Short Bio

For 20 years, Abi led insights, cultural intelligence, and data strategy at Meta, Uber, Apple, and award-winning agencies serving Fortune 100 clients.

She has mentored 500+ startups across Google for Startups, Techstars, and All Tech Is Human. And she wrote the Amazon bestseller 'How Not to Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age.'

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Full Q&A

Q: What are most of us getting wrong about using AI tools for insight and intelligence?

Abi: We built the most powerful listening technology in human history and we're using it to talk.

The entire industry is oriented around generation: faster surveys, synthetic respondents, summaries of summaries. The machine gets louder. The signal gets thinner. Meanwhile, the largest authentic focus group ever assembled is running right now, for free. Billions of people tell the truth in forums, reviews, and support threads—the places where no one is performing for a researcher.

And we keep shouting into it instead of listening.

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‍Q: What is different about your approach?

Abi: I reversed the direction. Instead of using AI to generate answers, I use it to hear what people are already saying across platforms, in the places where they speak honestly because no one's watching.

The Billion Person Focus Group treats AI as an ear, not a mouth. It surfaces what traditional research can't reach: needs people feel but haven't named yet. Discovery first. Receipts before recommendations. I've watched teams abandon entire product roadmaps after two days of this not because their data was bad, but because they finally heard what their market had been telling them for years.

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Q: What fresh value does that bring in an 'AI everywhere' world?

Abi: When everyone has the same generation tools, everyone gets the same outputs. Ask five AI tools the same strategy question and you'll get five versions of the same answer and that's not competitive advantage - it's just a form of consensus.

Every company has AI now. What separates them is whether they use it to confirm what they already believe or to hear what they've been missing: the underserved late night posts, the unsolicited confessions, the places where people are honest because they think no one important is listening.

Genuine listening has become the last unfakeable edge. The question is whether your organisation is set up to do it or just set up to look like it is.

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Discover Abi’s How Not to Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age. purchase your copy here.