Tulika Chikersal

Tulika Chikursal leads Innovation Insights at Post Consumer Brands and is also the Insights Guardian for Emerging Brands. 


Lots of insights that you're gathering for your team. What types of research are you typically conducting? There are so many different ways you can be getting insights and information. What do you typically leverage?  

I do innovation insights primarily from analyzing trends to idea testing, concept testing, validating the products, and post-launch evaluation.

We also do a lot of positioning research, which is more to understand how consumers see it. We do a lot of foundational research like A&U, leverage brand health tracker studies … it's literally across the board. We do a ton of research to inform brand positioning, brand strategy, and new innovations that we want to launch in the market.


What types of sources do you turn to for that type of information?  

One is primary research and then there's also a lot of social listening. So we scrape a lot of data online. It could be Amazon reviews, Walmart reviews, or other social listening platforms where consumers are proactive and are sharing information about products.

We also have a consumer experience team. So if consumers write to us, we also take that into account. 


To what extent is desk research (mining what research has been published out there in the ether) a part of your process?

It’s kind of low weighting here – we keep a tab on it, but it's not like other heavy lifting that we do. Desk research is just to understand some nuances. Not really the most important thing, but it's good to keep a tab on the space.  


So staying smart and keeping relevant more than anything! 

Last question for you. When you think about this intersection of AI and research, what one emotion are you feeling, whether because of the conference or in general? 

I'm excited. That's the emotion that I have right now. 

I gave a vacuum cleaner example just a few minutes ago in the panel discussion, but I think of computers. When computers were launched, everyone was worried. “It's going to take away our job.” It did.

But at the same time, it generated more jobs. You just had to make it your friend, go along with and work with it rather than against it. Same is the case with AI. Start working with it. It will be an enabler, not a replacer. It'll just augment consumers to do a lot more in every field. Individuals, companies, consumers, sellers, everyone. It's going to augment our world.


Actually, last question, because that answer made me think! 

What are you afraid of? What's the downside that you might be worried about?  

I think leveraging a ton of information in a manner that we should not. Because access to AI gives you so much more information.

Think of a few years back. 

You specialized in one thing and you knew more about that, but not about a ton of other things. With globalization, with COVID, everyone knows everything about being online. And that access has given us a way to reach out to anything we want. So I'm worried about kids growing up and the amount of access they will have to information with AI. 

I don't know what protocols we’ll need. I know Google back in the day had security measures (what kids could research or not research on the platform). So I think AI needs to figure out something like that. But kids are so smart. How are you really going to decode what age is the child and what information they should be able to extract from the internet? That's very important.  



And same concern holds in the context of research and risks of AI in the research world? Lots of information and concerns around how you manipulate it? 

Not really. In the research world, the issue with AI while we are testing and we're all new to it is data accuracy.

Whatever information I'm getting from AI, How accurate is it? 70%? Is it at 50%? We know that information is not false. It's not that AI is lying today, but we just need to understand wherever it’s getting that information, from which sources, and how accurate are they?

It's more like today, I intuitively know what my consumers are saying. So when I do any research, I'm like, “Oh, this aligns with the research that I did.” But going forward, if we're going to rely a lot more on AI as a singular source of data, I think it's going to be a little tricky. How do you wait? But I think by then we would have gained more confidence.


Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate chatting with you!