The Economics Behind Objective Analysis
Discover how AIMultiple balances vendor relationships and research integrity through transparency and ethical practices.
How We Fund Our Research
AIMultiple's approach to funding its research to ensure its objectivity. Every industry analyst including AIMultiple faces a trade-off:
- Vendors pay analysts with the idea that it will lead to more coverage and a more positive review of their brand
- Buyers want objective information but do not want to pay enough to cover research costs
As a result, either analysts need to be content with lower revenues or risk their reputation. Without a system and without transparency, analysts are likely to optimize their own revenues even though it may harm them in the long run. Therefore, we are transparent about how we generate revenues to fund our research.
Revenues from Non-Vendors
Parties that do not aim to sell to AIMultiple's audience are not interested in influencing our audience. Therefore, they provide a way to avoid the conflict of interest outlined above.
Part of AIMultiple's revenues come from:
- Serving as consultants to technology end users
- Providing market data and insights to investors or management consultants
- Completing commercial due diligence projects for investors
Learn more about AIMultiple's services
Engagement Model with Sponsors
Vendors either purchase consulting projects or pay for increased visibility. In the latter case, their brands receive links on AIMultiple's work. B2B vendors that are customers of AIMultiple are called AIMultiple's sponsors.
Advertising Disclosure
You can always identify AIMultiple's customers.
B2B technology vendors that are customers of AIMultiple are referred to as sponsors. If an AIMultiple sponsor or the sponsor's product or service is mentioned on any work of AIMultiple, AIMultiple will notify the readers about this:
- Reports sponsored by customers will clearly include the sponsor's logo on the title page.
- On web pages in the https://research.aimultiple.com/ domain:
- In tables: Sponsors' solutions will be linked from the table and presented at the top of the table.
- If the sponsor is not mentioned in a table, the text mentioning the sponsor's link will be preceded by a "Sponsored" statement.
- When you view these pages on a desktop, you can always see the full list of sponsors above the table of contents. For example, if this statement: "This research is not funded by any sponsors." is included, that means that the article has no sponsors.
- On web pages in the https://aimultiple.com/ domain:
- On vendor lists like https://aimultiple.com/rpa-software, visit website button is shown next to all sponsors and sponsors are shown at the top of lists. The default sorting is by sponsorship level, you can select other sorting options (e.g. AIMultiple score, market presence score) as well.
AIMultiple follows FTC guidelines on disclosures where appliable.
Sponsor Relations
In all its work for sponsors, AIMultiple gets paid for either
- Its insights
- To place clearly highlighted vendor links in articles
Vendors' input to AIMultiple is limited to:
- Providing information about their product. This is not unique to sponsors, AIMultiple analysts may pose questions to vendors to better understand their products.
- Choosing articles where their brand will be featured
As a result of this input, vendors' impact on AIMultiple articles is limited to:
- Getting their products listed at the top of other vendors. This is disclosed clearly to readers.
- Having links on their product names that lead to their websites
Other than the two points above, vendors have no influence over AIMultiple articles. Vendors can not make any contributions to any AIMultiple research.