Unlocking AI LLMs for C-Suite Research: New Frontier for Executive Sentiment & Decision-Making & Research
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For some time now, enterprise researchers have struggled with diminishing access to executives.
Driven by increasing demands on c-suite time and organizational flattening, earlier global sources of leadership surveys have diminished and, in some cases, evaporated entirely. Plus, the complexity of decision-making today and growing call for actionable insights on demand, and one sees traditional methods of sentiment inquiry begin to fall apart.
Enter GenAI for research: A powerful new hybrid between primary and secondary research. It enables faster, more precise understanding of executive behaviors and priorities. A groundbreaking opportunity to understand decision-making in complex, dynamic environments.
By employing constructed personas to simulate executive roles across industries, geographies, and organizational levels, research by the Choiceflows team uncovers critical decision-making patterns inside large language models (LLMs) trained on diverse datasets and analytics from web searches. We are not building synthetic respondents. We are rapidly conducting secondary research with a near census of public executive opinion. These tools serve not as a substitute for human expertise but as a complement, enabling faster turnaround times and cost-effective insight generation.
The method is called ChoiceFlows AI Rapid Insights (CFAIRI, pronounced “safari”) and it reveals how generative AI can complement human expertise by generating actionable insights without direct executive access – and points to opportunities for tailored engagement strategies. While highlighting the strengths of AI in parsing public data and uncovering nuanced insights, CFAIRI creators acknowledge limitations with discovery of proprietary information and underscores the importance of expertise in prompt engineering and automation.
Our team at Choiceflows approaches this challenge by designing research protocols to explore variations across industries (i.e., financial services, food services, and industrial firms), executive roles (CEO, CFO, CHRO), geographies (United States, Europe, and Asia), and company sizes (large corporates, mid-sized firms, and small businesses). Our methodology uses described and defined personas – a practice that entails instructing the AI to "assume the role" of a given executive.
Use Cases
In 2024 we examined how executives prioritize engaging consulting firms for strategic initiatives. Hypothesis question:
“What are your top criteria for selecting professional service providers such as management consultants and specialist advisory firms such as accounting and legal support?”
Prompts were crafted to elicit differences in selection criteria and evaluation processes. The AI's responses revealed meaningful distinctions by geography, industry, and role, underscoring the value of tailored advice in formulating business development strategies. Choiceflows initial study affirmed that GenAI LLMs excel at parsing and summarizing publicly available information, offering differentiated insights across the studied variables.
For instance, the AI identified region-specific legal and regulatory considerations as a critical factor influencing executive decisions in Europe versus the United States. It is also incredibly fast compared to traditional methods of inquiry making it ideal for crisis response scenarios. It makes topline c-suite sentiment available overnight vs. days or weeks, and the exercise is more of a census from the LLM datasets than a sample.
In 2025 we asked about enterprise financial auditing and advisory services. Again, we found discernment between US perceptions of the four largest audit firms and rest-of-world (ROW) perceptions of these US-based companies and likelihood for shifts or outright placing accounts up for review or reassignment in the context of global realignment underway.
The ability to understand executive decision-making at a more granular level—without direct access to the executives themselves opens the door to more customized inquiries and campaigns with a better chance of success. Subtle concerns can be directly addressed in requests for qualifications, proposals and presentations. Use of GenAI and the underlying LLM data training sets along the lines examined here can empower firms to respond more nimbly to shifting dynamics within industries, regulatory environments and regions of the world.
This said, success with these tools depends on expertise. Effective use requires clear objectives, precise prompts, automated routines for quick results (robotic process automation or RPA), nuanced follow-ups, and a keen understanding of both the data's potential and its limitations. Generative and analytical AI is not a panacea; yet it is a powerful lever for those who know how to wield it.
Looking Ahead
The implications of this research extend well beyond professional advisory and consulting firm selection. Future studies, for instance, could explore new questions, specific industries, or localized geographic markets, deepening our understanding of decision-making in contexts ranging from crisis management to innovation adoption. As GenAI evolves so too will its role in shaping how we extract, apply, and act on knowledge.
At its best, AI methods and tools offer us not just efficiency but the ability to see patterns and possibilities that would otherwise remain hidden. It is a capability for curiosity. A way to ask better questions and discover data & information to advance decisions.
This article is an abstract from a larger paper prepared for the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP) and an ESOMAR award submission for research innovation.
About Choiceflows and Content Evolution:
Choiceflows is a Content Evolution federation company dedicated to advancing decisions. Choiceflows is a pioneer in experimental design, including Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE), Volumetric Choice Experiments (VCE), Best-Worst Scaling (BWS), Contingent Valuation Experiments (CVE), and the Choiceflows AI Rapid Insights (CFAIRI) methodology. https://choiceflows.com
Content Evolution is a federation of innovators and organizations dedicated to listening with voice-of-people qualitative and quantitative research, leading with organization design and frameworks, discerning and distilling intention with enduring brands and positioning, and driving attention with client/customer and value chains with experience and engagement strategies. https://contentevolution.net
Contact: Kevin A. Clark, Choiceflows | kevin.clark@choiceflows.com | +1 919-593-3745 (m/v+t)