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
Frontier labs, enterprise AI and software vendors subscribe to AIMultiple's benchmarking services to have their solutions independently measured.
When we mention a subscriber of our services in our work, we always disclose that they are a subscriber, as outlined below.
Commercial relationship Disclosure
You can always identify companies with which AIMultiple has a commercial relationship.
If one of their products or services is mentioned on any work of AIMultiple, AIMultiple will notify the readers about this:
- In tables: Subscribers' solutions carry a link on the product name. Where a table shows product performance, that link is the only difference between a subscriber and a non-subscriber, because the order is set by the performance. In the absence of product performance data, subscribers are ranked at the top.
- When you view these pages on a desktop, you can always see the full list of subscribers below the table of contents. For example, if this statement: "This page does not mention any subscribers of AIMultiple's benchmarking services." is included, that means that the article features no companies with whom AIMultiple has a commercial relationship.
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.
Subscribing to AIMultiple's benchmarking services provides:
- Inclusion in benchmarks even if the product does not yet meet our market-presence threshold, disclosed in the benchmark
- A link on the product name so AIMultiple readers can find the product
- Granular, task-level results
- Benchmarks scheduled after their major releases
- Placement at the top of lists in the absence of product performance data
Subscribers can not withdraw from benchmarks or influence results in any way.
Other than the points above, subscribers have no influence over AIMultiple articles. Subscribers can not make any contributions to any AIMultiple research.
Any vendor can suggest a benchmark topic.