there clearly is a disconnect between companies who talk about having successful innovation and the results that they actually achieve. Oftentimes when we look at organisations and their success or otherwise with innovation, we find actually they’re not really measuring innovation to be honest. And not only that, they also don’t actually set targets for innovation and how innovation could be contributing to the top line. So the question is what does a healthy innovation look like? Again, it’s a kind of complex question and there are a few caveats or assumptions that I want to talk through first of all. Clearly this is going to depend partly on what the growth ambition of the company is. So what are their growth goals? Are they revenue goals? Are they share goals? Let’s assume for the moment they’re revenue goals, then how ambitious are those revenue goals? In setting these targets, companies will also need to look at the resource that it’s got available for innovation, how much it’s prepared to invest in innovation, and we’ll also have to look at how it measures success of innovation. And of course it probably goes without saying it also depends on what you actually mean by innovation. How do you define innovation? Because it’s a really big term does this only include breakthrough ideas or does it include renovation or even just really, really small changes to things like packed copy as well? Now when it comes to the definition of innovation, there’s no right or wrong answer here. Every company is going to have to decide for itself what is innovation, but do bear in mind that any change to just about any element of the mix or launch of a new mix or variant platform or whatever you like to call it is going to require scarce resources to be allocated to that particular project, and so to this end at Alchemy we prefer a broader definition of innovation. Now it should go without saying that any definition of innovation must be based on the impact it has on the consumer, not just on a technological assessment. What may be innovative in the minds of a chemist in the R and D laboratory may not be innovative in the minds of a consumer, so we have to bring in the consumer right at the start when we’re formalising that definition of innovation. Now sort of moving on, too often as I mentioned earlier, we do find that companies don’t have an innovation target and this sort of implies to us they haven’t really considered the role of innovation in their strategic planning and this is really fundamental because obviously when you do the strategic planning you’re allocating resource and you need to make sure that not only are you putting enough resource behind the innovation approach, whether it be around insights or R and D or advertising and so on and so forth, but it’s really important that there’s a clear identification of the contribution of innovation to the top line growth. Now taking all of that into account to get to the punchline, what we would normally suggest is that high performing companies are delivering around about twenty percent plus of their revenue each year from innovation launched in the preceding twelve months. Twenty percent per annum of their revenue coming each year from innovation. Now there are a couple of considerations in this. Of course, you have to look at the degree of substitution. So when you launch something, you’re going to be preaching to the converted to some extent, whether it be existing brands or platforms or if it’s a relaunch, existing users and so on and so forth, so you’ve got to factor in the degree of substitution into those calculations. But we would suggest that it’s going to be around twenty percent per annum. Now of course the question was a bit more challenging than that. It said look at this over a three year period and of course you could just multiply the twenty percent by three years and say, well, sixty percent over a three year period. But as I’m sure most of you realize, life’s not that easy and as innovation is launched, do have to build in a decay rate because people do get tired of innovation and you don’t advertise it and so on and so on. So any company is also going to have to factor in that decay rate over a three year period. Yeah. No, that’s great. Thanks for addressing both of these, and it absolutely makes sense. And I’m sure we’ve all experienced when our clients have an innovation that comes out of R and D, and that’s where things are led, and then they have to figure out how to make it happen. Starting from consumer insights is critical. I think you set us up well sort of for the next question because you sort of raised that. What sort of innovations are people launching? And so what we see here is three quarters of the innovations are actually renovations. So we’re talking about pack refreshes, new positioning work, having minor improvement with about twenty six percent being true launches. What’s interesting about that is when I was doing some research, saw Mintel had a report from twenty twenty four where they tracked twenty nine percent of new product launches were actually new product launches. And that was the lowest number that they had seen since nineteen ninety six. Now to sort of come back to what you were alluding to or mentioning before, Richard, is Renvation isn’t bad. It does a great job of protecting brands current. But if you’re thinking about, and especially grounding in the numbers that you were sharing there, which was super helpful, that you really are trying to drive growth, it can get to a point if you lean too heavily where you’re gonna be trading long term differentiation or for short term share gain or protection. This is where we really hit on our philosophy in a big way is we need leaders to be taking smarter risks, not bigger risks. Anchor bolder ideas, again, not risky because you wanna anchor them in real consumer tensions, things where we have clear evidence that this is a need, which again, you’re gonna then wanna go and have them make behaviorally realistic choices in validation, more than just like a stated enthusiasm. For that, Richard, I wanna sort of ping you again on this. Can you riff on this a little? Renovation has a role, but in a world of faster, cheaper, safer, how should they be thinking about this? Yeah, so that’s another great question. Look, I tend to agree with your starting comments. There’s nothing wrong with renovation per se, so long as the resource that’s invested to generate the renovation is commensurate with the return. Now I’d also add to that, that in our experience, not only do you need a full funnel, but you also need a balanced funnel that has both renovation and innovation in it. Want to say that oftentimes renovation is near term. It’s usually easy to do and sometimes it’s done for really good reasons. Sometimes it could be that a retailer has requested it or it could well be that innovation which is harder and more challenging has to be delayed and people are saying well we need activity and okay then you sort of say well maybe we should do some renovation at relatively short notice. That’s fine, but what’s really important to your point, Aaron, is that while the renovation is going on, it’s really important that the organisation is also working on the bigger breakthrough innovation and you can’t get to the stage where everything is short term renovation and no one is working on the bigger breakthrough innovation. Otherwise you’ll just have all the resource tied up in activity that’s going to be launched in the next six to twelve months and nothing that’s going to be launched for the next two to three years. And of course the point you made that I made earlier in my first response, which I know the three of us kind of feel passionately about, is that innovation has to be measured not just through the technology it delivers, but also through the eyes of the consumer. So it doesn’t automatically follow that all innovation needs technological breakthrough. You could have claimed or conceptual innovation that is perfectly adequate and is going to deliver large incremental revenue without the need for a massive investment in R and D. Now those are probably going to be harder to find and more challenging and so on and so forth, but there’s nothing wrong with claimed or conceptual innovation. But again, the definition of innovation is really, really important and it must be done through the lens of the consumer that we’re trying to serve. A couple more points of course, as I mentioned earlier, bigger breakthrough innovation has to be included in the funnel. It probably is going to take longer, and the risk of failure is probably going to be higher. Now that’s not a bad thing, so long as you have a full funnel that has got other opportunities that can be used when needed. And we’re going to come a little bit later, I know, to what happens to successful funnels and failure in the funnel and so on and so forth. It’s okay for innovation to fail in the funnel, but it’s worse if you launch this innovation and it fails in the marketplace and you actually knew that when it was in the funnel. So it’s okay, if not desirable, to kill off innovation in the funnel if you know its likelihood of success is going to be low. None of that should stop or preclude marketeers from getting out and looking for great innovation. I would say that in my experience across the categories and industries that I’ve worked in, I’ve yet to come across an organisation for which there is not the opportunity, even in mature categories, to add value through real innovation. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it’s well said. All your points land with me. And I really love the point you’re making about having a balanced, thoughtful portfolio. And it brings in mind the old statement to me that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. So if people are out of balance right now, there’s no reason not to start and get their innovation going, even if it’s gonna take true innovation, if you will, even if it’s gonna take a little while to get going. But another point you raised that I wanna dig into a little bit more is ultimately more meaningful innovation, the real innovation, we’re gonna have to start at the source, which is insight. We can see the number one hurdle to developing idea is not enough insights. The number two barrier innovations is lack of consumer understanding. But kind of ironically, less than half of our leaders are saying that their innovations are coming from consumer insight, if we’re looking at the average there. Is this is clearly an issue. Insight starved, yet they’re not really leaning into the insights that they have. And so that actually provides us some more signal that I’m gonna ask Olaf about in a second. But it suggests that we really need to do is make sure that we are leaning into insights that are delivered the right way and the right sorts of research and insights. So thinking about unmet needs, thinking about trade offs, the context it’s in, make sure there’s behaviorally realistic choices that we’re measuring there. Because here’s a key point. This actually is one of the things that’s come from years of doing this that we found. If you start from a consumer truth, the sell in becomes far easier because the evidence is going to travel with the idea. So you get in a much stronger position on maybe internal sell in. So Olaf, let me ask you, even when insights exist, they often don’t get used. We certainly have seen that. Where insights tend to break down inside organizations, and what have you seen to keep insights reusable instead of siloed? Yeah, thanks. That’s really an interesting angle and one that we see, of course, over and over again. You said when insights exist, that is mostly the case, surprisingly also not always the case, but that’s maybe a different story. But when insights exists, what we see is, to a large extent, the challenge that when you go one level deeper and ask the practitioners who are in need of the insights, what is really holding you back? Mostly what you hear is it’s scattered across too many systems, and it’s very difficult for me to to make it actionable for my situation to apply it and to interpret it. And, course, it’s great if you have if you have an insights team that can step in and build that human bridge and do the connection, but that really doesn’t scale as well. And so, of course, what what people are doing, what we are doing with our customers is help with technology to kind of bridge that gap to make to make the information, to make the insights accessible and carry it towards where people are in their mental journey, in their workflow when they need it, where they need it. You can now reach, of course, into the places, into the workplaces where people need to access the insights. But also now with AI, I can’t avoid the term, obviously, with AI, we now have a much better way of also making contextually relevant and lowering the barrier for people to actually interact with them instead of going to maybe, as it was before, going out to search for some reports, some decks they have to dig in and understand and translate to their situation, technology help to bridge that interpretation and make it easier to consume. But also technology, of course, is part of the solution. A big other part is obviously mindset, culture, awareness. Like any other product, your insights need to be marketed internally. There needs to be distribution. Needs to be awareness. There needs to be mental availability. And so what we see is organizations who are really successful at that. They invest a lot also in internal marketing into awareness, even at the C suite level of promoting this. And that helps drive a lot. When it comes to innovation specifically, an interesting development we’re seeing recently is now that many companies have really strategic assets that are aimed to help drive innovation, like IPSOs demand spaces, for example. Many customers we work with have demand space data, have beautiful reports, have a lot of detailed respondent level information that get aggregated into dashboards. It’s very rich, but they really struggle to bring that to life to make it actionable than in the actual innovation journey. And what you can also begin to do now with the help of technology is to embed that really in this journey and to give the folks doing this innovation, give them a partner, if you will, through technology that helps actually bring this information to life, that helps them to on the fly analyze better What do we have? How do we understand our consumers in the specific angles and perspectives where we’re driving innovation? Maybe spin up synthetic personas that help us give us some some feedback and insights back and help us iterate early. That doesn’t, of course, mean we’re replacing research here, but it means really leveraging all these strategic assets that have been invested in for optimally driving, accelerating and also casting a wider net in the process. You go with more candidates into the funnel, maybe you kill more, but you have a much better chance of going out with the winning concepts then. Yeah. No, that makes complete sense. And I’m glad that you raised and are talking about solutions for things that sometimes is like the holy grail of insights, which is, hey, we have so much, but how do we get it coordinated? How do we make use of it? I think that’s a great point there. So as we go through the results and we’re looking at things, we noticed there was another big friction point as well. And that’s differentiation is more than a third, when we look in CPG, more than a third of leaders said they had difficulty differentiating from their competitors. But then when we looked for their sources of innovation, we saw that it was, number one was competitive innovation. It was nearly half, I think it was like about forty eight percent said that bulk of their ideas are coming from competitive innovation. You can look at the irony there. I wanna differentiate and I’m just gonna go and I’m going to look at my competitors. So competitive scans are necessary, don’t get me wrong. It’s critical to know what’s going on, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to use them. If the right way is starting from a place of having a consumer truth and taking those ideas and then using a competitive scan to really help you go ahead and refine and focus what you’re doing to ensure that it’s sharp, that you have strong reasons to choose, that you’re not caught in some sort of a me too loop. I’d love to call on Richard again on this, which is can you talk through the risk of Me Too innovation right now, especially when you think of private label and fast follower just getting better? Yeah, mean, I think it’s a real issue, Aaron, for many CPG companies. I’d sort of start off by saying that in all the years that I’ve been involved with innovation, there two metrics that we always look at when we do our concept testing: uniqueness and relevance. But of those, the one that we set the highest hurdles for is for uniqueness. That is the most critical element in the concept testing that will determine the ability of the idea to ever enter the funnel in the first place. It’s all about uniqueness, there’s no question. But of course as you point out, this is a real issue for many industries and it highlights if you remember what we were saying earlier about the need to try and get real innovation, to get patented innovation that isn’t copyable, at least not in the short term. It does justify these investments in innovation as opposed to simply relying on renovation. There’s no question that being first is pretty much always best And I say pretty much always there will be some exceptions but the norm is that being first is best, and looking for the best and most compelling claims is another area that companies need to look to learn to focus on. So be first with the innovation and make sure that you’re coming out when you launch with the most compelling claims that people cannot undermine you with. This kind of brings me to the next point around the launch of innovation, because it’s not just the innovation and the technology that underpins it, it’s about how you bring this to life in the mind of the consumer. And if you’re going to go out there and be first with the innovation, but you’re not prepared to communicate it or you’re not prepared to communicate it effectively, there’s no doubt that your competitors, whether they be other CPG companies or retailers, will get out there, they’ll copy you and they’ll invest more in better, more effective communication, whether it be advertising, whether it be on show, whether it be in a digital environment. And so it’s really, really important that not only are you first with the innovation, but you are first with the claims and you’re heavy with the advertising so that people associate these new products with your brand. And this is usually the best defence against copiers and followers and so on and so forth, but we can’t stipulate enough that there’s no point in trying to win the technology race only to lose it at the final hurdle. When you’re out there, you have a badly branded ad, or people don’t realize what the product is, or they don’t understand the message so on and so forth all of that innovation is going to be wasted. You’ve got to be first, again, in the minds of the consumer with the innovation, and you’ve got to have it associated with your brand. That’s great, and it’s a good reminder for everyone that this is a complex system. There’s a lot that you have to consider there. It’s not, should I focus on innovation or marketing? One without the other is going to come up woefully short. And thinking about this sort of similar on the systems but a slightly different angle is great ideas can die even inside of bad systems, which is something we have to look out for. The majority, if you’re looking on the left there, the majority of ideas end up getting killed. One of the things that really surprised me, I’m sure it didn’t surprise you, but it surprised me when I was looking at the results is more than half of the leaders we talked to aren’t tracking the number of ideas they generated, the number of active projects, the number of total expected revenue. And almost two thirds aren’t looking at their concept pass rates. How I think about this here, and years ago, it’s how it really hit home the point to me on the importance of making sure you have a thorough, well considered measurement system is think about anything else that you’re considering to be a growth engine. Think about sales. Imagine having sales without tracking funnel, without thinking about. You just wouldn’t do that. It makes win rates or your forecast sense because you’re not gonna see where the holes are, where leakage is, what you can optimize there. So what we find works is acting a learning governance, having key criteria, having plans on explicit, we kill here, we advance there, success metrics by stage. Ultimately, what you’re gonna wanna do is tie everything together. So you have a through line that’s gonna follow from idea to the concept, to the pack, to the price, to looking at how it’s doing in market there so that you have the learning that’s compounding on itself as opposed to restarting at every phase. Richard, another place I’d love to ask you for a little bit of color here. When innovation isn’t managed like a growth engine, what do you typically see? Where does it break first? And what’s the simplest thing that leaders can do? Yeah, that’s a great question. I was really pleased when we were putting the survey together that we allocated some energy to this issue because this is often the cause of those low revenue numbers that we talked about right at the very start. There are a few watch outs that I wanted to share with our listeners today that may or may not resonate with them but I’m going to share them anyway. The first thing is that oftentimes innovation funnels are not really funnels they’re tunnels. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is that pretty much every idea that enters at the start of the funnel ends up being launched. Any idea or concept goes in one end, it’s going to come out the other end and go into the marketplace. It’s guaranteed to launch. That of course is a recipe for failure and there are some reasons for that. The first and most obvious reason that we find is that there simply aren’t enough ideas going into the funnel in the first place. I have to be honest innovation is very much a numbers game. You want as many ideas as you can get to go into the funnel. That gives you the freedom to be able to kill off the ideas as they go through the funnel and increase the likelihood of success when they get into the marketplace. Most companies sadly underestimate just how many ideas they need each month to feed a well managed funnel, where projects are being actively killed off in the funnel because they don’t meet the predetermined consumer metrics and business targets. Someone once asked me what my role as a gatekeeper was as the chairman of the gatekeeping meeting and I said my job is to get in there and kill off as many projects as possible. And people were astounded by that. They said why is that? I said because if I can kill off the weaker ones, the bigger projects are going to get more resource and their likelihood of success in the market is going to go up and up. So it’s that simple. And of course we shouldn’t criticize people when we kill off projects in the fund. Shouldn’t criticize people for that, not at all. What we want to be able to do is, for the right reasons, to be able to say this project is just not good enough and to be able to reallocate that resource to the projects that we know are going to win. Now a second reason that we find is that ideas are simply not being assessed with consumers as they progress through the funnel. Oftentimes ideas are not even being assessed at the start of the funnel with consumers. They’re not being validated in concept tests or idea tests. They’re just being allowed to enter into the funnel because the chairman likes a pet project or a competitor has done it, therefore it must be good or it was done in another country. We have to be checking our ideas not only at the start of the funnel but at every stage through the funnel. We should be re engaging with the consumer to make sure that as the idea progresses from something that’s conceptual to something that’s dressed up and executional elements that is meeting the needs of the consumer. I talked about the lack of rigor in killing off weak ideas in the funnel. This brings me to the next point that I think is really, really important. It’s a very pragmatic point, which is sometimes when we talk to clients we find that there simply aren’t enough senior people in the room, in the gatekeeping meeting in the room, to be able to make the decisions about killing off projects. And ideally you would have as a minimum, would have the Chief Marketing Officer, you’d have the Chief R and D Officer, you’d have the Chief Customer Officer in the room, and ideally you’d have the CEO in the room because this is where the growth is going to come from each year. This is where the real growth is going to come from and there’s no point delegating the gatekeeping meeting to junior people in your organization who simply are unable to make the decision about killing off bad projects, accelerating good projects, refunding good projects and so on and so forth. So you really want to have the most senior person in there. And one more caveat I’d add into this is that the head of your insights organization they need to be in the gatekeeping meeting and they need to have this role of representing the consumer in there and they need to be sitting there saying ‘Look, this idea, our consumers love it, this mix it’s great, or this mix isn’t good enough for our consumers, they’re not going to like it, I’m not going to agree to this, and the head of the inside organisation should have this ability to turn around and say I don’t agree with this, it’s not what our consumers want, or it is what our consumers want, let’s get on with it one way or another. So it’s a plea to make sure that the head of the inside organisation is given a space at this top table around innovation to represent the needs and hopes of the consumer. Sorry. No, please feel free. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. Final plea is: look, it’s really important that we keep killing off ideas as they go through the funnel, keep raising the bar on projects and then eventually you will find that you get a better payout with a much greater probability of success when the stuff is launched. No, I think that’s so well said, you just filled so many great, specific ideas. Thank you for that. As we transition now looking at the future of where we’re going with innovation, as we start to close out this webinar, we see that there’s a real embrace of AI. We have eighty six percent of the leaders we spoke to said that AI is going to be very to extremely important to innovation for them. And virtually everyone, you can see there ninety seven percent is already using AI in some form. So as promised, sort of framing up our perspective that comes from a lot of work with a number of our partners, AI as a collaborator, it’s not the chief innovator. You still are the chief innovator there and you need to consider that. Use AI where it shines and avoid it where it can lead you down bad paths. So where does it shine, you ask? So it’s great at accelerating synthesis, pull together disparate sources, searching knowledge bases. I will say that’s probably my personal favorite because we have so much stuff that probably could be organized better that we have there. Drafting and iterating concepts is a great use case for it there and having it as a partner who you’re working back and forth to get a really tight thing. Ultimately, it’s gonna help you compress your timelines, move faster, test more things, but be careful where it can mislead you, where it’s going to replace a consumer truth, where it can create a false confidence, where it’s gonna shortcut validation. At the end of the day, still talking to real people and understanding through tried and tested rigorous ways is the best way to make things happen. Olaf, can you bring this to life for folks? What are the best safe use cases you’re seeing for AI in insights? Search, summarize, connect the dots, without letting it become a substitute for research in and of itself? Yeah, right. I mean, as you already called it out, there’s this tension maybe between safe and impactful in a sense. Where it all starts exactly as you said, searching, summarizing, bringing together information from different sources, putting them together on demand for a situational context, but also automatically scanning as like an always on helper in the background to figure out what is new about topics of business interest. That’s for sure where I would say the starting use cases are, where you can have very clear traceability of where the information comes from, where you can gain the confidence and you can in a way, begin crawl before you walk in a sense to start working with AI and build that confidence out. And I think that’s absolutely table stakes use case to make sense of all the sea of data that we have available now. On the other end, there are, of course, as you said, also very impactful use cases when it comes specifically to innovation, like you can now use AI to help you, for example, shape your brief, challenge you, have you correctly identified what the brand challenge is, is this single-minded enough, help you really stay on focus and on track, and then use it to also synthesize suggestions where you should go or synthesize candidates for maybe innovation territories and so on and so forth. But obviously, you as the human, as you said, the AI is the collaborator, you as the human are still the ultimate judge and set the direction. A very interesting observation that we also make is that those both ends of the spectrum of how you work with AI also feel very different for people, and sometimes it’s counterintuitive because for the use cases like searching, summarizing, etcetera, what you do is essentially you describe your problem, you press a button, and you let the eye do the job and get the result back, and you’re done. Which is great. Everybody loves to do less thinking work, basically. When you look at those other more complex cases, you say, oh, now I want to really collaborate together with the AI to help drive my thinking forward on innovation and maybe on possible directions, what we could do. You quickly realize that actually you have to think a lot more when you work with AI because it comes back with so much richer candidates, angles, directions, perspectives, things you maybe wouldn’t have discovered on your own. You really need to dig in deep and lean in and understand that and bring your judgment now in to decide and prioritize and say, where do we want to go here? I think in that sense, it helps a lot to give you this big lever of becoming more impactful, it also requires us as the humans to be much more attentive, intentional, much more lean forward in this process. And while AI can help you to accelerate these initial steps, absolutely, as you said, there is the point when this needs to confront real consumers and proper research to validate it. So I think it’s important to gain that understanding also across everybody using it. How do you use it? What can it do for you? What can I not do for you? And how do you also have to really steer it to be most effective? And I think that’s something that is a broader challenge for all of us, not only in innovating with AI, but in all ways of engaging now with these new technologies. And I think to conclude, maybe yes, these starting use cases searching, summarizing, consolidating, synthesizing absolutely are great ways to get started. But it is really also to develop the muscle and the experience to co work with AI, which is very powerful, but also a very different game than just delegating, right, a bit brief desk research for me. Awesome. No, thank you so much for that. And before I hand it over to Ellen to wrap for us, I just wanna take what you said, because it was so much good stuff and what I heard and what I’ve experienced with my own use cases. It sounds like there are really three guardrails that we wanna consider. The first is ground AI and your data. One thing I wanna call out is everyone has access to the same four or five or so base models. They sound eloquent, they’re gonna give you answers, but they’re not connected necessarily to consumer truths and certainly not to your consumers’ truths. And if you’re just using them as is, you shouldn’t expect much differentiation from anyone else who’s doing that. Second, I think you made a great point at keeping humans accountable. It’s not just they’re in the loop, but really humans own this. This is a tool that they’re using here that they have to use to help them, which we think this can do really well. And finally, end of the day, still validate with real humans, real consumers when you’re scaling. Now, looking at the time and unfortunately, we can’t spend too much more here. I’d love to go to Ellen for her to wrap up. Wow, that was a very engaging conversation. I really, really enjoyed that. Thank you everyone for joining us. And thank you especially to Aaron, Olaf and Richard. If we didn’t get to your question today, we will do so by email and also via email in the next couple of days, you will receive a direct link to today’s recorded presentation. And of course, we welcome the opportunity to speak to you. So please feel free to reach out directly. That now concludes today’s amazing webinar. Have a wonderful day, everyone. Thanks a lot.