Robot Work vs. Human Work, feat Ferris Jumah, Founder and CEO of Surge.ai

Nov 27, 2020

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Today we talk with Ferris Jumah, CEO of Surge.AI, about big data, AI technology in consumer insights, and the evolution of purchasing funnels.

DIY used to have a connotation of poor quality or poor craftsmanship but today, it’s more indicative of participation.
Online marketplaces are booming with consumers and creators having more meaningful connections with items that could otherwise be more easily purchased.
Partnering with Gladly, we’ve created a new report: The New DIY: Creators, Crafts and Commerce.
“There is a cycle of inspiration that leads to education online, that leads to participation, which ultimately shapes the purchases that a person makes, which leads them back to inspire others into that same virtuous cycle.” - Phillip Jackson

Feris started out in CPG and retail, then ending up working at LinkedIn and joining the startup world.
“I’ve always been super focused on growth and [asking] how do we use data to generate actionable insights to help a business grow and to help businesses grow faster?” - Ferris Jumah
Surge is a real-time market research platform that helps brands quickly identify and target new audiences on search and social platforms. Surge helps businesses understand what those new audiences want and what they’re engaging with—and then ideates, creates, and distributes content for those audiences.
Surge was birthed from Ferris’s frustration with how long and expensive the process was of researching new audiences and figuring out how to market to them.
“Having fresh information is the biggest competitive advantage a company can have… your future audience is always evolving and digital channels [are changing] really quickly.” - Ferris Jumah

Ferris says that in order to keep up with the ever changing data, businesses need AI—what he calls ‘robot work.’
“That’s robot work. [Surge] exists to create those robots for you so we can give you time back to do human work.” - Ferris Jumah
Surveys and panels are a useful tool for consumer and market research, but they don’t scale very well. Surveys and panels are reactive but there’s a lot of consumer behavior that is subconscious and free of biases that wouldn’t be found through classic consumer research.
The hypothesis for our report, The New DIY, was that the pandemic has accelerated the trend of DIY, which was an already existing consumer trend—and that trend is mapped in a cycle of inspiration, education, and participation. Surge helped to research the trends, provide real data, and tamp down on our own personal biases.

“We’re all familiar with the classic funnel… it’s just an analog to thinking about how people shop in the real world and trying to translate that to digital. And it’s not at all relevant anymore.” - Ferris Jumah
Ferris talks about reframing how we see the commerce funnel—not as a digital version of real world shopping, but as an amalgamation of the right audiences, the right searches, and the right content all at the right time.
“The new funnel is all about what’s happening on social, what people are searching for, and tying all of that together [to keep] track of it… You don't want to be reading about [the current trend] in an article because by then, you’re late to the party.” - Ferris Jumah
Ferris explains that search is now contextual because of its increasing number of channels. What used to be searched on Google might now be searched for on social, on marketplaces, or YouTube.

Everything begins with ‘human work,’ in ideation and knowing a general lay of the land. Surge helps take that original input and give instant feedback on whether it’s trending, if there’s a related idea or more interesting idea, and giving that data back to be fuel for more ‘human work.’
An example of this would be a recent DTC office product brand wanting to focus on whiteboard sales because of their current demand. Surge was able to quickly identify that the communities most engaged with whiteboards as a product, particularly on social, are the workout/athletic community and the homeschooling community.
Given this data, Surge is able to give even more niche data such as the growing popularity of search trends with whiteboards: ‘portability’ or ‘reflective’.