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 brand, that evaluates AI and software providers and publishes its findings, faces a trade-off. This trade-off is therefore common for industry analysts:
- Vendors are willing to pay for a more positive review of their brand in public media.
- Buyers want objective information
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 Vendors
Vendors either purchase consulting projects or request benchmarks. Only benchmark results are publicly shared and therefore, they present the most important conflict of interest. In our public work including vendors, we always disclose which vendors are our customers customers as outlined below.
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.
Vendor Relations
Vendors' input to AIMultiple is limited to providing information about their product. This is not unique to our customers, AIMultiple analysts may pose questions to vendors to better understand their products.
As a result of working with AIMultiple, vendors' impact on AIMultiple articles is limited to:
- Getting their products ranked at the top of our lists. This is disclosed clearly to readers.
- Having links on their product names that lead to their websites
Other than the two points above, vendors that are AIMultiple’s customers have no influence over AIMultiple articles. Customers can not make any contributions to any AIMultiple research.
Customers can suggest AIMultiple to run benchmarks in their domain however, this is not unique to our customers. Any vendor can make such a request.