Beyond the Hype: Rival’s Play to Make AI Practical for Brands

VANCOUVER, BC – December 03, 2025 – For the past two years, business leaders and marketing professionals have been navigating a paradox. Artificial intelligence is ubiquitously hailed as the next industrial revolution, yet for many, its practical application remains stubbornly out of reach, lost in a fog of abstract jargon, overblown promises, and endless social media hype. While every software provider seems to have an AI-powered solution, the critical gap between theory and tangible business value continues to widen.

Into this breach steps Rival Technologies, a market research tech firm making a strategic bet that the best way to lead in the AI era isn't to sell another black-box tool, but to teach brands how to build their own capabilities from the ground up. The company has officially launched its ‘Innovation Insiders Program,’ a year-long, hands-on initiative designed to guide market research teams from AI confusion to confident application. With an inaugural class that includes heavyweights like Warner Bros. Discovery, ŌURA, People Inc., and Beem Credit Union, Rival is signaling a significant shift in how technology partners can deliver value—moving from vendor to educator.

Drowning in Hype, Searching for a Lifeline

The genesis of the program, according to Rival's Founder and CEO, Andrew Reid, came from a simple observation of the market's overwhelming noise. "There's so much noise out there, everyone's claiming to have the ultimate guide to the next big thing," Reid stated in the announcement. "It can be incredibly confusing for brands to keep up, especially when they're just trying to figure out what questions to ask in the first place."

This sentiment resonates deeply across the industry. Many insights teams are grappling not with a lack of AI tools, but with a lack of a clear, structured path to integrate them effectively. Rival’s program is designed as a direct antidote to this paralysis. It’s not a two-day webinar or a certification course, but a 12-month collaborative journey. The curriculum is pointedly practical, moving teams past buzzwords and into the trenches. Participants in the first cohort, which began in October, have already tackled the expanding context windows of large language models, the nuances of effective prompting, and even begun building their own custom GPTs to solve specific research challenges. The goal is to incrementally build expertise, moving from individual learning to team-wide fluency.

By creating a safe, collaborative space for experimentation, the program aims to demystify the technology. It gives brands the tools, confidence, and community support needed to run meaningful experiments, learn from failures, and ultimately evolve how they conduct research in a landscape being fundamentally reshaped by AI.

A Strategic Pivot from Product to Partnership

Perhaps the most telling aspect of this launch is the strategy behind it. In an industry where competitors are racing to integrate AI features—like Quantilope’s ‘quinn’ co-pilot or SurveyMonkey’s ‘Genius’—Rival is playing a different game. Instead of solely focusing on its own AI-powered platform features, the company is investing in building its clients' internal human expertise. This is a deliberate pivot from a transactional product sale to a long-term strategic partnership.

"We wanted to create a space where learning and collaboration come first, not just another product pitch," Reid explained. This approach positions Rival not merely as a software vendor, but as an indispensable guide through a period of intense technological disruption. By fostering a private peer community and providing proprietary tools alongside monthly workshops, Rival is building an ecosystem. This strategy cultivates deep client loyalty and establishes the company as a central thought leader, influencing how the next generation of insights professionals will leverage AI.

This educational model offers a distinct competitive advantage. While other platforms offer AI tools that can feel like impenetrable black boxes, Rival is giving its partners a look under the hood, empowering them to become sophisticated users and innovators in their own right. This builds trust and reduces the client churn that often occurs when a new, shinier AI tool appears on the market. The long-term vision is clear: create clients who are not just customers, but deeply integrated partners whose own success is intertwined with the Rival ecosystem.

Upskilling the Human Insight Engine

The ‘Innovation Insiders Program’ also addresses a critical human resources challenge: the rapidly expanding skills gap in the market research industry. Expert consensus, echoed in publications from ESOMAR to GreenBook, warns against the risks of over-automation. AI is a powerful amplifier, but it lacks the contextual awareness, ethical judgment, and strategic discernment of a seasoned human professional. The future of insights doesn't belong to the machines alone, but to the professionals who know how to expertly pilot them.

The program's first cohort illustrates this need perfectly. For a global media conglomerate like Warner Bros. Discovery, navigating intense streaming wars requires a nuanced understanding of audience tastes and content performance that raw data alone cannot provide. For a health-tech innovator like ŌURA, which is already using some of Rival’s AI tools, the challenge is to translate vast, sensitive user health data into meaningful product improvements and ethical marketing. Their participation underscores a recognition that their competitive edge relies on their human teams being at the forefront of AI application.

Rival’s initiative is a direct investment in the human element of the insights equation. It acknowledges that the ultimate value of AI is unlocked not by the algorithm itself, but by the skilled researcher who can ask the right questions, interpret the output critically, and translate machine-generated patterns into winning business strategy. The program is designed to create those researchers.

Building a Blueprint for Real-World Value

This initiative doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s a logical extension of Rival’s established AI footprint. The company previously launched its ‘Multi-Agent AI Framework’ and ‘Unstructured Data Agent,’ tools designed to bring AI-powered analysis to qualitative feedback at scale. The ‘Innovation Insiders Program’ serves as the human enablement layer for this technology, ensuring that the platform's power is fully harnessed.

By focusing on collective exploration and structured experimentation, Rival is helping brands build an internal blueprint for generating real-world value from AI. It's a model that moves beyond simply delivering a piece of software and instead commits to ensuring the client's organizational transformation. In an age of digital disruption, this approach of co-creation and deep partnership may well become the new standard for how successful technology companies drive adoption and deliver lasting impact.