Maybe it s how the product is packaged, or the ingredients, or maybe you ve bought it before and it tastes great.

Finding ways to attract consumers to package goods is the role of the global market research industry, worth an estimated $88 billion in 2024.

The industry is expected to grow by another $15 billion in the next four years, with artificial intelligence s rise one of the major contributing factors.

One company hoping to lead that disruption is AI Palette.

Before co-founding AI Palette, Somsabra Gan Chowdhury worked in the fast-moving consumer goods industry and worked closely with some of the world s largest consumer packaged goods companies.

The challenge that they always have is that consumer preferences are changing faster than ever before and they re not able to keep up or to understand and predict what will be popular say one year from now.

That s when I first came across AI and machine learning.

As I learned more about it, it became quite obvious to me that it s just a matter of time before AI impacts every industry.

As AI development gathers pace, so does interest from investors.

Venture capital firm 500 Global invests in entrepreneurs who they believe are building game-changing companies.

We caught up with them at Singapore Innovation Conference Switch.

Younger entrepreneurs that we re investing in, companies are being rebuilt with AI in mind.

It can, in an exponential fashion, reduce costs associated with day-to-day business activity that otherwise takes up a lot of time and requires a lot of people.

One of the areas that we looked at was in the space of marketing, product design and creation, product research.

Get to the market faster with more confidence that the product that you launch will be successful in the market.

So today for the companies to launch a product, it takes one to two years.

And by the time they launch the product into the market, the consumer preferences would change significantly because the way it is done traditionally is by talking to a small sample of people, not only representative of that particular market.

It only tells you the trends of today.

AI Palette was founded in Singapore in 2018 and its AI platform has been up and running for the past four years.

Its clients include major food and beverage brands, Diageo, Nestle and PepsiCo, as well as Simrise, a company that works with brands to manufacture ingredients and products in taste, nutrition, health, scent and care.

AI Palette knows very well the needs of companies like Simrise.

So the platform, the capabilities are set up and established in the way that we would want to use them.

It's very user-friendly.

Data is pulled from many multiple different sources.

So from social media, from online menus, from product data that is online.

And this is something that's of a key need for a company like Simrise that we're able to, let's say, easily synthesize what is happening in the marketplace and then interpret that and have an outcome that we can then present to our customers.

Consumer brand like Pringles, they used our platform to understand the preferences for snacks across four different markets, South Korea and Australia, which are very matured and developed markets.

And then we have developing markets, Thailand, Indonesia.

So our AI helped them to understand flavor trends.

And this is that they launched quite a few products into the market.

AI Palette has a three-pronged approach to its cross-sectional forecasting, which includes 39 different factors to predict the future trajectory of a trend.

So a trend would start in South Korea and it will come to Thailand and that will go to Indonesia and Philippines.

The other influences are in terms of like cross-category influence.

So for example, like alcoholic beverages as a category takes a lot of inspiration from non-alcoholic beverages.

And the final one is the generative AI, which helps us to create product concepts, incorporating the latest consumer trends and in a language which would resonate better with the consumers.

What AI Palette provides for us, we could not do before.

So it is something new.

We still do traditional consumer research also.

If the decision is a significant one, a large the very same consumers and ask questions of them.

Here in the labs behind me, we still have to taste the product because artificial intelligence cannot do that yet.

Our job is not to replace the humans, but to make the lives of the humans better so that they can do their job faster and with a lot more confidence.

The ground in AI is shifting very quickly.

The technology advances at light speed with every few months that go by.

This creates a lot of opportunities for startups to create because this uncertain ground is fertile for innovation.

But it also presents risks.

We look at companies that are building resilient solutions.

They are tackling big problems that no one is maybe looking at right now or have an innovative way to actually solve.

So we think that ground is very, very right.

It's often an overlooked area.

So companies like AI Palette that take on a very specific sector, those are exactly the kind of companies that we like.

Along with VC investors, AI Palette has had the backing of the Singapore government, which is committing more than three quarters of a billion dollars to AI development to strengthen its AI ecosystem.

What they really loved was that we are trying to disrupt a very large and traditional industry like the CPG industry.

The companies are very traditional and there have not been much disruption.

The planning to expand into other types of CPGs, be it home care and also maybe pet care.

We want to be synonymous with this particular category.