Changing the market research industry, one survey bot at a time

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Learn how Suzy’s latest innovation is tackling AI survey bots.

Generative artificial intelligence offers a whole realm of benefits for market researchers, improving your day-to-day tasks like survey generation and qualitative summary generation.

But with all the benefits that generative AI offers today’s market research professionals, there are new challenges on the horizon—especially for online panels. Now that generative AI is publicly available, the rise in AI bot activity is spiking across online market research panels—potentially skewing results, making data less actionable, and leading brands in the wrong direction. 

While the industry has been battling bots for years, it doesn’t currently have an answer for the quickly-spreading generative AI problem. That’s because today’s survey bots produce high-quality answers to open-ended questions—sometimes even better quality than human respondents. That means that some traditional bot-catching methods no longer work and bots are getting harder to detect.

When it comes to generative AI survey bots, we aren’t in disaster mode—yet. To stay at the forefront of the challenge, Suzy’s been hard at work on developing a solution to the generative AI bot problem with our latest patent-pending innovation called Biotic, our AI-Powered Bot Recognition Assurance Technology. By getting ahead of the game, we can set a new gold standard for the industry to ensure quality, actionable data for enterprise brands that want to focus on their consumers. Here’s what we’re doing and why:

First, it comes down to the audience

At Suzy, we’ve prided ourselves on our audience. It is the backbone of our platform, and we’ve worked hard to build it over the years. With that said, we are invested in putting in the hard work to manage our panel and ensure it is a quality tool for our clients. 

Over the last five years of building our proprietary audience, we’ve built a special relationship with our respondents. They return over and over again to answer questions on our platform, and it is thanks to this relationship that we can intelligently leverage data to drive quality. We build their profiles to help with deeper segmentation and have the data to back it up. Using real human data allows us to test our audience. If inconsistencies arise, it’s a clear signal that we may be dealing with a survey bot.

Then, it comes down to understanding human brains

At Suzy, our mission has always been to enable human understanding. In today’s day and age, that also means we need to understand the machines.

Fundamentally, humans and machines don’t answer questions the same way. As humans, we’re all susceptible to certain tricks, like optical illusions. Or we’re able to fill in the gaps and read words when letters are jumbled or missing. Computers struggle with activities like this—even AI-powered survey bots. 

At Suzy, we are taking advantage of both what we might consider human weaknesses and computer strengths to deploy tests for members on our platform that determine if they are bots or not.

Finally, we build an army

We want to beat survey bots on our platform. To that end, we’re in an arms race, building an army of our own bots in a safe environment. Our bots need to know how the Suzy platform works—and how best to exploit it. That way we can build defenses that will keep them out. Essentially, we must defeat ourselves to build better defenses. As the bots get better, so will we.

We’re doing this all safely, ensuring that no client data is involved in the process. We remove bad respondents and responses before any data is collected, so survey data will not be impacted by bot activity for our clients.

In the end, we will effectively keep bots off our platform and our audience human, allowing us to continue delivering the high-quality insights our clients have come to expect.

Suzy’s bot army will change the industry for the better

There are plenty of norms in the industry right now that need to be challenged, like collecting and cleaning data before sending it to a client or expecting professional survey takers and tolerating them. This impacts not only the quality of responses our clients receive but also how fast they can get that data. 

The industry can be better—delivering higher quality data fast for our clients and allowing major brands to truly get to know and focus on their target consumers.

Our survey bot army will help us improve not only the quality of our panel as a whole but also on a survey-level basis. And we will be able to do it fast. Typically, when a bot farm shows up, it can take a few days to remove it. Our tool will respond in just a few minutes!

With these protections in place, today’s enterprise brands will have an online research platform they can truly rely on—with fast, actionable data so they can move at the speed of the consumer. 

Curious to see what the future of AI means for market research? Book a demo to learn more from our team today.