Innovation at the edge: A year of building what's next

A year ago, when Aaron stepped into the CEO role, we made a deliberate choice about how Zappi would evolve. Rather than the typical founder story—where the founder steps back and the new CEO takes over—we built something different: a dual engine of leadership where I could spend all my time on what I love most: innovation.

And the truth is, it's worked exactly as we hoped.

I don't spend time in internal meetings or on operational management anymore. Instead, I get to think deeply about where the market is moving, have long conversations with customers about the future, and experiment with what's possible. My job is about creating the innovations that will define insights work two years from now, not two months from now.

This past year has been about placing big bets on the future. Some will work. Some won't. But the ones that do will reshape the category.

If you ask me what I'm most proud of from this year, it's not the products we've shipped—it's the innovations we've developed to the point where I know they're going to change everything.

Concept Creation Agents are the clearest example. We built the industry's first agentic system for ideation and concept creation—not just another ChatGPT wrapper, but a purpose-built system trained on years of consumer insights data. It generates concepts 30x faster than traditional processes and cuts resource costs by 20x. But more importantly, it understands what actually drives concept performance because it's built on real consumer response data, not generic language models.

Is it perfect yet? No. Do people know exactly how to use it? Not yet. Have we implemented it perfectly? Absolutely not. But it's ready—and by the end of next year, we'll have figured out the support, services, and best practices that make it indispensable. That's how innovation works: you experiment, you learn, and you iterate until it clicks.

The same is true for our broader synthetic and AI work. We're building capabilities that will allow brands to make 10,000 decisions a month instead of 100. That's not hyperbole—it's the shift we need to enable. As AI accelerates the pace of content creation, media fragmentation, and market change, brands are generating 10x more ideas. Insights needs to keep up. Our job is to make sure that every one of those 10,000 decisions has the insight it needs to be made smartly.

That's why we launched our Connected Insights framework with AI-Accelerated Insights as Level 4. AI isn't just a feature—it's an accelerant for everything. And if we can stay at the cutting edge of how it's disrupting insights, we can help our clients maximize the value of their existing and future data assets in ways that weren't possible before.

People often ask me about my innovation philosophy. It comes down to three things:

First, listen. Listen to clients and what they're struggling with. Listen to where technology is going. Those two streams of insight—market need and technological possibility—are where breakthrough ideas live.

Second, experiment. Genuinely play. Try things that might not work. The goal isn't to get it right the first time—it's to find out what seems to work and what doesn't as quickly as possible.

Third, hand it over. Once we've experimented, built the alpha and beta, and proven the concept, it's no longer my job. I hand it over to our Product team to make it launchable, and they hand it to the go-to-market team to make it profitable. By the time something ships, I've moved on to the next thing two years out.

That's the beauty of the dual engine model. Aaron handles execution and scale. I focus on what's two years out. We share the same vision for where Zappi is going, which makes it easy—we trust each other to stay in our lanes and do what we do best. 

So what am I focused on now? Everything AI-related that enables those 10,000 decisions.

We're working on integrating insights into client workflows so it's not a separate step—it's embedded in how they work. We're building new capabilities that extract more value from the data we already collect. We're exploring how to help brands change and adapt in a world where AI is disrupting everything.

The velocity we've maintained this year—120+ product releases, including 45 in Q3 alone—reflects the pace of change in the market. We're not just keeping up; we're anticipating what's next. But the real work isn't in the releases themselves. It's in the experimentation happening now that will become the releases of 2026 and 2027.

The bets for the next year are similar: synthetic insights, workflow integration, and helping clients navigate the AI transformation.

Can we enable those 10,000 decisions? Can we integrate into client workflows seamlessly? Can we help insights teams lead their companies into the AI future rather than being disrupted by it?

AI is accelerating everything. We're at the cutting edge of how it's disrupting insights, and we want to empower the next generation of insights professionals to thrive in that world. If we can stay ahead and help our clients maximize the value of their data assets, that's a very exciting place to be.

I'm more interested in what's happening in two years than two months. But the work we're doing now—the experiments, the prototypes, the bold bets—is what will define whether insights becomes a strategic advantage or gets left behind.

One year in, we're just getting started.

Steve Phillips

Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Zappi