One year in: Momentum, focus, and what's next

A year ago, I stepped into the CEO role at Zappi with a clear mandate: sharpen our focus, strengthen our execution, and accelerate our path to improving how we help our customers stay closer to the people they serve.

I'm proud to say we've made real progress. We've accelerated our growth while bringing in exceptional commercial leadership to scale effectively. We've deepened our commitment to innovation through our vision for AI-accelerated insights as the next evolution of how brands connect with consumers. And most importantly, we've focused relentlessly on helping our customers make faster, smarter decisions with confidence. 

But the wins that matter most aren't just internal wins.

This year, we added 21 enterprise accounts—representing over $60 billion in combined revenue across their businesses. And we now serve half of the leading Fortune 500 CPG brands—companies like PepsiCo, Mars, Colgate-Palmolive and Coca-Cola —across more than 250 divisions.  

Those numbers reflect something deeper: trust. Our customers are leaning into Zappi not just for individual studies, but as their partner for connected, continuous insights that fuel faster, smarter decisions. Every project they run makes the platform smarter for everyone—contributing to 1.2 billion consumer data points and over 100,000 informed decisions that help all our customers make better predictions about what will work with consumers. 

And one of the biggest shifts we've made this year is transforming how we listen to our customers. Today, our product management team is plugged directly into the voice of the customer, making roadmap decisions based on systematic feedback—not anecdotes from individual sales calls or senior executives. 

The ROI speaks for itself. Earlier this year, Forrester's Total Economic Impact study validated 243% ROI for Zappi customers—with payback in under six months. Connected insights, delivered continuously, create measurable business value.

One of the questions I get asked most is: How do you and Steve work together?

Very well, and very easily.  Steve, our founder and Chief Innovation Officer, gets to spend his time on what he's most passionate about: innovation. He brings decades of experience in market research and visionary thinking to make sure our products remain on the leading edge of the industry. Given the speed of change happening due to AI, we're lucky to have his focus and energy driving our innovation roadmap.

Meanwhile, I focus on scaling our business, profitably: go-to-market execution, operational rigor, and making sure we're building products that solve our customer needs.

This collaborative model has unlocked real momentum. We're not just keeping pace with the market; we're anticipating what's next and delivering updates fast enough to meet the demands of today's fast-moving brands.

We've shipped over 120 product releases this year, including 45 in Q3 alone. But it's not just about velocity—it's also about breakthroughs. Take our AI Marketing Agents: built on proprietary consumer insights data, they generate concepts 30x faster than traditional processes while cutting resource costs by 20x. They understand what actually drives performance because they're trained on real consumer response data—not generic language models that just sound good.

You can't scale a business without the right people. This year, we welcomed Mike D'Aloia as our Chief Revenue Officer, along with senior leaders Manjula Kandasamy and Ian Myszenski to strengthen our go-to-market operations. We've also grown our Business Development and Sales teams globally, investing in the talent we need to take our platform to market more effectively.

We’ve embraced the idea of Leadership at All Levels and are on the infinite journey to realizing it more fully.  Leadership is not really about title or reporting structure, although a lot of people default to that thinking. Instead, it is about how we all show up, own our outcomes, own our relationships with our colleagues, master the skills we need, and exercise control of our actions to achieve our shared goals.

Beyond commercial growth, we've stayed committed to building a company that reflects our values. We're the only B Corp-certified consumer insights SaaS platform—a distinction we proudly renewed this year. We also achieved Disability Confident Leader accreditation in the UK and expanded our education initiatives—running workshops at the Camden/Google AI Campus, hosting student internships, and supporting work experience programs.

Decision velocity has exploded. Brands are making 10x more decisions than they were just a few years ago—driven by media fragmentation, rapidly shifting consumer behavior, and the AI explosion. But insights velocity hasn't kept up. Traditional research is still too slow, too costly, and too disconnected. The gap between decisions and insights is widening, and it's holding companies back.

But winning brands are closing that gap. They're embedding insights into daily operations. Their insights teams are speaking the language of business outcomes. And they're using AI to accelerate human judgment, not replace it.

That's what we're focused on: enabling brands to move from fragmented approaches to connected insights powered by AI. Helping insights teams shift from reactive order-taking to strategic partners. Turning insights from a cost center into a competitive advantage—so brands can stay closer to the people they serve and win with consumers.

Here's the bigger picture: We're creating a future where trusted insight is instantly and continuously at the heart of every brand decision. Five years from now, the world's best brands will be making thousands of decisions per month—both large and small, both AI-driven and human-driven—all informed by real-time consumer insights. The question isn't whether that future arrives. It's who helps make it happen. We're building Zappi to be that partner.

To our employees: Keep practicing Leadership at All Levels. Keep executing with deliberateness and discipline. It is definitely working.

To our customers: Insights teams are in a unique position to help lead their companies into the AI future. Let Zappi be your partner on this journey, and let’s win with consumers.

A sincere thank you to Zappi, to Sumeru Partners, and to all our customers for an amazing first year.  The coming ones will be even better, I know it.

Aaron Kechley

CEO, Zappi