BBC News – Business
Our Take: Whether about polling or anything else, 90% accuracy sounds like a big number, but in practice it means getting a lot of things wrong. It’s really important when companies cite these kinds of figures to try to get access to real life examples of that margin of error.
Your Takeaway: Never take accuracy figures on face value – work out what they actually mean.
It’s cheaper and faster to collect people’s opinions using AI, but will it make polls more accurate?
Highlights
One checks he’s answering the question, one analyses whether he’s being too superficial and needs prompting to go deeper, while the third checks that the respondent is not a fraud… not a robot, for example.
Note: How long will it be before there are products to answer these kinds of calls for you?
The voice is young, female, brisk and business-like and belongs to an AI agent. A computer programme in other words. A string of code.
Note: It’s worth questioning why AI agents are so frequently expressed as being female…
The company claims its method is "10 times faster, 10 times cheaper and 90% as accurate as human polling".
It does not focus on quantitative polling, which is already largely automated through mass surveys. Instead, it emphasises depth. "We don’t ask people to tick boxes – they have a conversation with an AI," Fontaine explains. "That means we can explore not just what people think, but how they think – how they build their opinions, and even when those opinions change."