Trust at Scale: How a 50-Year Market Research Leader Transformed Customer Experience with Alation's Chat Technology

When you’ve spent over five decades building a reputation as one of the world’s most trusted market research providers, innovation comes with extraordinarily high stakes. I’m Lamine Lahousania, Director of Generative AI at Euromonitor International, and I’ve had the privilege of leading our organisation's journey into the next frontier of data intelligence.

Euromonitor International is a London-based market research company founded in 1972, and leads the world in data analytics and research into markets, industries, economies, and consumers. In 2024, Business Management Review magazine named it a top-five market research company. With a team of more than a thousand research professionals, data scientists, and technology specialists conducting extensive on-the-ground research in more than 100 countries, we’ve built our success on delivering uncompromising data quality through our flagship platform, Passport.

Passport offers an unbiased view of industries, channels, products, companies, economies and consumers, serving as an award-winning market research knowledge hub for forward thinkers. As someone with over 10 years of experience delivering data-driven actionable insights to many of the world’s biggest consumer brands, I recognised that even industry leaders like us face evolving customer expectations. We saw an opportunity to transform how our 2,500+ global partners interact with our vast data repositories while maintaining the trust that defines our brand.

The challenge: Democratising complex data access

For decades, accessing insights from Passport required navigating through multiple pages, configuring complex filters and often starting over when requirements changed mid-query. This process created bottlenecks that slowed decision-making for customers who needed quick answers to strategic questions about global market trends.

Previously, if a client had a question that required complex data retrieval—for example, a question about global market trends for a specific product category—platform users would need to navigate through a series of pages to refine their search criteria and eventually land on the relevant statistics.

The traditional approach wasn’t only time-consuming but also limited the flexibility customers needed for their unique regional definitions and business requirements. As someone passionate about making technology work for people, I knew we had to find a better way.

The evaluation: Trust and governance as non-negotiables

When we began evaluating data intelligence solutions, we established two non-negotiable pillars: trust and accuracy, combined with governance and security. With a 50+ year reputation at stake and our background in delivering insights to the world's biggest consumer brands, we knew our evaluation process had to be rigorous and thorough. We conducted a small-scale proof of concept and an internal hackathon to test different vendor technologies with our own data, ensuring any solution could meet our exacting standards.

Our focus was heavily on comprehensive metadata and data lineage capabilities—essential for giving users full confidence in understanding data origins and transformations. Equally critical was finding a solution that could accurately implement our complex permissions architecture and data taxonomy, ensuring authorised access at subscriber levels for our diverse global customer base.

The solution: Alation's metadata-driven approach

Alation stood out from the competition through its metadata-driven agents and comprehensive knowledge layer of curated data products. This approach directly addressed what we knew we needed: A trustworthy solution that could reason through each response while remaining grounded in established business definitions and context.

By leveraging that knowledge layer of curated data products and full metadata, its AI-powered agents can reason through each response, ensuring it is grounded in our established business definitions, rules and context, thereby improving accuracy by a significant margin compared to standalone solutions.

The partnership enabled us to integrate Alation Chat with Your Data directly into Passport, transforming the user experience from complex navigation to simple, natural language queries—exactly the kind of technological advancement we’ve been passionate about implementing.

The transformation: From barriers to conversations

The implementation of Alation's conversational AI technology has fundamentally changed how our customers interact with market research data. Users can now ask questions in plain English and receive immediate, trusted answers backed by full transparency—something I’ve been working toward throughout my career in data transformation.

With Alation Chat with Your Data integrated into Passport, that same user can simply ask a question in plain English. The Alation query agent, leveraging the rich metadata and business definitions we've established, can provide an immediate and trusted answer. Each response is fully transparent, providing the underlying SQL and data lineage so the user can clearly understand how the result was created.

Perhaps most significantly, the technology enables unprecedented flexibility in data aggregation. While Passport already included pre-calculated regional data points, many customers needed custom definitions that aligned with their internal organisational structures. Previously, this required extracting raw data and re-aggregating it externally—a time-intensive process that limited insights and frustrated both customers and our teams.

Now, Chat with Your Data allows for an enormous amount of custom aggregation, helping to make Passport more instantly relevant and insightful for our customers. This capability transforms Passport from a static data repository into a dynamic, conversational intelligence platform—the kind of innovation that gets me excited about the future of business intelligence.

The impact: Democratising data while maintaining trust

The results speak to the power of combining advanced AI capabilities with rigorous governance frameworks—something I've championed throughout this initiative. While we’re still in beta phase, we anticipate dramatic reductions in time-to-insight, enabling our teams to provide faster, more accurate service to customers worldwide.

The transparency built into every interaction—showing underlying SQL queries and data lineage—ensures that speed gains don’t come at the expense of the trust that customers have come to expect from our 50-year track record. This balance between innovation and reliability is what I believe sets our approach apart in the market.

Key lessons: Building trust through technology

My experience leading this transformation with Alation offers valuable insights for other organisations navigating digital transformation:

Trust is the foundation: Never compromise on accuracy, especially when your data is a product. I recommend looking for solutions that provide clear lineage, definitions and quality metrics, enabling users to understand how answers are generated and where data originates.

Focus on people and process: Technology alone isn’t sufficient; cultural change management is essential. We invested in data champions across business units, established clear governance roles and provided ongoing training to ensure successful adoption. Our collaborative approach has been crucial in inspiring and influencing stakeholders throughout this journey.

Governance from day one: Rather than letting data outpace governance, we implemented a solution that enforced existing security policies from the start, ensuring data protection while reducing risk. This proactive stance has been fundamental to maintaining our reputation for quality.

Strategic partnerships are key: Our collaboration with Alation proved crucial, especially for legacy data structures that don't work with out-of-the-box configurations. It was incredibly helpful to work with a partner who guided us through our own data and made recommendations on how best AI agents could work with it.

The future: Scaling trust and intelligence

Our journey with Alation demonstrates that advanced AI capabilities and rigorous governance aren’t mutually exclusive—they're complementary forces that, when properly aligned, can transform customer experiences while maintaining the trust that decades of success depend upon.

By choosing a partner that prioritised transparency, metadata-driven intelligence and flexible governance, we've positioned Euromonitor to continue leading the market research industry into its next chapter of innovation. The result is a platform where customers can truly converse with data, accessing insights that were previously hidden while maintaining complete confidence in the results.

For organisations looking to democratise data access without compromising on trust, our partnership with Alation provides a compelling blueprint for success in the age of conversational AI. We’re already the first destination for organisations seeking growth. Passport’s impressive features, combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence with human intelligence, ensure we’ll continue leading this transformation.