People don't do what they say they'll do.
Steve Mugford watched one of the most data-driven companies on earth bet real money on stated intent. Flashpoint.AI began as the fix.
01 · The problem we saw
Conventional research data is flawed.
Steve ran strategy at Capital One. The studies steering real money were built on opt-in survey data: biased, fraudulent, blind. The newest AI research tools inherit the same flaw — calibrated on the same opt-in data, plus their models' own biases.
Steve Mugford
Co-founder and CEO, Flashpoint.AI
Chief Strategy Officer at Capital One · BCG · Harvard Business School
Bias and fraud
51%selection bias
25–30%fraud
25–30%say-do bias
Blind spots
99.9%of people never take surveys
Unreachable. High-net-worth, C-suite, B2B, episodic audiences.
Unserved. Developing markets, micro markets, fast-moving markets.
Figures overlap, not additive. Sources: CASE4Quality (2021); Rep Data research-on-research (2025); Westwood synthetic respondent study (2025); Pew Research Center (2023, 2026); White et al., HBR (2019); Sheeran & Webb meta-analysis; User Interviews (2026).
02 · What we believe
Real behavior beats stated preference.
So Steve's team at Capital One built a new class of research: Market Experiments. A live market test, designed around a business objective, reads real people making real choices in real market context — and returns insight you can bet on. It disrupted an industry.
Unique market and customer intelligence
Signal no panel can produce, read from the open market.
Actionable insight, reduced risk
Decisions made on what people do, with real stakes.
Disruptive product innovation
The engine behind category-defining launches.
But almost nobody could use them. Complex, expensive, slow — research this powerful shouldn't belong only to giants who can staff a team of behavioral scientists.
03 · How we're doing it
A patented way to run rigorous experiments at scale.
Flashpoint.AI patented the marriage of two technologies: AI is how we run the experiments, and MarTech is where.
AI — how we run the experiments
- Natural language: sophisticated experiment design and interpretation, accessible to non-data-scientists
- Generative AI: instant experiment design and stimulus creation
- Complex execution automation: orchestration and optimization across platforms
MarTech — where we run the experiments
- Precise targeting: behavioral, demographic, psychographic, geographic, device-level
- Rich contextual and interaction data with closed-loop results
- Global reach — cost-effective and fast
Give it a business objective. It designs the test matrix, builds every cell, runs the experiments across the live marketplace, and interprets the results — for anyone, anywhere, any time, on any topic.
04 · Why quant, qual, and this
Experiments don't replace quant and qual — they complete them.
The strongest answers come from triangulation — proven methods and new ones, aimed at one problem. So we rebuilt quant and qual to run at experiment speed.
So what are we doing?
- Automated, world-class quant and qual at 10x the speed — programming, fielding, and analysis without the busywork.
- ConnectedSynth that are actually usable — calibrated on your own research, so they know what they know and don't pretend to know what they don't.
- Breakthrough insight from Market Experiments that no one else on the planet can run.
Reach us at info@flashpoint.ai.