Hanover Research and Neudesic use Azure OpenAI Service to accelerate insight development by up to 10 times

Custom market research and analytics provider Hanover Research (Hanover) has thousands of reports and analyses developed across its 20-year history that it uses to generate information and insights for established organizations, emerging companies, and educational institutions. The company uses a variety of approaches and technology in its research and wanted to explore how AI could streamline its analysis and enhance the level of insight it could deliver.

To build a flexible solution that can meet its current and future needs, Hanover turned to Neudesic, a business innovation company with more than 20 years of partnership with Microsoft, to design and build a proof of concept, AI-powered research solution called the Hanover Intelligent Virtual Engine (HIVE). Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Hanover is reducing the delivery time for insights to clients; streamlining its research workflows; and developing enhanced capabilities to collect, identify, generate, and share insights with clients. 

Optimizing research by building a custom, generative-AI solution on Azure OpenAI Service

Hanover supports more than 1,400 clients by using a variety of research methodologies to deliver insights tailored to their unique circumstances that they can use to face new and emerging challenges and make decisions with confidence. This culture of customizing innovative insights shapes Hanover externally and internally. “We always innovate across our research methodologies and have taken the same approach in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology,” says Ray Malone, Senior Managing Director of Engineering at Hanover. 

As part of this culture of innovation, Hanover realized an opportunity to analyze its repository of data and reports in more detail and far faster using AI. The information in Hanover’s repository comes in a variety of forms, from Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations to PDF files, Excel files, and financial documents. After considering an internal build and off-the-shelf solutions, Hanover looked for a partner that could create a customizable, flexible system that would meet its internal needs and those of its clients. “The complexity of the challenges our clients must address has increased, and the decisions at stake are substantial,” says Amanda Lockhart, Vice President of Marketing at Hanover. “We need to empower our researchers to continue to meet these needs with the most effective, flexible, and extensive tools possible.”

In early 2023, Hanover engaged Neudesic, named the 2023 Microsoft US AI Partner of the Year, to enhance its knowledge management and search functionalities. “As the technology rapidly advanced and we considered different options, we saw that working with Neudesic was one of the most attractive possibilities we could delve into,” says Dr. Patrick Rooney, Product Manager at Hanover. Neudesic collaborates with businesses to quickly design and create cloud solutions for processing data. “We see ourselves as the Azure special forces when opportunities for our clients and Microsoft arise, enhancing productivity with a timely and trusted approach,” says Tim Murphy, Senior Enterprise Client Executive at Neudesic. “We provide the latest technology by creating a partnership with Microsoft and the client to deliver the best results in an agile manner, building trust, confidence, and rapport with proven expertise.”

With the introduction of Azure OpenAI Service, both companies quickly pivoted to use the new Microsoft offering. Neudesic partnered with the Microsoft Solution Assessments team to enhance Hanover’s insights through an Azure OpenAI Jumpstart Workshop, an ideation workshop for Azure OpenAI Service use cases that Neudesic offers on Azure Marketplace. During the workshop, Neudesic worked with Hanover teams to determine the best ways to implement Azure OpenAI Service in its workflows and create HIVE. “We quickly identified the potential of developing an advanced document management solution that integrates AI capabilities and allows us to build a ‘copilot’ for research internally,” says Malone. 

Accelerating the speed to identify key insights by up to 10 times using generative AI

With HIVE, Hanover analysts query information more efficiently across various sources and receive answers with citations on Azure OpenAI Service. They can sift through large amounts of data to provide in-depth analysis and guidance to clients more quickly. “Our top priority is unlocking the insights in the data and providing them to our clients in a way that’s perfectly tailored to their needs,” says Wes Givens, CEO of Hanover. “By investing in AI technology, we see tremendous value for clients and, ultimately, an enhanced customer experience.” With this proof of concept, Hanover is reducing the time to identify key insights. “The HIVE solution we built with Neudesic helps us to deliver deeper insights to clients more quickly,” says Lockhart. “Our goal is to make market research accessible to everyone, and to do this, we know we need to be able to tackle increasingly difficult research approaches more effectively using tools such as AI.”

Hanover anticipates that using AI investments will streamline portions of the research analysis process and create more opportunities to provide clients with insights that would otherwise be unavailable. “Our people are multitalented and bright,” says Rooney. “Equipping them with AI tools gives them more ways to delight customers with insights that are buried in the data. These tools can save our researchers measurable time, so they can focus more energy on complex research. And from our clients’ perspective, the insights now available are virtually limitless.” 

Even with these customizations, the proof of concept was simple to build. “Microsoft is making it easy and flexible with Azure OpenAI Service because Hanover doesn’t have to construct an entire platform with numerous offerings,” says Murphy. “With a robust integration strategy, companies can now take advantage of generative-AI offerings with security and governance in mind and motivate business stakeholders to use various platforms with one interface and have the assurance backed by the Microsoft responsible AI frameworks.” 

Meanwhile, Hanover can pass these benefits on to clients while maintaining strong data security. “We have the same confidence in the security of our connection to Azure OpenAI Service that we do in our own databases,” says Malone. 

Unlocking the transformative capabilities of AI

Using this investment in AI, Hanover is looking at more ways to incorporate this technology in its offerings. “With Azure OpenAI Service, the capabilities that have come to life are transformative,” says Malone. “It’s exciting to be in the engineering space and to be able to solve problems for businesses that you couldn’t solve before. Some of the things we’re solving now, people were dreaming of doing for years.”