Bolt Launches End-to-End Research Platform

AI-moderated consumer research firm Bolt Insight has launched an always-on platform called Bolt Intelligence. The tool brings together qual, quant, UX research and social listening in one end-to-end workflow; and also spots trends, makes predictions and recommends research.

Bolt was founded in 2019 and is led by co-founders Hakan Yurdakul (CEO), a former brand strategist at Unilever, and CTO Kerem Turgay, a Harvard and ETH Zurich-trained engineer with experience from Siemens, Coca-Cola and Afiniti. The firm now employs around fifty people in offices in London, Istanbul, Paris, New York and Singapore. With its original offer based around the BoltChatAI qual platform, last year it added Dynamic Personas and Meta-Analysis, and in December while announcing a £7 million funding round, it said it was working on an 'Assistant AI Chief Insights Officer', a real-time intelligence and decision-making partner.

The new Bolt Intelligence platform is powered by Bolt IQ, the company's proprietary AI research 'brain'. A Signal Scanner feature continuously analyzes market and competitive data; Pattern Detective spots trends and Foresight Engine predicts them. The platform draws upon all this data to recommend research action: clients can run their research independently or co-design studies with Bolt's team.

Together with the platform's launch, the company has unveiled a refreshed brand identity (see image), which it says 'reflects its confidence as an established global operator and its ambition as a category creator.'

'This is the platform I wish I had when I was on brand side,' says Yurdakul. 'The industry chose speed. We chose substance. While others built AI to replace the researcher, we built Bolt Insight to elevate and amplify them, because every feature has been designed by people who have sat in the debrief, written the discussion guide, and had to make the findings stick in a room full of stakeholders.'

The firm is online at www.boltinsight.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.