Polling giant Morning Consult is using AI to help dig through survey data

Consumer intelligence company Morning Consult has publicly launched a new AI platform that can almost instantly provide detailed insights into its survey data in response to questions posed in plain language.

Morning Consult conducts roughly 30,000 interviews daily across dozens of countries, enabling clients to access in-depth information about consumer sentiment toward brands, public figures, political trends, spending behaviors, and other factors critical to their businesses. Historically, extracting and analyzing that data required time and expertise in data analytics and visualization—a challenge for business leaders needing quick answers.

“The feedback I kept hearing from C-suite executives was: I don’t want to wait to send this email off and find out the answer after I had to make the decision,” says Morning Consult CEO Michael Ramlet. “I need the data right now, and I need to be able to ask it questions.”

With the new platform MorningConsult.AI, business leaders and other users can ask questions such as how a brand is performing in a specific country or how its key metrics compare with competitors over the past year. The AI typically generates answers within seconds, complete with data visualizations. Users can drill down further, filtering results by age, race, or other demographics.

Those monitoring fast-changing factors, such as U.S. tariff policies, can revisit the platform over time to track shifts using Morning Consult’s continually expanding data set. Because the AI internally queries Morning Consult’s proprietary data, the results shown in graph form are transparent and traceable, avoiding the hallucination issues found in general-purpose AI.

“This can’t hallucinate,” Ramlet says. “If there’s not data on that topic, it’s not going to bring you back any data that isn’t relevant to the specific business question.”

The platform is fast enough for real-time use during meetings or calls, whether viewed on a large screen or quickly accessed on a smartphone.

Michael Stutts, chief brand officer at Dollar Shave Club, says he recently used the AI to generate state-level breakdowns of brand awareness, net positivity, and other metrics, with heat maps produced almost instantly. “Within seconds I had what would have taken untold amounts of time and resources to do,” he says.

On a call with a retail partner, Stutts was able to immediately answer a question using the AI, eliminating the need to follow up later after internal consultation.

According to Ramlet, the platform continues to improve as AI models grow more powerful. Since its initial release to Morning Consult clients in November 2024, the system has gained the ability to analyze and summarize data in text, thanks to advances in commercial AI.

“All of a sudden, in the last four months, we’ve seen just an entirely different level of capability to do that type of comparative analytical analysis,” Ramlet says.

Currently in public beta testing, the platform is available to anyone. Ramlet envisions a free version will always exist, making Morning Consult’s insights accessible to students, small businesses, and others without extensive data capabilities. At the same time, the company is developing more advanced AI agents to generate tailored outputs, such as marketing reports or executive briefings.

Just as crucial as the AI, Ramlet says, is Morning Consult’s proprietary data, which competitors can’t easily replicate.

“You can’t go back in time and collect that data,” he says. “And I think that’s the part of this that’s going to be really compelling—AI is going to make it easier to use proprietary data sets than in the past.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91333723/morning-consult-launches-an-ai-tool-makes-survey-data-a-breeze?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss