Research Commitments

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

AIMultiple strives to minimize its conflicts of interest and ensure that its only focus is the best interest of technology buyers.

AIMultiple provides guidance to buyers. It is not possible to provide independent advice as a company if the company is not independent.

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

AIMultiple team follows the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics. This is how we implement it at work:

Scope of work

AIMultiple team prepares every page on aimultiple.com and its subdomains:

• We do not accept any guest posts, sponsored posts other forms of contribution from companies other than AIMultiple.
• 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

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.

Industry analysts

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 constitue 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 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.

The order in which products are sorted is important as some users may only check top products. The sorting always follows this format:

• 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.

AIMultiple shares the data that drive our insights.

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

• 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

For more on how AIMultiple works, please see

• Research methodology
• How we fund our research

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.

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.

Version

This is version 1.2 of AIMultiple's commitments.