AMS Wins Esomar Regional Award for Breakthrough Research Methodology

Applied Marketing Science, Inc. (AMS), a leading market research and consulting firm, has been named the 2025 Regional North America winner of the Esomar Award for Breakthrough Research Methodology. The honor, announced at the Esomar Congress in Prague, recognizes AMS’s groundbreaking development of a supervised, fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to transform Voice of the Customer (VOC) research. 

The winning submission, Supervised, Finetuned LLM for Voice of the Customer Research, reflected AMS’s partnership with researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and MIT Sloan School of Management. Together, they engineered a cutting-edge AI-powered LLM that is uniquely optimized for VOC and reimagines how organizations identify and analyze customer needs, providing scalable, accurate, and business-ready insights. 

“This award is such an honor and a reflection of our team’s passion for advancing the practice of market research,” said Kristyn Corrigan, principal at AMS and leader of the firm’s Insights practice. “By combining decades of VOC expertise with breakthrough AI, we’ve developed a model that helps businesses uncover hidden customer needs with a level of speed and clarity that simply wasn’t possible before.” 

Unlike off-the-shelf AI tools that often miss nuance or produce generic insights, AMS’s supervised, finetuned LLM is purpose-built to deliver precise and actionable customer needs statements from any type of text data. By combining the scale and speed of AI with the judgment of experienced researchers and leading academics, it overcomes human limitations in data processing and bias. The tool transforms the overwhelming volume of customer feedback into clear insight, surfacing real-time needs and sentiment, including the subtle and hidden, that businesses can act on quickly and decisively. 

The Esomar Awards recognize excellence and innovation in global market research. AMS’s recognition in the Breakthrough Research Methodology category underscores its leadership in advancing research practices and delivering solutions that help clients uncover deeper customer insights, adapt with confidence, and achieve stronger business results. 

Details on AMS’s award-winning methodology are available via an on-demand webinar. Businesses can also contact AMS’s AI experts to learn how the supervised, finetuned LLM supports VOC success.