Authored by: Dan Coffin
After sitting through a long business meeting, you know how hard it can be to actually absorb anything just by listening for hours. Staying engaged—let alone enjoying the process—feels like an uphill battle.
Now, we are all more aware as a society of the value of active learning using multiple mediums and formats. The market research industry has adapted to this shift, using video, animations, interactive dashboards, and other multimedia formats to present insights more compellingly. At Research Partnership, our in-house creative team, The Studio, collaborates with research teams to create a wide range of engaging outputs which work particularly well for engaging diverse stakeholders, especially those spread across different geographies.
Yet, despite these innovations, the industry as a whole is still over-reliant on the traditional PowerPoint presentation for delivering the final report, sometimes because clients want their insights quickly and sometimes because of the need to convey a complex amount of information in a limited amount of time.
However, times are changing and AI is transforming how we deliver insights.
Video has already proven to be far more engaging than static text, offering both visual and auditory stimulation, emotional connection, and an interactive storytelling format. Studies show that viewers retain a lot more of a message when delivered via video, rather than reading text. It’s also a convenient medium that can reach broader audiences, allowing them to engage with content at their convenience.
However, video is still a one-way form of communication. To truly engage audiences, we could go a step further. Research Partnership’s Innovation Centre of Expertise team scans the landscape to test and evaluate new tools that will help us do business better so our clients gain more value. You won’t be surprised to hear our team have recently been focused on investigating how AI can help us serve clients more effectively. We recognise the power of AI in enabling us to get better, deeper insights, and for taking over some of the operational tasks to allow our researchers more time for strategic thinking and consultation.
As the Innovation team began to experiment with the vast array of available tools, they started to think about how AI could not only be used to enhance research design and data analysis, but also to support with the immersion and socialization of client outputs. Enter the Insight Avatar.
The Insight Avatar brings a new dimension to delivering market research insights, making data more engaging, personalized, and interactive. By moving beyond static presentations up to multi-stakeholder workshops, the avatar breathes life into research, extending its relevance beyond the confines of the meeting room or report.
Here are some innovative ways we’ve been experimenting with avatars to enhance research delivery:
1. Avatar as Presenter
Using large, language models for generative AI the avatar functions as a virtual presenter, guiding the audience through key insights like a human host. This approach simulates a conversation, with the avatar speaking, gesturing, and highlighting essential points. We’ve been trialling this format alongside traditional PowerPoint presentations for audiences who can’t attend live sessions. This has proven effective for personalizing content across various audiences and languages.
The avatar can tailor presentations to suit different audiences—offering more detailed insights for data-driven professionals or summarizing key takeaways for senior leadership. It can also break down complex data, presenting it in a step-by-step, easy-to-understand format. By integrating real-time dynamic infographics, the avatar could zoom in on specific sections, highlight trends, and provide comparisons—taking interactivity to the next level.
In the future, the avatar could even host live or pre-recorded webinars, taking on technical or repetitive content, while allowing human analysts to focus on higher-level commentary. Taking it to an even more advanced stage, avatars could respond to live audience questions, enhancing real-time engagement. Audiences could ask questions of their data, to help them with education and learning.
The versatility of avatars means insights can be integrated across platforms like websites, apps, or social media—allowing stakeholders to access research on demand, ask for updates, or request specific data insights. With some creative thinking, the potential for avatars to revolutionize insight delivery is limitless.
2. Avatar as Patient or Physician Persona
Avatars are especially effective for studies where you need to bring a persona to life, such as segmentations, KOL studies, or patient journeys. Avatars can be customized to represent visual, demographic, and behavioral characteristics, providing a clearer picture of the persona’s needs and preferences.
For example, an avatar could represent an elderly diabetic patient or a young person managing asthma, using specific visual characteristics, language, and behaviors to reflect that segment. These avatars can incorporate cultural elements and personalized traits, ensuring inclusivity and relatability. Such representations help recipients understand the unique challenges and experiences of different patient segments, making the data more tangible, memorable and impactful.
3. Avatar as Emotional Connector
Avatars can also serve as powerful emotional connectors, especially in illustrating patient journeys. For example, an avatar representing a chronic pain patient might exhibit limited mobility or discomfort, helping the audience connect with the emotional reality of the patient’s experience.
Seeing a visual representation of someone coping with pain is far more impactful than merely reading about it. The avatar can also depict the patient’s treatment journey—interactions with healthcare providers, medications, and the day-to-day challenges—making healthcare pathways more understandable and relatable for stakeholders.
By adjusting its tone, pacing, and style based on the audience—whether formal, casual, or humorous—the avatar can enhance engagement and emotional resonance, giving research insights utility and actionability far beyond the initial presentation.
4. Avatar as Teacher
Avatars can also engage and educate through gamification, making learning more interactive and enjoyable. For example, avatars can introduce quizzes or interactive games to test audience comprehension or highlight key trends in an entertaining way. Offering digital badges or rewards for insightful questions or completed sections encourages deeper engagement with the data.
At a more sophisticated level, an avatar can be programmed to answer real-time questions about the research. By integrating AI, it can analyze datasets and provide tailored responses, diving deeper into specific areas based on user queries. Our partner, Inizio Medical, has been using avatars in this way to help educate Medical Science Liaison teams, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
By integrating avatars into market research, we can make the delivery of insights more interactive, engaging, and user-friendly, significantly increasing information retention and audience involvement. With AI driving the next wave of innovation, the possibilities are vast, and the future of research delivery looks more exciting than ever.
If you would like to talk to us about how Insight Avatars are changing the way we deliver insights, please contact us now.
Find out more about AI at Research Partnership https://www.researchpartnership.com/ai-at-research-partnership/
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