AI Just Beat Experts at Understanding Customer Needs

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO

A fine-tuned LLM just identified 100% of customer needs from product reviews and interviews. Professional analysts, using the same data, caught 87.5%.

If you know anything about Voice-of-Customer studies, you know this shouldn’t be possible.

Understanding customer needs isn’t about parsing text—it’s about recognizing unstated desires. When someone complains their wood stain “goes on pink,” they’re not asking for a different color. They’re revealing a need to see which surfaces they’ve already covered. Analysts train for years to make these leaps.

And base AI models, indeed, failed spectacularly—identifying real customer needs only 40% of the time, worse than humans. The breakthrough came from supervised fine-tuning with about 1,000 professionally-extracted customer needs from past Voice of Customer studies.

Turns out, with the right training data, AI does it better.

MIT researchers partnered with Applied Marketing Science, a firm with 30 years of VOC experience. They trained the model on r…