Riley’s Radar
Ideas on revenue, context, and AI
Tips for revenue teams, stories about people, updates on what we’re building at Riley, and lessons learned along the way.
What I Learned About AI Adoption in Southeast Asia at Bali Tech Week
Last week, I spoke at Bali Tech Week and met with business leaders working on AI initiatives across Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Here are four things I learned from those conversations — about the data the region already has, the models people are choosing, the security questions businesses keep asking, and why infrastructure decides how useful AI really is.
Read article →Revenue Ops Has Too Many Tools. It's Not Your Fault.
If you’re in RevOps, you didn’t wake up one day and decide to build a complicated stack. You inherited it. You patched it. You added “just one more tool” to answer a question no one else could answer with confidence. And now you’re expected to make sense of it all, in real time, while deals are on the line.
2 min readBuild vs. Buy AI: The 2026 FAQ Every Business Leader Should Read
As AI reshapes how organizations understand customers, many teams are asking the same question: Should we build our own AI solution, or buy a mature platform?This FAQ breaks down the real tradeoffs - short, direct, and designed to help leaders make a confident decision.
3 min readTop Data & Analytics Conferences in 2026: The Definitive Month-by-Month Guide
2026 is a pivotal year for data, analytics, and AI leaders. With organizations accelerating their shift toward real-time intelligence, scalable platforms, and operational AI, the events shaping the industry this year are more important than ever.
6 min readTop Consumer Insights, Market Research & UX Research Conferences in 2026
2026 is shaping up to be a milestone year for consumer insights, market research, user research, and customer experience teams. With AI reshaping how organizations understand customers, the industry’s most influential events are bringing researchers, strategists, and insights leaders together to redefine what modern customer understanding looks like.
4 min readData Lake vs. Data Warehouse (2026): The Ultimate FAQ & Comparison Guide
Recently, I had a long conversation with a customer about data lakes vs. data warehouses. Choosing between a data lake and a data warehouse has become a foundational question for every organization entering the AI era. The architecture you choose determines how fast you can analyze data, how costly your pipelines become, and whether your models will be fueled by clean or unreliable inputs.
5 min read3 Tips for Better Revenue Planning in 2026
Learnings from deploying Riley across global enterprises & mid-market teams2025 was a defining year for us. We launched Riley’s enterprise offering in July, and within four months turned multiple enterprise pilots into multi-year contracts across CPG, fintech, real estate, and travel.As we’ve helped these teams improve their forecasting and planning motions, one pattern became clear: revenue planning rarely fails because of the model - it fails because of the inputs.
4 min readRevenue Leaders Are Entering the Era of Dynamic Customers
Every November, we all reset, think, and look ahead…for the new fiscal year. The Riley team spent a week in New York meeting CROs, CFOs, and COOs over pastries and strong coffee, and a few themes became unmistakable.The teams preparing best for 2026 are rethinking how they understand customers, redesigning the way experiences unfold, and modernizing how they forecast growth.Here are the shifts shaping that momentum.
3 min readA Day in The Life of an (AI-First) Researcher
2018 was the year I officially transitioned my job from data science into user research. Back then, I decided to write an article on Medium titled, A Day In The Life of a UX Researcher, because so few people knew what user experience research is.
3 min readCustomer Research Deserves Better AI
Today’s AI tools can summarize feedback, but is summarization enough to truly understand customers in a way that’s impactful for the business?
3 min readThe Customer Insights Trap: Are We All Building the Same Product?
I just returned from a retreat with company leaders, and one theme came up repeatedly: everyone wants to better understand their customers, believing it’s the only way to build winning strategies and stand out from competitors. Yet, nearly all of them shared the same frustration: despite thinking they understand their customers, they’re still seeing declining engagement, rising churn, lost deals, and growing dissatisfaction. So, what’s causing the gap?
6 min readThe Illusion of Understanding: What LLMs Can't Tell You About Your Users
Customers, friends, and even the occasional coffee shop stranger often ask why I built Riley, and how it’s different from just layering ChatGPT on top of feedback. The short answer: summarization isn’t understanding. Real customer intelligence requires structured modeling, signal weighting, and triangulation. Riley was born out of that need, a need that I personally experienced.
5 min readWhat if Your Next Big Product Idea Is Hiding in a Sales Call?
When product managers seek user insights, they typically rely on familiar methods like interviews, surveys, and usability tests. However, there is a wealth of customer insights from sales calls that often goes unnoticed and underutilized.
4 min readWhen Product Meets the Front Lines - Announcing Riley's Partnership with Gong
When I first started doing user research, I focused heavily on first-hand methods — things like user interviews, surveys, and usability tests. From these, I uncovered valuable insights that led to modest improvements in user engagement and retention.
5 min readSharing Product Insights: Get Teams on the Same Page With Riley
The Problem: Communication Silos in Product TeamsCross-team collaboration becomes a challenge when there's an overwhelming amount of data circulating, and it’s hard to pinpoint who has the right information at the right time. As a result, critical decisions stall because key stakeholders never receive the data they need when they need it.
4 min readUnderstand Customers Faster, Build Better
The companies that win are the ones that can build quickly. By using Riley to automate the aggregation, analysis, and distribution of customer data, we can build in weeks what typically takes other companies years!Because we ship incredibly fast, we’ve seen a 250% increase in signups and multiple companies, including Fortune 500s, trying out Riley.
2 min readFrom Chaos to Clarity: How Riley Instantly Synthesizes Customer Insights
Today, more than ever, companies must move quickly. In fast-moving teams, decisions can’t wait. Whether it's refining a feature, responding to user feedback, or adjusting a product marketing strategy, teams need insights—yesterday. That’s the challenge we kept hearing from our community of product leaders and UX researchers: teams needed a faster way to get to the 'why' behind user behavior and start taking action to address those pain points.
3 min readAchieving SOC 2 Compliance: How Riley Protects Your Data
Announcing Riley’s SOC 2 Type II CertificationUnderstanding your customers goes beyond just your data and includes their data as well. We deeply appreciate the trust you place in us with your valuable and confidential research data. Since the beginning of Riley, we’ve upheld the highest technical, security, and operational standards across our entire company. We take this responsibility seriously, ensuring that every customer, regardless of size, can rely on us to protect their data with the utmost care.Today, we’re excited to announce that Riley is SOC 2 Type II compliant.
3 min readHow To Ask Business-Centric User Research Questions - Part One
Are we asking the right questions to our users? Do our questions actually help us find insights to inform the business objectives we’re hoping to achieve? Are we leading users on with our questions? One problem that people often face when running user interviews is knowing the right questions to ask.
5 min readHow To Ask Business-Centric User Research Questions - Part Two
Think about the last time you shipped a feature and wondered why users aren’t coming back to use it as frequently as you expected. Perhaps you have also been part of a larger discussion on preventing customer churn? User retention remains one of the hardest, yet arguably most important, problems to solve. Companies with fantastic retention often benefit from strong market positioning through growth-accelerating mechanisms like network effects and flywheels.
5 min readMeet Riley: Your Personalized Product Insights Assistant
Meet Riley : Your personalized product insights assistant - helping you become better at analyzing and prioritizing your data using adaptive AI, so you can make impactful product decisions.I’m beyond excited to share that Riley (askriley.io) is officially launching to the public. This moment is a culmination of years of insights and learnings —turning what I and so many of you have long wished for into a reality. Today, we are also announcing the successful completion of our Seed Round, led by Vertex Ventures US, with participation from NextView Ventures, Hyphen Capital, and a number of seasoned founders, product, and research leaders.
3 min readUnearthing the Diamond: AI's Role in Product Insights and User Research
Since launching Riley, we’ve heard from countless researchers and product leaders about how AI is transforming their work.A senior user researcher told us, “I shared insights from Riley and finally convinced our exec team on a new product direction.” Another product manager shared, “Riley helped me uncover valuable insights quickly—now I want my whole org using it.”
4 min readThematic Product Insights For Making Better Strategies
I was chatting with a product manager who is working on a feature with the intent of improving user retention. To help formulate a direction, the product manager scoured user research notes, product analytics dashboards, and Zendesk tickets, only to end up with 25 possible directions for the feature without a clear way to discern which of the directions would likely yield better results.
6 min readTwo Ways To Make User Insights More Impactful Using Machine Learning
A lot of manual work goes into the collection, analysis, and dissemination of user insights. The most common pain point we hear from our community of researchers, product managers, and designers at Riley can be distilled into this one sentence:
2 min read