$20/month to understand everything about your customers

I heard an unsurprising (but still interesting) stat on the radio this week: 9 out of 10 university students are now using GenAI in their studies.

A survey of 1,000+ full-time undergrads found that: 58% use AI to explain concepts, 48% to summarise articles, 41% for research ideas, and 39% to structure their thoughts.

Students aren’t using AI to replace thinking—they’re using it to enhance it. As marketers, we should be doing the same.

Whether it's breaking down market trends, summarising customer insights, or generating fresh research ideas; AI can now do in minutes what used to take us hours. But there’s a serious catch…

Without appropriate context - like a clear understanding of customer pains - AI will confidently give you bad insights.

How to engineer generative insights

For us 'human marketers', context is everything. It’s how we make sense of our customers, and it’s what makes AI effective too.

If you don’t give AI the right context, it can’t help you understand anything.
So, how do we do it? Spoiler alert: free AI prompts ahead!

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know I’m a huge believer in Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)—and that’s exactly how we approach AI-powered market research.

Here’s the 3-step process:

1️⃣ Map out your customer’s JTBD, Pains, and Gains
Before going near ChatGPT, write down your assumptions about:

• What your customers are trying to achieve (the Jobs they need to get done)

• What’s frustrating them before, during or after the Job (Pains)

• What success looks like for them, a positive outcome (Gains) 

2️⃣ Use AI to test and expand your assumptions
Feed your JTBD assumptions into ChatGPT (or another AI tool) using a structured prompt. Here’s one to try:

📌 Grab your FREE Chat GPT - JTBD Prompt Kit

3️⃣ Validate artificial insights with real customers!
AI can help you refine your assumptions, but they still need to be tested. That means using good old-fashioned research: customer interviews, surveys and A/B message testing to see what truly resonates (I've even given you a prompt to get you started on this too—no excuses!).

AI Won’t Replace Research. But It Can Speed It Up.

The biggest challenge in marketing has always been making the right bets and assumptions about our customers. Most of us are guessing most of the time.

AI doesn’t solve that for us, but it does give us a fast, structured way to enhance our thinking before we validate it with real people.

AI is a game-changer, but ultimately it works best when paired with our own human intuition.

Let’s not forget the fundamentals!

P.P.S. I’m delighted to be speaking at Scotland’s Growth Marketing Meet-up in March! If you’re around, you can sign up here.