Ensuring Research Integrity Through Transparent Funding
AIMultiple adheres to strict policies that eliminate conflicts of interest, enabling the production of objective, vendor-independent analysis supported by clearly disclosed revenue sources.
Independence
AIMultiple provides guidance to technology buyers and strives to minimize conflicts of interest, recognizing that truly independent advice is only possible when the company itself remains independent.
Ethics
AIMultiple team follows the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics.
Commitment to Human Rights
Ethical commitments are incomplete without a commitment to human rights. We do not serve any organizations that contribute to growth of countries that do not respect human rights and dignity.
Commitment to Sustainability
AIMultiple is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 through minimizing travel-related emissions and optimizing the energy efficiency of its cloud infrastructure.
Research with Integrity
AIMultiple's ethical commitments for objective & data-driven research about new B2B tech products and services.
B2B tech involves unethical practices in every part of the industry:
- Industry analysts allocate their time among vendors in line with the fees paid by tech vendors without disclosing their customers or their commitment levels.
- Review platforms run review campaigns with their customers, boosting their number of reviews without disclosing who their customers are. Reviewers get paid to leave reviews.
As a result:
- Buyers with limited time form their shortlists based on the marketing budgets of products rather than their capabilities.
- While discerning B2B tech buyers are losing trust in online sources
AIMultiple is committed to providing ethical research and disclosing our ethical commitments. Our aim is to help B2B tech buyers better use data to identify better solutions for their businesses.
Independence
Independently Owned
AIMultiple is owned 100% by its employees and never accepted any outside investor funding including VC or PE funding.
Diverse Revenue Sources
We earn revenues from several channels and have a clear model for collaborating with vendors as outlined in how we fund our research.
Ethics
Scope of Work
AIMultiple team prepares every page on aimultiple.com and its subdomains:
- No company or individual other than AIMultiple employees or our technical advisors reviews our work before it is published. AIMultiple's technical advisors can not have any affiliation with B2B vendors.
Only in these cases can outsiders contribute to AIMultiple work:
- Leaving a comment at the end of a research article
- Getting quoted in an AIMultiple article. In such cases, we will highlight the name of the experts and leave their statement in italic.
Conflict of Interest Policy
- AIMultiple discloses all conflicts of interest.
Part of AIMultiple's revenues are sponsorship fees by B2B technology product or service providers whose products may be mentioned in AIMultiple articles. AIMultiple clearly highlights sponsors as outlined in how we fund AIMultiple.
- All industry analysts avoid conflicts of interest.
AIMultiple policies forbid industry analysts to
- have any commercial relationship with vendors. They are forbidden from accepting gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment from any
- technology product and service provider operating in the domains that they cover.
- other company that could be affiliated with technology product and service provider operating in the domains that they cover.
- own equity in technology product and service provider operating in the domains that they cover. Equity ownership in public companies through common index funds is allowed as long as market value of the technology product and service provider does not constitute more than 1% of the industry analysts' net worth.
These policies are applicable to all analysts regardless of their level of experience. The only exception is the travel fees for the principal analyst who is in charge of vendor communication. Principal analyst accepts travel fees to be covered by vendors to attend vendor events.
Industry analyst may contact vendors regarding their queries during their research. Other than this, AIMultiple industry analysts are forbidden from responding to vendor queries or requests. For corrections or other comments, vendors can reach out to principal analyst, Cem Dilmegani, who will review their request and may contact the individual analyst. This brings another layer of oversight and transparency to vendor communication.
Not all individual conflicts of interest can be avoided. For example, industry analysts may be hired while they own equity in private companies where secondary sale options may be limited. When one of these requirements can not be met, it is disclosed at the end of articles in transparency statement sections.
Plagiarism Policy
AIMultiple team creates original research. All forms of plagiarism are forbidden including but not limited to copying text, ideas, images, or data without appropriate acknowledgment, as well as paraphrasing without crediting the source.
Violations of this policy will result in removal of the plagiarized articles and disciplinary action against all the team members involved in the research. Please share any suspicions of plagiarism with the AIMultiple team.
Additional Transparency Requirements
- AIMultiple shares how products or services are sorted.
- AIMultiple's customers are listed at the top of the lists with links on their product names.
- The rest of the products are sorted according to a metric highlighted in the article. Typical metrics are the number of reviews of that product and the number of employees of its company.
The order in which products are sorted is important as some users may only check top products. On pages where AIMultiple did not measure the products’ performance with quantitative metrics, the sorting always follows this format:
On pages where AIMultiple measured products’ performance with quantitative metrics, all products are ranked according to their performance in the benchmark regardless of their status as a customer.
- AIMultiple shares the data that drive our insights.
- AIMultiple benchmarks
- Reliable sources according to Wikipedia's guidelines.
- AIMultiple teams' business and technology experience. When this is the case, articles mention the context to help readers understand the context
Sources are shared either within the body of the article with external links or at the end of the article in an external links section. We only rely on
For more on how AIMultiple works, please see Research methodology & How we fund our research.
Commitment to Human Rights
Country Selection
IDEA is a non-profit supported by numerous governments. Their Global State of Democracy (GSoD) Index on human rights was the most objective and data-driven index we identified on human rights. Countries below a score of 0.35 fail to provide their citizens with most basic forms of human rights. As of the latest report, there are 48 countries that have a score below 0.35.
Company Selection
We don't work with companies that are either
- headquartered in these countries
- earn 20% or more of their revenues from this set of countries
Compliance
In addition to these, we comply with sanctions and export control laws of the EU and the US.Commitment to Sustainability
As a company that shares insights on digital documents, our biggest impact on the environment is our carbon footprint which is made up of:
- Business trips
- Computing
We aim to be carbon neutral by 2030. Current initiatives that support this:
- Our computing infrastructure (excluding individual workstations) is consolidated in AWS. We have a minimal set of services in Google Cloud.
- We are a remote-first company: Our employees do not commute.
This is version 1.2 of AIMultiple's commitments.