HOw ASI Works

Asymmetric Strategic Intelligence (ASI) is synthetic research and strategic consulting built specifically for professional services, grounded in 30 years of direct response copywriting and decades of experience in your markets.

What rigorous synthetic research requires

ASI works because it combines three types of expertise.

1. Professional services buying expertise

Not all CFOs think alike when evaluating cybersecurity consultants. Not all general counsel want the same things from a litigator.

Some of course clients prioritise vendor track record. Others prioritise cost or integration with existing systems. Some are risk-averse. Others are early adopters.

Building useful synthetic research requires knowing:

• What dimensions are relevant to the decision
• How those dimensions interact (a risk-averse CFO in a regulated sector behaves differently from a risk-averse CFO in tech)
• Where individual variation matters and where it doesn't

You can't prompt your way to this in a chatbot. It requires deep expertise in professional services buying behaviour. And then there are the thousands of lines of computer code and API access to the right LLM model for the work.

2. LLM limitation knowledge

Large language models are good at some things and terrible at others. They won't warn you when you're asking questions they shouldn't answer.

Where LLMs are reliable:

• Replicating language patterns (how buyers talk about problems)
• Identifying decision criteria from existing data
• Generating plausible reasoning chains

Where LLMs fail:

• Knowing how your firm is perceived (unless you're Deloitte, your reputation isn't in the training data)
• Admitting when they can't give useful answers
• Understanding context-specific reputation dynamics

If you don't know these limitations, you'll get answers that sound authoritative but are disconnected from reality.

3. Persuasion expertise

ASI is built on our 30 years of direct response copywriting and decades in professional services.

Our clients come to us because they want to convince someone of something—a client to instruct them, a procurement team to shortlist them, a client to choose them over a competitor.

An LLM will tell you CFOs evaluating cybersecurity consultants care about "track record, sector expertise, cost, implementation timeline." That's likely true, but it's not actionable. Every cybersecurity consultant claims those things.

What you need to know:

• Which criteria are hygiene factors (you need them to be considered, but they don't differentiate)
• Which criteria are differentiators (they swing decisions between shortlisted firms)
• How buyers weight competing claims when they can't verify everything
• What language patterns signal credibility versus triggering scepticism

That's decision intelligence combined with persuasion expertise. It turns your firm into the obvious choice.

How ASI works

Step 1: Map the decision architecture

We identify what dimensions matter in your category. Who's involved in buying decisions? What gets weighted heavily? What's ignored? How do procurement dynamics change the decision?

This isn't guesswork. We're mapping the actual structure of how decisions get made in your market, eliminating sampling bias and recruitment delays that plague traditional research.

Step 2: Build behavioural models

We create Client Proxies — individual behavioural models that represent variation in your buyer population. These are not averaged opinions of "typical" buyers. Client Proxes are individual models of your clients; together, they capture how hundreds of different types of buyers think, decide and behave.

These Client Proxies become your research panel. You can ask them questions, test positioning variants, explore messaging options. They give 100% effort, 100% of the time.

Because Client Proxies are synthetic, you can go back to them as many times as you need. No recruitment costs. No time delays. No survey fatigue. No annoyed clients.

Step 3: Translate decision intelligence to action

We don't slide over a deck with a thousand colourful pie charts and call the job done. We pair your decision intelligence data with the strategic consulting you need to turn it into positioning and marketing that attracts and retains clients.

ASI reveals positioning gaps clients didn't know existed. Strategic consulting builds the foundation that leverages what actually drives decisions.

What makes ASI different

We model decision-making, not opinions

Copilot and ChatGPT prompts generate smoothly plausible opinions. ASI models how buyers actually make decisions — what they weight heavily, what they ignore, how they evaluate competing claims, what evidence they trust.

That's the difference between prompting a chatbot "What do buyers care about?" (opinions) and mining an LLM for "What systematically drives their choices?" (decision intelligence).

We only answer questions where synthetic research gives actionable intelligence

We can't tell you how your specific firm is perceived (that requires asking actual clients). We can tell you what clients in your category use to make decisions — the actual decision heuristics, not the rationalised survey responses.

We can't tell you if clients perceive your firm as "innovative" (that requires asking them). We can tell you whether "innovation" is a differentiator or a hygiene factor in your category, and how buyers evaluate innovation claims.

Knowing what drives decisions is often more useful than knowing how you're perceived — because it tells you whether something is worth investing in as a positioning pillar.

We give you consulting, not just data

Decision intelligence is only valuable if it changes what you do. ASI includes the strategic consulting required to turn intelligence into positioning that creates competitive distance.

We connect findings to positioning pillars, messaging frameworks and strategic decisions that drive conversions. That's expertise in professional services buying behaviour backed by research and combined with 30 years of direct response copywriting.

Academic and enterprise validation

Synthetic research isn't experimental; it's proven at enterprise scale and validated by peer-reviewed research.

Stanford's research shows 85% accuracy. The Journal of Marketing published a 2025 study showing 95% alignment between synthetic insights and real consumer data.

Studies by Brand et al. (2023) (Microsoft and Harvard Business School), Li et al. (2024) (Stanford and Boston universities) and Dillon et al. (2023) (University of North Carolina) found the same alignment across diverse research applications — from conjoint analyses to brand perceptual mapping to moral judgement scenarios.

Qualtrics Research surveyed 700+ senior marketing executives in 2025. Of those executives, 92% say intelligence-based methods are MORE accurate than traditional approaches. That's practitioners reporting actual experience, not vendor claims.

Where ASI creates advantage

ASI is built for strategic questions where traditional research is too slow, too expensive, or can't access the right buyers:

Positioning questions: How should we position against larger competitors? What messaging resonates with risk-averse buyers? How do procurement teams actually evaluate our category?

Decision intelligence: What consistently drives client choices? Which criteria differentiate versus which are hygiene factors? What language patterns signal credibility?

Competitive blind spots: What decision drivers matter to clients but no firm addresses? Where are positioning opportunities competitors haven't seen?

Strategic scenarios: How would buyers respond to a new service line? A price increase? A repositioning? What objections would they raise?

Client Proxies for ongoing consultation

Once we've built your Client Proxies, they're available whenever you need them.

Developing a new campaign? Ask your Client Proxies what they think. Testing messaging variants? Get their reactions. Writing a pitch document? Check whether the language resonates.

It's like having your target clients on retainer — CEOs, CFOs and general counsel available for questions.

Results in practice

The pattern is consistent across professional services: decision intelligence reveals positioning gaps, strategic foundation fixes them, competitive distance follows.

See more examples in our client work.

Test whether ASI answers your strategic question

Book a 15-minute call with Steven Lewis to examine a specific strategic question you're facing — positioning, competitive perception, buyer behaviour, messaging — and determine whether ASI's rigorous methodology gives you decision intelligence you can actually use.

In that conversation, we'll map the decision architecture around your question, establish whether synthetic research is the right approach (we'll recommend traditional research if it's better suited), and show you exactly what the intelligence would reveal and how you'd operationalise it.

You'll leave knowing whether ASI Research fits your question or whether another methodology serves you better.