AI Insights: How Early-Stage Startups Can Leverage AI in Market Research?

How well do you really know your market, your competitors, and your potential customers?

For early-stage startups, market research is essential, but it can also be time-consuming, fragmented, and difficult to structure. AI can significantly accelerate the process, from exploring customer segments and competitors to developing market-sizing approaches and identifying the assumptions behind a business idea. At the same time, AI changes the challenge of market research: when information becomes easier to generate, judging what is relevant, reliable, and useful for decision-making becomes increasingly important.

In this Born Global Meetup, Dr. Anja Hagedorn will show how founders can use AI not simply to obtain answers, but to structure market questions, build better analyses, challenge assumptions, and identify what still needs to be validated through real-world evidence.

During the workshop, we will explore how AI can help you:

• identify and compare potential customer segments
• research competitors, substitutes, and alternative solutions
• build bottom-up market-sizing approaches using data, proxies, and explicit assumptions
• structure a market-research process and identify critical knowledge gaps
• distinguish between AI-generated hypotheses, external evidence, and assumptions that still require validation
• translate research findings into concrete customer-discovery and validation activities

We will also look at the limitations of AI-supported market research, including source quality, unreliable or fabricated information, outdated data, and the risk of treating plausible AI output as fact.
The goal is not to replace customer discovery or primary market research, but to understand where AI can make market research faster, more systematic, and more useful for startup decision-making.

Who is this meetup for?
Early-stage founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, researchers and students developing a business idea, and startup teams preparing for customer discovery or market validation. No advanced AI or data-analysis experience is required.

About the Speaker
Dr. Anja Hagedorn works at the intersection of strategy, data, technology, entrepreneurship, and AI-enabled decision-making. She holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and combines academic research with practical experience across startups, corporate environments, research institutions, consulting, and entrepreneurship programmes. Her work focuses on translating complex information and data into structured decision processes. She has also completed an Applied AI and Data Science program at MIT Professional Education.

📅 Date: 28 October 2026
🕠 Time: 17:30
📍 Venue: Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Halle 7, SMILE Incubation Space.

Come alone or bring your friends with you.

The event is open to all (Germans too) and it's fee to attend.