Entropik uses AI to gauge brand preference

Artificial intelligence (AI), which can help predict users’ emotions, may re-define how consumer preference is learnt.
 
Bengaluru-based Entropik Technologies aims to help businesses make better decisions through effective customer behaviour analysis. It has built a platform called Chromo that can predict users’ emotions based on their touch or swiping gestures on a smartphone or a digital wearable device to track feelings about particular content or products. The start-up filed for a patent for “Chromo.io” last August.
 
“Survey methods lead to opinion rather than actionable feedback about the product experience. The user, when put under test conditions, tends to provide wrong inputs. We use a scientific way of tracking user emotion, taking subjectivity out of the equation,” said Ranjan Kumar, founder and chief executive officer, Entropik Technologies.

 

Chromo is Entropik’s second platform.  The first product, Affect Lab, is an AI-powered consumer behaviour research platform that uses brain-wave mapping to help brands track how users feel about their product experience. “It is an easy-to-wear headset that tracks cognitive behaviour like attention, appreciation and activation,” said Kumar.
 
Affect Lab is used for feedback on a brand’s products from a focused group of consumers. Entropik’s customers include ITC and US-based BoxCart. Chromo is used for proof-of-concept processes.
 
Entropik sells Affect Lab Web and mobile apps as a subscription priced at $50 per test minute and claims it has operationally broken even. Industry analysts said brands stood to gain by using such technologies. “AI is set to disrupt the existing market research, brand consulting, digital advertising and user experience research segments. Like any other disruption, it takes substantial education of clients to make them realise the potential,” pointed out Kumar.

 
Kumar said Entropik was making strides to tie up with market research firms, marketing and branding agencies, and user experience research and production houses in India and the Asia-Pacific.
 
The start-up raised $200,000 from Dileep Bhatt, president of downstream operations at JSW Steel, and Milind Chaudhary, director of Sea Global Services in November last year.