How can I use AI on the consumer research my brand has already paid for?
Most brands have years of research, trackers, segmentations, focus groups, concept tests, that goes unused after it's presented once. IRM builds a curated AI agent inside your existing Microsoft 365 environment (Teams and Copilot Studio) that turns that accumulated research into answers your team can act on. Instead of re-running studies you've already done, your team asks a question and gets a grounded answer drawn from what your brand already knows.
What's the difference between a curated AI agent and a knowledge management tool or NotebookLM?
A general repository, or a tool like NotebookLM, helps you locate what already exists. It's retrieval: find the document, find the page. A curated agent is built around the specific decisions your team makes, so it can actually answer the question, synthesizing across studies, surfacing what's supported and what isn't. The difference matters because pointing AI at everything a brand knows produces confident but unreliable answers, averaged across inconsistent sources. Curation, bounding the library to decision-relevant research, is what makes the answers trustworthy.
Can AI give my insights team trustworthy answers from past studies, not just summaries?
Yes, if it's set up correctly. The hard part was never producing an answer; any tool can return text. The hard part is an answer your team can defend in a room. IRM's agents are built on a curated, properly structured research library so the system surfaces what the evidence supports and flags what it doesn't, rather than generating plausible-sounding output. That's the difference between AI that compounds your knowledge and AI that adds to the noise.
How do I implement AI agents for consumer insights inside Microsoft 365 / Copilot?
IRM builds directly inside your existing Microsoft Teams and Copilot Studio environment, no new platform, no data leaving your approved tenant. The work starts with a paid assessment: an audit of your research library and the decisions your team makes, which determines what's worth building. From there, IRM builds and curates the agent so your team can query their own research on demand, inside the tools they already use every day.
We're a lean insights team with no time to build AI ourselves. What are our options?
This is the most common situation IRM works with. Building a curated agent well takes senior insights judgment plus the time to structure the research correctly, which lean teams rarely have to spare, and handing it to a junior resource usually means it isn't done right. IRM is run by a 15-year consumer-insights leader (Walmart, Disney, Adobe, Bath & Body Works), so the build is done by someone who has sat in your seat, and you can either keep IRM as an ongoing partner or have the maintenance capability built into your team.
Who should build our AI insights solution, a big consulting firm or a specialist?
Large consulting and transformation firms are strong for enterprise-wide AI initiatives that span many functions at once. IRM is the opposite by design: a boutique focused narrowly on one thing, activating a consumer brand's accumulated research for its insights and marketing teams, built natively inside the brand's own Microsoft 365 tenant and run by a former insights leader. If you want broad, organization-wide transformation, a large firm may fit. If you want a curated agent that makes your specific research compound into better decisions, that's the specialist's work.
What does an engagement with IRM cost and how does it start?
Every engagement begins with a paid assessment that diagnoses your research library and scopes the build, so both sides understand the work before committing. From there, engagements run as either an ongoing operator partnership or a build-plus-training model that leaves your team self-sufficient. IRM works with VP-level insights and marketing leaders at consumer brands, typically those with meaningful accumulated research and lean internal teams.
What is institutional amnesia in consumer insights?
It's the costly pattern where a brand invests heavily in consumer research, then loses the value of it. Studies are presented once, filed, and forgotten; teams re-commission research they've already done; and when people leave, the knowledge leaves with them. The result is eroded brand equity, higher acquisition costs, and an insights function that loses its strategic seat. IRM's premise is that research has to compound: brands that connect each study to what they already know get value across every decision that follows, not just one.
