Insights on AI-Powered Research

Expert perspectives on qualitative research, AI personas, and the future of focus groups

How We Made Large AI Models 40% Smaller (And Open Sourced the Whole Thing)

How We Made Large AI Models 40% Smaller (And Open Sourced the Whole Thing)

Tom Turney, Founder & CTO, PsyGuard.AI This week we achieved something we have been building toward for a the past week. We compressed large AI model weights by 28-42% with barely measurable quality loss. No retraining. No calibration data. No special hardware. Take an existing model, run one command, get a smaller version that produces nearly identical output. This is not a paper. This is running code with real results, tested by real people

Tom Turney •

24 Hours vs. 5 Weeks: The New Timeline for Audience Insight

Five weeks. That is the traditional timeline for a single focus group study. Two weeks to recruit participants. Another to schedule facilities and moderators. Then the sessions, followed by analysis and report writing. By the time insights finally land on your desk, the campaign decision was made three weeks ago. That timeline made sense when there was no alternative. Agencies accepted the lag because qualitative research required physical rooms, real participants, and heavy logistics. In

Joe Brennan •

The Death of “We Don’t Have Time for Research”

Every agency has said it. Every marketer has heard it. “We don’t have time for research.” It is the mantra that is quietly killed more qualitative studies than budget ever has. It is not because strategy leaders do not believe in research (everyone knows audience validation improves outcomes). It is because when deadlines shrink and client asks stack up, research feels like the thing that simply will not fit. And in traditional qual, that

Joe Brennan •

What Happens When Focus Groups Move at the Speed of Your Creative Team

Creative teams work in sprints. Concepts evolve by the hour. Feedback loops tighten until a single Slack thread can change an entire direction overnight. Traditional focus groups? They run on a completely different clock. Recruitment, moderation, analysis. It all adds up to weeks of lead time. That timeline simply can not keep up with how modern creative work gets done. So research gets skipped. Not because teams do not value audience input, but because by

Joe Brennan •
How KV Cache Compression Will Transform AI Focus Groups

How KV Cache Compression Will Transform AI Focus Groups

Tom Turney, Founder & CTO, PsyGuard.AI Yesterday Google Research published a paper called TurboQuant that compresses LLM memory by 5x with zero accuracy loss. Within hours, I had it running locally. Here's why this matters for PsyGuard.AI and the future of AI-powered qualitative research. The Problem We're Solving PsyGuard AI runs AI-simulated focus groups. When a market researcher wants to understand how 12 psychologically-profiled participants would react to a

Tom Turney •

Once-a-Year to Always-On: How Modern Focus Groups Unlock More Client-Approved Ideas

For years, agencies have treated focus groups as a luxury, something reserved for big-budget initiatives or critical brand launches. At $25,000–$50,000 a pop and a 3-5 week turnaround, they were never built for the pace or economics of today’s agency life. Most strategy and planning teams only get one shot a year, leaving dozens of campaign routes, brand platforms, and positioning ideas to be approved, or rejected, without audience validation. That’

Joe Brennan •