People make ten to twenty thousand decisions a day, most of them unconscious. If you build products, a meaningful share of those decisions ripple back to your end customer. And yet the customer is almost never at the table. Sales meetings, ad-hoc research bursts, and gut feeling fill the gap. That is the waste BUFFL was built to remove.
Seppe Stroo, co-founder of BUFFL, hosted the Consortium at BUFFL HQ in Mechelen for an intimate workshop on consumer research in the AI era. The room was small enough to make the format hands-on: walk through the method, run a live AI study against BUFFL's 40,000-strong consumer community, then apply the same framework to assumptions the participants brought from their own products. The thesis was that as AI makes building cheaper, the scarce skill is asking the right question of the right person at the right moment.
What follows is the spine of the talk: the diagnosis, the method, the AI search study, and the product ideas it produced. The participant case studies stay in the room.
