Justkul and AI in 2026

From the very beginning, Justkul’s goal has been to provide the best data and insights possible. This year we are launching new AI and portal offerings to help our clients develop deeper understanding of their most important strategic issues and evaluative needs.

Why I started Justkul

Twelve years ago I founded Justkul under the belief that surveys done well are among the most powerful tools for understanding customers, companies and markets.

At the time, I had spent most of a decade designing well-regarded surveys for the top strategy consulting firms, leading private equity firms and CEOs of billion-dollar companies, but I always had felt that something was left on the table and we were not giving clients everything that we could. Sometimes it was because projects were rushed, but even when they were not rushed, it took so much time to manually review and code the data, or to constantly readjust PowerPoint charts as data was removed for quality issues or errors were found, that there just wasn’t time to develop a deep understanding of what was happening.

Furthermore, I felt that the general standard of surveys at the time was poor. The current orthodoxy was that designing a good survey only required someone to drop standardized, “unbiased” questions into a survey tool and obtain a large enough sample size. Surveys were seen as boring, mechanical tools that could only address a finite class of simple issues such as determining market size, brand awareness, or providing NPS scores. As a consequence, the design of a survey was often assigned to the lowest-level person on a consulting team.

Justkul 2013

Having experienced all this, I believed surveys could be done better, and founded a research company at the end of 2013 to make it happen. In the first few years of my company, we developed:

• Automated systems for coding, proofing and reviewing data so there was more time for my team to focus on those parts of the survey process that really benefited from human insight.
• We then built our own data science tools that enabled us to review the answers to vast numbers of questions simultaneously and find hidden trends and relations.
• We focused on developing surveys with engaging narrative and logical flows, so that participants were pushed to reveal deeper insights about why they made the decisions that they did, leading to a more enjoyable survey experience and better data.
• Finally, by bringing all of these systems together in a systematic way, we could use surveys to answer questions that were not normally thought answerable by online surveys.

By bringing all these tools together we provided novel strategic insights to companies, organizations, schools, and investors that went far beyond the status quo, and helped people see important issues in entirely new ways.

Justkul 2026

Now after 12 years, I still believe that no one does strategic surveys better than Justkul. However, with the advent of AI, some of the things that gave Justkul a competitive advantage have become mere table stakes.  We know in the age of AI we have to continually push our business model further. That’s why we’re happy to announce today that thanks to AI and new algorithms we have made a number of significant improvements to our research processes that will enable projects to be completed more efficiently and that will enable my team to develop even deeper insights.

First, while we continue to share dashboards, final reports and preliminary data in Excel as before, we have now directly tied our internal analysis tools to an online project portal where we can share the most-up-to-date version of our analyses and reports. This enables us to show how we are thinking about the market while we are writing our reports and while the surveys are still in the field. The portal works on laptops and mobile, and has interactive and downloadable visualizations. It also conveniently combines all the current deliverables of the project in one place, including current Excel files and downloadable PDF and docx drafts of the report. These instant reports are not as polished as our final reports, but they enable you to see what we are thinking about and how conclusions are evolving whenever you need to. This will allow us to more efficiently share data on longer-term longitudinal studies and projects with shorter timelines, and in general make our work more collaborative and insightful.

Second, we have enhanced our workflow with artificial intelligence that is focused primarily on research. Unlike generalist models, our AI is trained on over a decade of our best-in-class practices of survey design. Unlike our clients’ AI models, our AI is independent and not subject to the same internal biases and groupthink that can lead to surveys that merely confirm what a company already knows.

There are many specific ways AI has improved our work:

• AI accelerates our survey design process by pulling relevant questions from our database of questions that serve as a starting point for our surveys, enabling us to produce first drafts of a survey more quickly and explore all the possibilities.
• We use AI to review data quality and to help us better identify when bots and people are cheating or gaming our surveys. This means our human researchers need to spend less time finding inconsistencies and can spend more time determining which inconsistencies are truly significant.
• Our AI assists with our analysis, as we can ask it to take free runs through the data, code open-ended responses, or look for its own correlations and connections and help us to determine if there are better ways to think about the data.
• AI also helps review our conclusions for soundness and inconsistencies and thereby increase our confidence in our results.