Stravito introduces its MCP Server to seamlessly integrate company research into AI tools. This innovation enhances decision-making through reliable consumer insights.

F&B innovation is advancing beyond AI’s role in identifying consumer trends and supporting R&D workflows, as companies are now unlocking the data they already own to make faster commercial decisions. At Givaudan, the flavor house is leveraging Stravito’s AI platform to transform existing consumer research and market intelligence into a more accessible knowledge source — allowing teams to move faster from consumer insights to flavor innovation.

Every year, the world's largest consumer brands spend millions trying to better understand their customers. They commission surveys, organize focus groups, test packaging designs, and evaluate advertising campaigns. The resulting reports frequently shape major commercial decisions, then disappear into shared drives, forgotten PowerPoint presentations, and research repositories. A few years later, another team asks many of the same questions all over again. Stravito believes the problem isn't a lack of consumer insights. It's that companies can't find them. "There is a lot of information that companies already have but don't know they have," said the Franco-Swedish CEO and co-founder, Thor Olof Philogène. "AI is only as good as the data it uses." Founded in 2018 by four entrepreneurs with backgrounds in market research and technology, the SaaS startup has built a platform that helps large organizations search, organize, and interact with their existing market intelligence using generative AI. Today, the company operates as a hybrid-remote team with small offices in Europe and North America, serving more than 100 enterprise customers in both regions with around 120 employees. It made the Financial Times' FT1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. Turning forgotten research into business intelligence For decades, companies have accumulated enormous amounts of customer knowledge: qualitative interviews, consumer surveys, product testing, packaging evaluations and regional market studies. That research cost millions of euros. Yet much of it remains inaccessible to the people who could use it. Stravito's tech lets employees ask questions in natural language and retrieve answers grounded in their company's own research, without spending hours digging through folders or requesting reports from internal insights teams. The platform searches the organization's proprietary knowledge rather than the public internet, surfacing years of consumer insights in seconds. Its value proposition is as much about organizational memory as artificial intelligence. As language models become commoditized, Philogène believes the real competitive advantage is helping companies use the information they already own, which competitors can never access. "The valuable intelligence companies need is already inside the company," Philogène said. "Companies just need to be able to access it." Stravito's "Glass box AI": information with traceability ## **Beyond search: testing ideas before commissioning new research** Finding existing research is only the first step in Stravito's vision. The company's latest features let businesses create AI personas built from their own historical consumer research. Marketing teams can then pressure-test early-stage ideas, such as packaging concepts, product positioning, or advertising messages, before deciding whether additional research is required. The company cites Lavazza as one example: the Italian coffee brand evaluates packaging concepts using AI personas grounded in its existing consumer insights. The objective is not to replace real consumer groups, Philogène stresses, but to help companies get more out of the research they already have and identify earlier when genuinely new research is needed. If successful, the approach could change not whether companies conduct market research, but when they conduct it, and how effectively they build on previous work. ## **Building AI that businesses can trust** As generative AI becomes embedded in enterprise workflows, accuracy and explainability are becoming as important as speed. Philogène argues that businesses need AI systems that don't just produce answers but explain where those answers come from. General-purpose AI assistants commonly operate as "black boxes." Stravito says every one of its responses, by contrast, can be traced back to the underlying research and supporting evidence. The company calls this a "glass-box" approach: users can see the reasoning behind a recommendation, and the system says so when the available evidence is too thin to support one, rather than producing an overconfident conclusion. "If you run a global business, getting a fast answer is good but being able to actually trust an AI is key," Philogène said. "Every time you get an answer, we'll explain it. If we don't have the answer to something, we'll say so. That in itself is an insight. If we challenge our customers, they necessarily want a trail and a defensible answer." That transparency matters most for multinationals, where the marketing and product decisions riding on these recommendations carry real money. ## Measuring the impact Stravito argues that the biggest gains come less from the technology itself than from cutting the time employees spend hunting for information and redoing work that already exists. According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study commissioned by Stravito, a composite customer would see a 254% return on investment and €3.44 million in present-value benefits, with payback in under six months. In the same model, time spent responding to information requests fell by 75%, and time spent searching for information by 70%. Those figures rest on Forrester's modeling methodology rather than independently audited customer-wide results, but they still give a sense of the scale of inefficiency Stravito is targeting. ## **The next frontier for enterprise AI** For much of the past three years, the AI conversation has centered on increasingly powerful foundation models. But as these technologies mature, attention is shifting toward something more valuable: the proprietary knowledge that exists inside organizations and nowhere else. For Stravito, that, rather than bigger models, is where the next wave of enterprise AI will be won. The company has no immediate plans to raise again. Instead, it is focused on expanding within existing enterprise customers while building new AI features. Philogène believes AI could eventually become a permanent representative of the customer inside every strategic discussion. Business schools have long encouraged executives to leave an empty chair in meetings as a reminder to consider the customer's perspective. AI, he suggests, could make that symbolic exercise tangible by giving decision-makers instant access to decades of consumer knowledge. If companies begin consulting the insights they've already gathered before commissioning another study, the first question they ask may no longer be "What do our customers think?" — but "What do we already know?"

🧠 Global brands already possess years of customer intelligence. Stravito’s “glass-box” AI helps them find it and use it to test ideas before commissioning yet another costly research project. Check out Stravito's solution here. **Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand** * * * # Headlines 🗞️ **Mistral AI** has signed a multibillion-dollar deal to supply **Microsoft** with access to its expanding European computing infrastructure, powered by thousands of Nvidia’s latest chips. In return, Microsoft will push Mistral’s models deeper into products such as Foundry and Copilot Studio, while offering customers everything from public-cloud deployments to fully disconnected systems for sensitive workloads. The partnership gives Mistral a powerful new revenue stream just as it is reportedly exploring a €3 billion fundraising at a €20 billion valuation. It is also a striking twist in Europe’s sovereignty debate: the continent’s leading independent AI company is helping an American hyperscaler expand its own European capacity. | Les Echos, Microsoft 🗞️ **Nabla** has named American health-tech executive Brian Manning as CEO, freeing co-founder Alexandre Lebrun to spend more time leading Yann LeCun’s frontier AI startup, AMI Labs. Manning, who previously helped scale Bamboo Health, PatientPing and Zocdoc, takes over as Nabla pushes deeper into the US healthcare market, where its clinical assistant now supports 100,000 clinicians and 40 million patient encounters a year. Lebrun is not disappearing: he will remain Executive Chairman and Chief AI Officer, overseeing Nabla’s long-term technology and product strategy. The appointment looks like a clear division of labor. Manning is driving commercial expansion while Lebrun focuses on the frontier AI research that could shape Nabla’s next generation of products. | Nabla, Maddyness 🗞️ **Raise Summit** has been snapped up by British events group Hyve just days after its third edition brought more than 9,000 people to Paris. The deal also includes robotics newcomer Machina Summit and Signal Week, the rebranded Paris Blockchain Week, although the price was not disclosed. Their founders and teams will stay in place, while Hyve explores taking the events international and building what it calls an AI “super vertical.” In 2027, all three conferences will run during the same week at the Palais des Congrès, turning early July into an even bigger fixture on Paris’s tech calendar. | SiliconANGLE 🗞️ **The real cost of AI isn’t on Big Tech’s balance sheets.** According to Usine Digitale, an estimated $1.65 trillion in future commitments is fuelling the US' 5 major hyperscalers’ AI build-out through long-term contracts and financing vehicles. For Europe, it underlines the enormous capital gap still separating its ecosystem from US giants. | Usine Digitale 🗞️ French automotive supplier **Valeo** is moving into defense tech with a new electric motor for Harmattan AI’s drones, developed and manufactured in France. Production is due to begin in early 2027, with the motor designed to avoid heavy rare earths and reduce reliance on vulnerable foreign supply chains. For Valeo, the deal marks its first contract in the drone sector and a test of its strategy to repurpose automotive technology beyond cars. For Harmattan AI, it is another step toward controlling more of the hardware behind its autonomous defense systems. | Valeo**,** Reuters 🗞️ A heavyweight coalition of French and European companies has launched AION, a bid to build a sovereign AI “gigafactory” in France. The consortium brings together Ardian, Iliad, Orange, EDF, Scaleway, Capgemini, Bull and Artefact, alongside an ecosystem spanning chips, cloud, quantum computing, research and AI startups. France is pitching its low-carbon electricity, data-center expertise and deep talent pool as the ideal foundation for Europe’s next generation of computing infrastructure. The ambition is straightforward but enormous: give European companies access to world-class AI capacity without relying on infrastructure financed and controlled elsewhere. | Capgemini 🗞️ **France and Germany** are taking another step toward reducing Europe’s reliance on U.S. defense technology, pledging to explore a sovereign alternative to Palantir’s military software. France’s Arcadia platform was singled out as a possible foundation, alongside German solutions, as both countries deepen cooperation on AI, cloud infrastructure and battlefield data. The agreement also covers connected combat systems, autonomous vehicles, long-range missiles and military satellites. Notably absent, however, was any mention of the troubled FCAS fighter-jet program. | Politico 🗞️ **The European Parliament** is building its own approved AI platform after discovering that lawmakers and staff are already using public chatbots to help draft amendments, speeches and other legislative work. EPGenAI Hub will offer access to models from **OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Mistral** , with more sensitive tasks handled inside Parliament’s own systems. The goal is to curb data leaks, hallucinated legal references and the growing tide of unmistakably AI-written text, although MEPs still face no obligation to disclose when they use it. The irony is hard to miss: the institution writing Europe’s AI rules is embracing largely American models while still preaching digital sovereignty. | The Next Web 🗞️ **France’s competition watchdog** is warning that the AI agent boom could quickly become a three-company market, with **OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic** already controlling more than 84% of the sector. The regulator says building an agent is getting easier, but reaching scale is another matter, especially when incumbents control distribution, data and the costly computing infrastructure needed to run these systems. Its own experiment found that ChatGPT and Gemini often search very different corners of the web—and do not always tell users which sources shaped their answers. The big concern is that AI agents are becoming the new gateway to online commerce and information, giving a handful of platforms enormous power over what consumers see, buy and trust. | PPC Land 🗞️ **Airbus** is turning to French cloud provider **Scaleway** to host sensitive industrial and defense applications, giving a fresh boost to Europe’s push for digital sovereignty. The multi-year deal will support AI tools developed with Mistral and cover everything from aircraft design and engineering to military systems and corporate operations. Airbus plans to migrate around 70 critical applications by the end of 2028, with as many as 900 potentially moving over the next five to six years. The contract value was not disclosed, but the message is clear: for its most sensitive data and AI workloads, Airbus wants European technology under European control. | Reuters Become a paid subscriber * * * ### 🧠 How Stravito Uses AI to Turn Forgotten Consumer Research Into a Competitive Advantage Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and co-founder of Stravito Every year, the world's largest consumer brands spend millions trying to better understand their customers. They commission surveys, organize focus groups, test packaging designs and evaluate advertising campaigns. The resulting reports often shape major commercial decisions, then disappear into shared drives, forgotten PowerPoint presentations and research repositories. A few years later, another team asks many of the same questions all over again. Stravito believes the problem isn't that companies lack consumer insights. It's that they can't find them. "There is a lot of information that companies already have but don't know they have," said the Franco-Swedish CEO and co-founder, Thor Olof Philogène. "AI is only as good as the data it uses." Founded in 2018 by four entrepreneurs with backgrounds in market research and technology, the SaaS startup has built a platform that helps large organizations search, organize, and interact with their existing market intelligence using generative AI. Today, the company operates as a hybrid-remote team with small offices in Europe and North America, serving more than 100 enterprise customers in both regions with around 120 employees. It made the Financial Times' FT1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. Check out the story here * * * _****Want to reach an audience of more than 30,000 readers each month?****_ _****The French Tech Journal is the leading English-language media platform covering France's dynamic tech ecosystem. With 31,000 + engaged readers across key global markets and consistently high engagement rates, our sponsorships provide unparalleled access to decision-makers in French tech.****_ Learn more about sponsorships * * * 👋🏻 If you’re enjoying The French Tech Journal, support the project by forwarding it to friends and sharing it on your social networks. You can also comment on this post. And if you have ideas for stories, tips, or just want to harass us, shoot us an email: chris@frenchtechjournal.com / helen@frenchtechjournal.com 👋🏻‌

Stravito, providers of the Insights Intelligence Platform, has upgraded its artificial intelligence asistant with Deep Research Agent for delivering answers. With new agentic capabilities, users ask strategic business questions and Stravito AI Assistant autonomously plans multi-step research, analyzes full reports in parallel, and iteratively quality checks its own work before presenting results. It works exclusively from trusted inputs, including primary and third-party research, ensuring every output is grounded in real business context and built on reliable, high-quality data rather than unverified information from across the web.

Centralize your market research, so your organization can access case studies, guides and whitepapers for insights and marketing teams.

Centralize your market research, so your organization can access case studies, guides and whitepapers for insights and marketing teams.

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