"Ignoring AI means missing out on opportunities, letting competitors get ahead in customer service and efficiency."
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview with Ben Harknett, CEO of Cambri, where we delve into the transformative power of AI in business, particularly in product development.
With a track record of scaling several SaaS companies to acquisition, including Wildfire’s acquisition by Google and RiskIQ’s acquisition by Microsoft, Harknett brings a wealth of experience to the table.
In this interview, Harknett shares insights into his journey of integrating AI into Cambri’s operations, aiming to propel the company to unicorn status within the next five years.
At Cambri, Harknett leads a team dedicated to revolutionizing product development through innovative AI solutions.
From the inception of the company, AI has played a pivotal role, driving efficiency, enhancing decision-making processes, and ultimately, ensuring the success of new product launches. Through Cambri’s latest offering, Launch AI™, Harknett aims to reduce risk in new product development and accelerate brand innovation.
Join us as we explore Harknett’s vision for the future of AI in business and the remarkable impact it promises to deliver.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Ben Harknett: I have always worked with high growth start-ups and my experience includes successfully scaling several SaaS companies through to acquisition, most notably Wildfire’s acquisition by Google (360m) and RiskIQ’s acquisition by Microsoft (500m).
I see my strength in bringing products to market in fast growing companies attributed to working at the intersection of harmonizing product direction and GTM strategy. I joined Cambri in Feb 2023 as CEO with a clear intention to take Cambri to unicorn status in the next 5 years.
I genuinely believe that Cambri can be a unicorn business in the next 5 years, as the company is solving a multimillion-dollar issue in new product development failure rates. Cambri is a global res-tech growth company born in 2018, with headquarters in Helsinki and Stockholm, and offices across Europe and the United States.
Cambri provides teams with an agile approach to product development, resulting in more successful launches to bring only purposeful and long-lasting products and services to market. With the debut of our newest solution, Launch AI™, Cambri is reducing risk from new product development and accelerating brand innovation.
Can you share with us your journey towards integrating AI into your business operations?
Ben Harknett: AI has been part of our platform from the beginning, starting with the use of NLP models (natural language processing) to automatically scan and summarize the sentiment from open-ended survey questions and surface them to users, saving valuable time.
From there, we implemented machine learning (ML) and GPT to create our Launch AI™ model that predicts the likelihood of success of Cambri tested products by answering the fundamental question every innovator has – ‘will this new product launch be a success?’
By leveraging Launch AI™, new product development (NPD) is no longer about taking a leap of faith. Companies can now test early and test often to determine if a new product will be successful.
Launch AI™ includes Launch AI™ ‘Predict’ and Launch AI™ ‘Advise’. Launch AI™ ‘Predict’ generates a score to indicate if your NPD concept will be successful or not, using a robust data set combining survey data with post launch data.
This gives a much higher success prediction accuracy than traditional KPIs that have been the industry standard until now. Launch AI™ ‘Advise’ offers suggestions on how to improve the NPD concept with an AI-generated summary of the key strengths and the weaknesses of the concepts as well as sources of uniqueness. Launch AI™ will generate new and improved value propositions, based on respondent feedback on strengths and weaknesses.
What specific areas of your business have been most impacted by AI, and how?
Ben Harknett: Whilst it is still early days, it is very clear that the impact of AI on the market research and consumer insights industry will be revolutionary and offer a bigger and brighter future.
Democratization of insight: Consumer insight will play a more pivotal role in organizations as it becomes even cheaper and faster, meaning more decisions will be data and insight driven. In the innovation space, this will encourage a more iterative, test-and-learn approach, which we know is a contributing factor to better success rates.
We are already seeing this at Cambri as our automated AI-driven advice and summaries deliver actionable insights our clients can easily share across their business.
Operational efficiency: AI (in the form of workflow automation) will replace some of the more operational aspects of MR, like desk research, scripting a survey, analyzing data, charting data, report writing, freeing up time for more meaningful and higher value activities that drive commercial performance.
There will also be a greater emphasis on data management to ensure the quality of the data inputs and that the right sources and combinations of data are feeding the AI model. Research will become less about methodologies and more about actions and outcomes.
I don’t believe that jobs will be taken by an AI; however, they will be taken by somebody who knows how to take advantage of AI, so people need to up-skill themselves on how AI can help them in their roles.
Speed of insight: More insights will be available to make data driven decisions than ever before. As cost decreases and speed increases, decision makers will have the information they need at their fingertips. AI enables us to unlock the value of the data we collect by connecting the dots between different data sets, structuring unstructured data and enabling us to read the signals in the data very quickly.
For us at Cambri, it specifically means we can offer our customers better consumer predictions and the ability to incrementally learn from all the data captured from past innovations to drive better innovation success.
Catalyst for ideas: We believe AI will enhance the creative process rather than replace it. Like a creative virtual assistant, AI will encourage different approaches, prompt tweaks and changes, and ultimately feed the creative mind to help drive better innovation that delivers value for consumers.
To summarize, AI will be a positive development for everyone: business, teams, as well as consumers. Things that will need careful consideration along the way are quality of data and predictions, shit in equals shit out, data privacy and IP.
What are the biggest obstacles you’ve faced in implementing AI, and how did you overcome them?
Ben Harknett: Integrating AI has been fairly straightforward because we were already set up to take advantage of it. As a technology company, we already have the right skill set in-house with our data science team, and as a business, we generate lots of data in our innovation platform which then feeds our AI model. Data quality is key, so ensuring the integrity of the data you are feeding the model is an absolute imperative.
We use AI in combination with our own proprietary NLP which acts as a filter to contextualize the data making it relevant for NPD and CPG industries. There are not really obstacles when implementing AI, and instead there are more foundational aspects that you need to put in place in order to ensure it runs smoothly.
For example, initially, you need to have a very good idea of the business problem that you are aiming to solve with the help of AI. You need experts around you, such as data scientists, consumer behavior experts, marketing and product innovation experts, etc., so that AI works for the benefits of the consumer and business.
You will also need to make sure that you have access to relevant data. In addition, it’s important to ensure the recipients of the AI-generated insights trust the information they are getting and the methodology behind it – it can’t be an obfuscated black box solution.
Careful thought needs to be given to how much information you share about the inner workings of the model and how much is kept a trade secret. Finally, you’ll need to consider the user process and how your AI can be integrated seamlessly into the user experience.
What advice would you give to other CEOs looking to integrate AI into their business?
Ben Harknett: You can’t afford to ignore it. We are now in the era of AI. It is everywhere, so if you are not thinking about how you can leverage its capabilities then your competitors probably are.
It’s a massive opportunity for businesses – how they improve services for their customers but also how to drive operational efficiencies internally.
A few things to consider:
- Is the AI project aligned to the company’s strategic goals?
- Can the financial and operational impact be measured?
- Ask yourself: is this a problem AI can solve?
- Is it designed to replace a manual process or enhance a human one?
- Do you have access to the necessary data? Applying AI successfully depends on having the right quantity, quality and freeness of data available.
- Do you have the technical know-how and skill set to build, deploy and scale up the project?
- Have you thought about /covered off all the ethical considerations? Namely bias, privacy and transparency.
- How will you turn the AI model into a user-friendly AI product?
How do you see AI evolving in your industry over the next 5 years?
Ben Harknett: It will evolve through the automation of operational tasks, methodologies, data collection and analysis. It will also increase in volume of insights, and do it cheaper and faster.
There will still be a human role for researchers for the curation of data assets and identifying which data sets to connect and integrate data. Data management will also evolve, as maintaining the integrity of the data will be key.
AI offers a huge reduction in time to value for innovation teams. AI will help surface the learnings from institutional memory – what were the learnings from previous projects and how can these insights help inform and guide new product development. More innovation teams will adopt a data-led iterative approach.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Ben Harknett: Success for Cambri is accelerated growth both in terms of number of customers and users but also development of our platform’s AI capabilities by leveraging data to further improve predictions and automated advice.
We also want to get closer towards our goal of eradicating failed product launches and enabling brands to only launch successful products. Cambri users innovation success rate is currently 73% – we’d like to push that to 95%.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Ben Harknett for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Ben Harknett or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
