Track A — Functional AI

AI for Consumer Insights

Find out what customers actually want — and what they'll pay — before you build, price, or launch.

UC Santa Cruz ExtensionThree live online classes plus a final project. Each class blends concept teaching, live in-class exercises, and hands-on labs in Excel/Google Sheets and AI tools.
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Taught by faculty atAlba — The American College of GreeceUC Santa Cruz Extension20+ years teaching · thousands of students trained
What this class is

A hands-on research course that teaches non-technical professionals to measure what buyers value, find the right segments, and size the business opportunity. You work with the methods real research teams use — conjoint analysis, regression to a utility function, willingness-to-pay, segmentation, and a market-revenue simulation — run in Excel/Google Sheets with ChatGPT and Perplexity as a working partner. Every class builds toward a complete consumer insights report for a real product.

Who it's for — Product managers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and business analysts with no research or statistics background — anyone who needs to validate a product idea, set pricing, or understand what customers want.

In class you work on a synthetic company corpus — a fictional business modeled on real-world challenges, so you practice on realistic, messy data, not toy examples.

What you'll be able to do
  • Define and pressure-test a product idea using Amazon's 5Q framework and a buyer persona
  • Design a conjoint survey that asks the right question — rate a bundle's appeal 1–10, with price as a feature — and spot careless 'garbage' responses
  • Run a conjoint analysis: encode levels, regress, and read a utility function that ranks what buyers value most
  • Convert utility into willingness to pay using the utility-price-spread method
  • Segment customers by preference and demographics with AI-assisted clustering
  • Size a market: TAM/SAM/target, customer lifetime value, price elasticity, and break-even
  • Run a market-revenue simulation and present findings as decision-ready charts and infographics
You'll build your own AI agent

You leave with A complete consumer-research workflow from product definition to market sizing — AI assists the research, drafting, and visualization, and cross-checks the analysis (no agent build)..

Every Enorasi student leaves with their own AI agent — built to their own custom spec — and uses it in their daily work. Whatever your role, you decide what it knows, what it does, and how it works — then put it to work.

The path

How you build them, class by class

1Define the idea and learn the numbers

Product Ideas and Statistics

  • A structured framework for defining the customer, the problem, and the right solution
  • How to gauge product-market fit with a clear, defensible benchmark
  • Just-enough statistics to read your data with confidence — run live in Excel
  • Homework: product write-up, buyer persona, and an AI-powered competitor deep-dive
2Measure feature preferences and find buyer clusters

Conjoint Analysis and Customer Segmentation

  • How to scope a clean conjoint study and treat price as a feature buyers trade off
  • Turn survey responses into a utility function that quantifies feature preferences
  • Read the utility function: which features drive value and how to interpret the results
  • Segment respondents by demographics and preference with AI-assisted clustering
3Estimate the opportunity and present the findings

Market Sizing and Data Visualization

  • Characterize and size the market: TAM/SAM/target, CLV, break-even
  • Derive willingness to pay directly from your conjoint results
  • Build a market-revenue simulation that estimates share and revenue by product variant
  • Visualize results as decision-ready charts and infographics
Your capstone

Your hands-on capstone: a complete consumer insights report for a real product. Pick a product (reuse your 5Q homework), survey real respondents, build the conjoint analysis in the provided template, explain the winning combination, flag any bad data and why, make product/pricing recommendations, size the market (TAM/SAM, CLV, break-even), and present with strong visualizations and infographics. Submit both the Excel and a deck, and cross-check your analysis with an AI assistant. It is the work your certificate is based on, and a concrete research artifact you can show a hiring manager or leadership team.

Your certificate is based on what you build — not attendance.

Ready to build your AI agent?

A small, high-quality cohort for professionals — fully online, hands-on from minute one.

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