From Data Depth to Strategic Scale: How GWI Is Rewriting the Rules of Market Research
As marketers face rising pressure to act on insight, GWI’s AI-driven platform links decision-making, creative development, and campaign execution.
Reinventing Market Research for a New Era
Founded in 2009 by Tom Smith, GWI (formerly GlobalWebIndex) has evolved from a niche market research initiative into a multi-functional insights company. Today, GWI provides brands and agencies on-demand access to survey data from internet users in 50+ markets. Smith started GWI while working at Universal McCann, frustrated by the fragmented nature of global data. While brands were going global, the research industry remained stubbornly local.
"I had access to every tool the agency bought, and yet there was no consistent way to understand consumers across markets . That gap led me to develop a single-source global panel. Initially run as a simple research study, it has since scaled into a platform with over $100 million in recurring revenue.”
Tom Smith, Founder and CEO at GWI.
Tom Smith, Founder and CEO at GWI.
The pivotal shift came when GWI transitioned from selling research reports to offering always-on data access via a self-serve SaaS platform. Today, the company offers rich demographic, attitudinal, behavioural and media consumption data that marketers, planners, strategists and sales teams can access on demand.
Product Expansion: Spark, Canvas and the Power of the Platform
GWI has recently launched two new flagship features: GWI Spark and GWI Canvas. Both are designed to make insight discovery faster, more intuitive, and more widely accessible across organisations.
GWI Spark acts as an AI-powered discovery engine. Users pose natural language questions (e.g. "What motivates Gen Z shoppers in Spain?") and receive quick answers drawn from GWI’s expansive data set . Spark doesn’t just surface a single metric; it provides multiple routes into the data, enabling users to dig deeper without requiring technical skills.
GWI Canvas is a data storytelling and visualisation layer. It automates the creation of slides and charts from the data, saving time and allowing users to focus on interpretation and application. Canvas supports multi-market storytelling and is particularly popular with agencies preparing client presentations.
Both products feed into GWI’s broader strategy of democratizing insight. As Smith puts it: "The goal is not to replace experts but to empower everyone else."
Beyond the Research Department
GWI is expanding the definition of who can do research. Where insight once resided solely with research departments or strategic planners, GWI’s tools are now being deployed across sales, marketing, product, creative, and even executive leadership.
One key driver of this shift is integration. For instance, GWI’s partnership with Salesforce allows insights to be surfaced directly within Agentforce, Salesforce’s generative AI assistant. This means a sales executive preparing a pitch can instantly retrieve audience insights tailored to a specific company or vertical. The platform is designed to be intuitive and logical for people trying to access business critical content.
The self-serve model scales both vertically and horizontally. Freelancers and small business owners can begin with a free trial, moving up to affordable paid tiers with AI-powered support. At the enterprise level, clients access more comprehensive data layers and integrations, including APIs that pipe insights directly into marketing automation, CRM or analytics platforms.
This representsRed a fundamental shift. GWI is not just building tools for analysts; it is building infrastructure for everyone in the marketing, sales and media value chain to make evidence-based decisions quickly.
Human Insight Meets Artificial Intelligence
The last two years have seen a rapid infusion of AI capabilities across the GWI ecosystem. GWI’s features now incorporate generative AI to improve speed, relevance, and usability. Natural language queries, automated slide generation, and conversational interfaces are fast becoming the norm.
But Smith is clear: foundational models alone are not enough. "Large language models don’t understand consumers. They understand language. That distinction matters."
GWI’s approach is to ground AI outputs in robust, representative human data. The company collects responses from almost a million consumers , weighted by age, gender, income, and education, with strict quality controls across all 54 markets. Surveys are run monthly, ensuring data is timely and relevant.
This hybrid model combining structured data with AI delivery is designed to solve the biggest problem in modern marketing: the accessibility of meaningful, localised insight.
AI now powers nearly every interaction on the GWI platform. But this is not a simple case of embedding a chatbot. GWI’s core innovation lies in combining structured, representative data with generative interfaces. AI tools like GWI Spark allow users to ask questions conversationally and receive curated data stories in return.
“LLMs are built to process language, not to understand people. That’s our job. Our infrastructure allows GWI to deliver what AI alone cannot: accuracy, context, and localisation. Whether the end user is planning a campaign in São Paulo or selling a product in Seoul, GWI provides relevant, regionalised insight grounded in real human behaviour, not internet guesswork”.
Tom Smith.Tom Smith, Founder and CEO at GWI.
A Complement, Not a Competitor
Rather than positioning itself in head-to-head competition with legacy research giants, GWI has carved out a collaborative role within the insight ecosystem. It fills the agility and accessibility gap between deep-dive custom research and standard syndicated reports.
Clients often use GWI alongside other providers. Nielsen and Kantar might be used for media measurement and panel tracking, while GWI supplies agile attitudinal data and audience profiling. System1, focused on creative testing and emotional resonance, is another example of a complementary partner.
In many cases, GWI data even underpins the work of others. Agencies, tech firms, and consultancies embed GWI insights into their own platforms or presentations an acknowledgment of the brand’s growing status as a foundational layer for marketing intelligence.
What differentiates GWI is not just speed or breadth, but its focus on user experience and real-world application. With APIs, visualisation tools, and LLM integrations, it is as much a technology provider as it is a data company.
"Most clients buy multiple platforms for different needs," Smith notes. "Where we win is on speed, ease of use, and the breadth of use cases."
The Arms Race for AI
Holding companies, led by WPP, are investing heavily in proprietary AI platforms such as WPP Open and Open Intelligence. While speed to market is crucial, Smith advocates that LLMs need LHM (Large Human Models). .
"Agencies must respond; they have no choice. But the danger is they rely on black-box models with little understanding of audience context."
Tom Smith.Tom Smith, Founder and CEO at GWI.
He cites one example where an LLM-generated campaign for Saudi Arabian EV drivers produced dangerously inaccurate stereotypes. "Without representative, human data, these systems hallucinate. That’s not just ineffective - it’s risky."
GWI is working with several agency groups to integrate its data via API into internal tools. The aim is to anchor AI platforms in real-world context through human involvement.
Scaling the Future of Insight
Two funding rounds totalling £220 million have helped GWI expand its engineering, design, and data science teams. All technology is built in-house, primarily from a base in Athens, Greece. The company now maintains 10 specialised data sets across verticals and is investing in high-frequency, real-time data collection.
Smith’s ambition is clear. He wants GWI to become not just an insights platform but a foundational layer in the AI stack - the go-to infrastructure for companies that want reliable, human-grounded data.
"Insight should be ambient, accessible everywhere, embedded in every system. That’s where we’re heading."
Tom Smith.Tom Smith, Founder and CEO at GWI.
Whether for a sales team preparing a pitch, a marketer evaluating creative, or a strategist plotting expansion, GWI is betting that the future of marketing lies not in guesswork or gut feel but in fast, intelligent, and universal access to the truth about people.
Looking ahead, Smith sees GWI not just as an insight provider, but as the human truth layer to AI. . “If AI is the interface to everything, then consumer insight becomes the context for everything.”
The company’s long-term play is clear: build the rails that deliver understanding, not just data at speed and scale.
