In a joint interview, Shintaro Matsumoto, President and CEO of Silicon Valley’s NEC X, and JD Rico, CEO of Qualitative Intelligence, reveal their transformative work in tech and marketing. Explore how NEC X’s Elev X! programs and QI’s advanced AI tools are reshaping startup growth and marketing strategies. Gain exclusive insights into their collaboration and discover how they’re driving innovation in today’s fast-evolving digital landscape.
Can you explain NEC X and its Elev X! Boost and Elev X! Ignite programs, including their target audiences, objectives and unique benefits?
Shintaro: Based in Silicon Valley, NEC X is an innovation accelerator and venture studio backed by NEC corporation’s 125 years of IT and networking expertise. Our Elev X! Ignite and Elev X! Boost programs transform visionary ideas into commercial successes through a unique blend of collaboration, funding, extensive R&D resources, engineering expertise and comprehensive support.
Elev X! Ignite is an approximately nine-month program designed for early-stage founders. It focuses on customer discovery and validation and offers NEC X’s extensive support resources in addition to up to $200K in funding. When the program concludes, our graduates successfully transform their visions into pre-seed to seed-ready startups. We seek candidates who are working on new business ideas, developing problem-solution hypotheses, or prototyping an MVP, but are not required to have generated revenue or launched a product.
Elev X! Boost is a highly customized program. It prepares and empowers seed-stage startups for rapid growth and a successful series A round. We offer a tailored blend of strategic partnerships, integrations and implementations within NEC X’s global tech ecosystem.
Can you provide a brief overview of Qualitative Intelligence’s Voice of Customer AI SaaS solution, including its latest features, target customers and benefits?
JD : Our Voice of Customer AI SaaS platform, VoxQI, enables real-time message testing and risk assessment, allowing brands to create personalized and engaging communications while anticipating the audience’s response.
The platform can analyze anonymous data from past and current campaigns, customer reviews, real-time social trends, compliance and brand voice to create digital clones of target customers. These digital clones are then used to test marketing concepts and optimize messaging, streamlining the process and significantly reducing the financial risks associated with marketing campaigns.
By using VoxQI, customers benefit from faster and more economical message testing, better predictive insights for risk mitigation, increased marketing efficiency, and enhanced brand engagement.
In collaboration with NEC X, we’ve unveiled advanced social sentiment analysis and brand risk management capabilities. Powered by NEC’s Semantic Model Technology, our solution rapidly analyzes multi-channel videos, images, and texts. This helps brands predict audience responses and minimize compliance and social risk.
With QI’s AI-powered platform, companies can test content and messages in real-time, analyze sentiment at scale, and accurately forecast risks faster and more cost-effectively than resource-intensive research methods like surveys and focus groups.
Describe NEC X’s ongoing collaboration with Qualitative Intelligence.
Shintaro: QI joined NEC X’s venture studio program, Elev X! Ignite in 2022. Since then, we’ve continued to support them with access to NEC X’s comprehensive startup ecosystem, including hands-on support, funding, mentorship, advanced technology integrations, skill-development workshops, and strategic collaborations.
Recently, we’ve integrated QI’s Voice of Customer AI SaaS solution with NEC’s Semantic Model Technology, a proprietary machine learning algorithm. This integration enhances the efficiency of QI’s large language model, enabling real-time training to identify critical information and trends in user-generated content for rapid and accurate social sentiment analysis.
Recently, even industry leaders have misjudged public sentiment and audience reactions to creative ads. How can brands better anticipate potential backlash, so they can still be bold and creative without risking their reputation?
JD: By leveraging advanced tools for risk assessment and sentiment analysis, leading brands can conduct rapid, in-depth content testing across diverse audience segments. This helps identify potentially problematic elements before an ad is released publicly. For example, testing a controversial ad like Apple’s recent iPad “Crush” campaign with various groups can reveal concerns about sensitive elements, such as depicting books and instruments being crushed, which may be particularly important in cultures where these items hold significant value.
In our fast-moving digital landscape, social responsibility is paramount, requiring brands to be highly attuned to the cultural and social implications of their content. Traditional research methods like surveys and focus groups are proving inadequate. However, with the right tools and strategies, brands can better predict and mitigate risks of social backlash.
For instance, tools that offer sophisticated AI-driven insights can transform vast amounts of data into actionable intelligence, enabling brands to understand deeply and predict how their messages will resonate with different audiences. Here are just a few ways new tools can help anticipate and prevent backlash:
How does NEC X support other innovative new B2B Software and SaaS solutions providers that can help marketers, advertisers and brands? What advice can you offer startups in this space?
Shintaro: NEC X has helped launch, grow and continues to support more than 100 startups. In this regard, B2B Software and SaaS solutions for marketing constitute one technological frontier where we thrive and have great synergy. One reason for this is that NEC is part of the rapidly evolving rise of new AI technologies, and marketing is one of the biggest use cases for AI.
NEC X benefits from NEC’s extensive resources, including 45,000 patents, an $8 billion research network, 7 global laboratories, and over 1,000 researchers. We provide innovators with hands-on support, resources, and expertise, as well as opportunities to validate solutions with real customers and NEC technologies.
Our support also includes access to our partner network, such as Alchemist Accelerator, ERA, SVG Ventures | THRIVE, and more, as well as hands-on coaching, leading tools for cloud and tech development, financial management, sales and marketing, and continued education.
For entrepreneurs, timing is critical, and market conditions can be restrictive. Quickly understanding customer needs is key to refining ideas and achieving profitability.
Delays can lead to missed opportunities, so I regularly encourage our startups by saying, “Let’s strive for rapid growth together.”
