IIeX NA 2019 Conference Series – David Wolfe – Inguo

Welcome to the 2019 IIEX North America Conference Series. Recorded live in Austin, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews David Wolfe, Prinicipal at Inguo. Contact David Online: LinkedIn Inguo [00:00] David Wolfe.  Inguo is the name of the company.  They’re an NEC spin-out of the AI laboratories at NEC Corporation in Japan.  David’s got a really interesting background, including Olympic-level wrestling in the United States for those of you who are fans of that.  We don’t actually dive into it, but it was certainly worth mentioning. I thought that was fascinating seeing that kind of background and then coming into market research.  They have AI-empowered insights discovery tool. It’s the first of its kind in the data science industry; it’s got a ton of automation and value that it can bring. They’re very early in their inception, and I think it’s a great time if you’re looking for AI-empowered insights and discovery that you’d take advantage of at least picking up the phone and having a conversation with David.  Enjoy. [00:48]   My guest today is David Wolfe, principal of Inguo. [00:51]   So, I started my career after grad school in international policy.  So my original background is linguistics, cultural anthropology, and international policies.  So, I have an M.A. in international policy from the Monterey Institute, now known as the Middlebury Institute.  I worked for a firm in Washington, D.C., focusing on the Kashmir dispute where I was working with India and Pakistan, but basically trying to give a voice to the people of Kashmir because they are just basically innocent by-standers caught in the middle of nothing.  But I will leave it at that ‘cause that’s a touchy subject and don’t want to scare people away. [01:27] I hear you.  I think that’s great.  That’s an interesting...  There are a couple of things there that are really interesting there for me.  One is that you’re talking about adding voice to a subset of the population that doesn’t have voice, which in a lot of ways is the fundamental core tenet of market research.  So it’s about uncovering the hidden truth, sometimes the ugly truth, so that brands can better deliver on their customer promise. [01:52] That’s correct, 100%. So, I also in my studies studied mass communications, but mass communications from a critical theory point of view.  So looking at things like for urban planning and information cities and how we can utilize technology to make us better as a society. But not looking at societies as a “one size fit all” because we are a big, diverse world.  So how we can utilize this to ingratiate each other without imposing our culture or someone else’s culture whatever on someone else but meeting in the middle and finding understand, which I think market research now is really trying to do that and find the humanity within market research.  And so, that was what drew me into this. [02:36] At a macro-level brands are doing the same thing.  So, this is what I find so interesting,