Breaking new markets used for demand more conjecture than statistics. It seems like the regulations have changed over night now. Now enter Alex Pollock, someone who has personally experienced how artificial intelligence cuts through the murk, highlighting chances most never notice. AI is your headlamp if your rivals are still stumbling about in the dark.

visualize this: Though local trends change with the wind and consumer behavior isn’t exactly what you’re used to, you are a mid-sized corporation looking into Southeast Asia. Conventional market study and questionnaires Their speed is slow. The procession had already passed down the street by the time results show up. But, essentially every digital breadcrumb, artificial intelligence can search local news, social media, purchase data, and review excerpts. This “real-time context mining,” Pollock notes, lets you predict rather than merely react.

Practically, what does that look like? Think about firms adopting sentiment analysis driven by artificial intelligence before introducing a product into a foreign market. Rather than obsessing (or underthinking), they know what’s hot, what’s generating news, and—above all—what’s failing. As Alex Pollock loves to joke, “maybe that’s your cue to pivot if they’re not talking about it online.”

Then there is the predictive analytics gold mine. AI looks for trends across purchasing times, cultural events, even surprising weather changes rather than depending just on past sales data. Sales on a few product lines jumped by 20% when H&M tested an artificial intelligence technique for Middle Eastern style trend prediction. That kind of leap wakes the rivals. “It’s about more than speed,” says Pollock. It’s about realizing the invisible currents influencing demand.

Localization has also been thrown off. Brands used to just copy their best-selling advertisements and wish for the best. Locality powered by artificial intelligence goes farther. Pollock told how, in Japan, an AI-powered campaign replaced local microbloggers with famous influencers, shocking everyone—except the data. That sell-through rate of that product? far more than past initiatives.