Data Gurus Podcast | Insights on Business Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Market Research & Data Collection

On this episode, host Sima Vasa talks to Michael Ramlet, Co-Founder and CEO of Morning Consult. Michael shares how Morning Consult has scaled from a startup with a newsletter to a global leader in delivering real-time consumer insights used by central banks, hedge funds and Fortune 500 companies. He explains why owning the supply chain for data collection is critical to quality, how the industry must e...

Kelly Monahan, Co-Founder of Beyond the Desk, joins host Sima Vasa to challenge the assumption that AI is responsible for today’s workforce crisis. Kelly argues that shareholder-primacy doctrine, adopted wholesale since a 1970s Milton Friedman op-ed, created the fragile leadership culture now cracking under macroeconomic pressure — and that AI is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Kelly ...

Mike Nash, CGO of KS&R, joins Sima Vasa to make the case that thought leadership is now one of the last places where B2B companies can genuinely differentiate, and that the gap between volume and quality has never been wider. Mike argues that original insight, not AI-assisted content, is the only thing that changes how executives see a problem, and breaks down the three-pillar framework KS&R us...

Dr. Olivier Toubia, Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, joins Sima Vasa to discuss his landmark study building digital twins from over 2,000 real participants — and what the results reveal about the genuine limits of synthetic data in market research.

Olivier explains why digital twins skew hyper-rational, why a 0.2 correlation with real hum...

Dr. Poornima Luthra, Author, Educator and Keynote Speaker, joins Sima Vasa to make the evidence-based case that DEI backlash is rooted in fear, not fact, and that most organizations have never done the systemic work required to make inclusion stick. Poornima draws on two years of primary research — interviews, discourse analysis and emotion coding — to identify five core fears driving resis...

Thor Olof Philogène, Founder and CEO of Stravito, joins Sima Vasa to discuss knowledge discovery at scale and how AI-powered insights intelligence can turn fragmented enterprise research into a competitive asset.

Thor also covers Stravito’s AI + human expertise model, the launch of AI personas that simulate consumer perspectives from real segmentation data, and why i...

On this episode, host Sima Vasa talks to Jason Cohen, Founder and CEO of Simulacra Synthetic Data Studio, about the limits of traditional research, the evolution of synthetic data, and why causal modeling matters more than larger sample sizes. Drawing on his experience building and exiting Gastrograph AI, Jason explains how real-world data gaps undermine decision-making and how synthetic data can suppo...

On this episode, David Wellisch, Co-Founder and CEO of Collage Group, talks to Sima Vasa about cultural intelligence as a measurable driver of brand relevance, growth and purchase intent. David shares his path from AOL and private equity to founding Collage Group. He explains how understanding consumer values, linking insight to activation and leveraging proprietary data and AI helps brands drive meani...

Host Sima Vasa welcomes Carol Sue Haney, Head of Research and Data Science, Engineering at Qualtrics, to discuss the transformative role of AI and data science in the market research industry. 

Carol Sue explains Qualtrics’ early bet on generative AI and the development of proprietary LLMs, moving into agentic work and synthetic sampling, which she predicts will...