With the recent rollout of ChatGPT 5, even those with the most luddite of approaches have started to take notice and are starting to find ways to utilize it. The Shore Research team has been using ChatGPT for research and has developed a set of best practices for initial secondary market research.
The best use case for AI is to quickly identify and cull through data for speed and breadth of data, but never as a single source of truth. AI has largely democratized secondary data and research, and now, more than ever, companies need to rely on primary data like surveys and interviews of customers and competitors to identify and exploit differentiated trends.
Tip #1: Prompt writing matters
AI is great at processing huge amounts of information, but it is no different from your smartest analyst: it will return unfocused or irrelevant information if your prompts are vague. Clearly define your research objectives, geography of interest, time frame, and level of detail you require. Specify sources to include or exclude, and the number of sources you require. Consider breaking your massive prompt into smaller topical questions.
Tip #2: Quickly pull from multiple sources to triangulate the best data
Use AI to aggregate and cross-verify diverse data by pulling from both structured and unstructured content. Ask it to return differing results in a table to allow you to evaluate and draw conclusions. Use different searches with different phrases to catch variations in how the market is described, for example, members vs. patients.
Tip #3: Trust but verify
Always validate your findings, read the underlying sources, and question their validity. AI can confidently return incorrect data, and critical thinking is more important in the age of AI than ever before.
We hope these tips help you get started using LLMs to conduct secondary market research. The intangible quality separating good research from great research is curiosity. As you optimize and save time using AI, don’t forget to remain curious and keep asking questions to understand your market fully.