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Consumer focus groups run by AI

Motives is a team of AI agents that runs qualitative research projects for consumer brands: moderating and analyzing video interviews to help brands understand consumer preferences and test new ideas, in hours instead of weeks.
Active Founders
Sean Conley
Sean Conley
Founder
Building the best way to understand consumers. Previously launching AI tools at Google, Dataiku, TrueLayer. Started professional life as a researcher at GiveWell.
Sam Stoll
Sam Stoll
Founder
Co-Founder & CTO at Motives. Ex-Palantir. Building the best way to understand consumers.
Company Launches
Motives - Qualitative consumer research run by AI
See original launch post

Motives is a team of AI agents that runs qualitative research for consumer brands. Running a focus group can cost $20k+ and take 1-2 months to recruit participants, interview them, and analyze the results - Motives AI runs that whole process in 1-2 days.

The problem

Marketing teams thrive on understanding their customers, with large brands spending $100mn/year on consumer research. Today they choose between surveys, which are fast and affordable but shallow, and focus groups or in-depth interviews, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take weeks or months.

The solution

We’ve built AI agents that can plan, run, and analyze consumer interviews, giving marketing teams deep qualitative insights in days instead of months.

https://youtu.be/dHFtzfFaRKg

Ask a research question, and get results in hours - here’s how it works:

  • Customers chat with our AI agent to describe their research questions or the concepts they need to test, and our AI builds a research plan.
  • Our AI then recruits relevant people from our global panel network and interviews them over video.
  • The AI automatically analyzes the interviews and generates a report with actionable insights.
  • Customers can view specific video highlights and chat with our AI to answer follow-up questions.

Results

Our customers include some of the biggest consumer brands in the US and Europe - check out our case study about how Unilever’s recent acquisition Wild has been using Motives to test new packaging concepts.

Who we are

Sean (CEO) ex-PM and Growth at Google, Dataiku, and Truelayer

Sam (CTO) ex-Palantir software engineer

We’ve been friends since our undergrad days at Oxford. From our own product development backgrounds we know how difficult it is to learn what your customers really want - so we’re building a better way, focusing on helping marketing teams at consumer brands since they feel the pain on the largest scale.

Want to know more?

Need to understand your customers better? Know marketing or insights teams that could use faster, more scalable research?

Check out our website to book a demo, or reach out directly to sean@motives.ai

Motives
Batch:Summer 2025
Status:
Active
Location:London, United Kingdom
Primary Partner:Jon Xu