105 Kellogg Insight Unexpected Benefits In doing their research, Timoshenko and Hauser found that analyzing user-generated content has another, quite unexpected, advantage over traditional interviews and focus groups: the ability to “follow up” on an intriguing customer comment or need in order to dig deeper. In a traditional-interview setting, he explains, “you don’t have the chance to call back the same interviewee and talk about this experience. It’s a lost opportunity.” With user-generated content, on the other hand, you actually can explore further. With an interesting lead in mind, you might go back to the entire corpus of thousands of reviews to search for additional clues. “You don’t go to exactly the same customer review, but you could look for the keyword, or a particular phrase, or the particular experience,” Timoshenko says. Overall, he wants marketers to understand that machine learning can be a powerful tool—not just for replacing human intelligence, but for aug - menting it. “One of the big breakthroughs in this research was when we agreed on the idea that machine learning cannot solve all the challenges of this pro - cess,” says Timoshenko. “Most people, when they think about machine learning, they look for completely automated solutions. It appears that humans are just much better, naturally, in some tasks than machines. And they will stay better in the foreseeable future. And formulating cus- tomer needs is one of these tasks.” Based on research from Artem Timoshenko