This review is part of a larger series of LinkedIn newsletters titled AI in Market Research: Reviews of AI tools, platforms, and solutions that market researchers should use today.
When people hear about Claude, they often ask whether it’s better than ChatGPT. The answer depends on the specific use case, especially from a market researcher’s perspective.
ChatGPT has an advantage in creating synthetic respondents via the ChatGPT builder or the Assistant API. This capability is a strong point for ChatGPT, as discussed in the first article of this newsletter series.
However, Claude has some limitations when using the standard web interface. It allows only five attachments per chat, so you’ll need to aggregate interview transcripts if you want Claude to analyze them all simultaneously, as many qualitative studies have more than five interviews. Fortunately, this limitation is easy to work around by copying and pasting transcripts from multiple interviews into a single file, clearly marking each section as “Interview 1,” “Interview 2,” etc. Claude can still make clear distinctions between the contents of each interview.
The file size limit for a single upload in Claude’s web interface is 10MB. To put this in perspective, 14 interviews of approximately 45 minutes each when combined only amount to a Word Document with a file size of 264 KB. You would need a very large number of interviews, far more than typically conducted in a real-world B2B market research study, to be challenged by this file size limit.
It’s also possible to create something analogous to OpenAI’s GPT builder by integrating the Anthropic API into a custom app using platforms like Bubble. Claude can even provide step-by-step instructions on integrating the Anthropic API with Bubble.
As a side note, this is another sign that coding expertise is no longer the superpower it once was when the mission was – to teach everyone to code – by hand per se. But knowing how to use GenAI is. As highlighted by none other than IEEE – https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding – For example, one contributor to the linked article stated:
[Generative AI tools] – “will free up time for us to teach higher-level thinking—for example, how to design software, the right problem to solve, and the solutions. Students can spend more time on optimization, ethical issues, and the user-friendliness of a system rather than focusing on the syntax of the code.”
As of May 1st, 2023, Claude has become more team/business-friendly with the release of the “Team” plan. Before this release, Claude’s web front end was more tailored toward individual users. The Claude team has also shared plans to launch integrations with CRMs and enable collaboration on AI documents or projects, but the specifics are yet to be seen.
Finally, Claude, again for business users, just launched a prompt generator, which compliments the prompt library they released a while back.
Regarding data privacy, Claude automatically doesn’t store any user data, regardless of the access level or license. This is true even for the free version, a claim that ChatGPT’s free edition can’t match, as it collects user queries by default to satisfy its need for more data. However, users can opt out of data collection in ChatGPT’s free edition by following the instructions in the provided link.
Claude can assist market researchers in many of the same ways as ChatGPT, such as:
- Generating survey/interview questions: Claude can suggest improvements to question structure and answer options, focusing on clarity, specificity, balance, and brevity.
- Analyzing open-ended survey responses: This includes categorizing responses, identifying sentiment, extracting frequently used words/phrases, summarizing, and providing recommendations.
- Conducting secondary research: However, it’s essential to remember Claude’s cutoff date for new data, currently set to August 2023.
- Report writing: Claude can help with outlining, grammar checks, suggesting visualizations, etc.
In summary, here’s my review.
- Usability: Five Stars
- Power: 4 Stars (lacks a GPT builder like OpenAI’s, which is a significant advantage for market researchers)
- Flexibility: Five Stars
- Cost: Five Stars (comparable to other Pro or Teams-enabled solutions)
- AI Washing: None (it’s pure AI)