Research is the foundation of every strategic work, or at least it should be. But research has become especially in the field of marketing more and more complicated over the years. On the one hand you have the big market players that publish every year their ocean of new trend papers and on the other hand web search has become such a nightmare as content marketeers and search specialists have flooded the web with tons of irrelevant information just to get some traffic from Google. I can just speak from my experience that I find the standard trend, market or competitor research nowadays really frustrating. For the first part I crafted a little product to help me out that I want to share now to the public.
What is it all about?
Basically the trend assistant is an AI agent that is specialized in gathering and analyzing trends in marketing and business. It is feeded with a huge library of trend reports and other relevant documents from the last few years. The historic data dates back to 2018 and is up to date with the current wave of trend reports that were released end 2024/ begin 2025.
When you are a little more familiar with AI systems you might think: “a this is a Custom GPT within chatGPT”. That is almost there. The system I built is using OpenAI’s large language model as a foundation but is more then a custom GPT. It uses openAI’s assistant API to create a customized agent for this specific use case.
For non tech people it is just a simple chat interface like you know from other AI tools. Simply start with a question about a topic, trend or whatever and engage in a conversation with the agent if you want to follow up. The usage I think is straight forward and shouldn’t have a upfront learning curve.
Other than some other AI tools this one is instructed to mainly give advice based on the content in the trend library that it was trained with. So you see also in the output the references that were used for certain conclusion to be sure the AI is not making things up here. I really put some time into fin tuning the behaviour and output style to be useful for the work of marketing or business strategists.
I hope you find it helpful and would love your feedback!
Thank you,
Erich
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