PP&A designed the study as a voice-of-customer survey aimed deliberately at non-customers and at buyers who had evaluated the client and chosen another platform. PP&A wrote the questionnaire, which covered the models and tools respondents used, their top selection criteria, their generative AI use cases and priorities, the importance of enterprise search, their experience of the client, the steps they took to evaluate competing offerings, their reasons for not selecting the client, their view of its security and compliance posture, their trial and support experience, and open-ended questions on what would make them reconsider and which features they wanted to see.

The survey ran online over one week in late September 2024 and returned 64 completed responses from directors, vice presidents and C-level executives at large US companies actively using generative AI, most of them sole or joint decision makers on the purchase. PP&A analyzed the results by respondent segment, comparing buyers who had evaluated and rejected the client with those who had never evaluated it, coded the open-ended answers into primary and secondary themes, and delivered the findings as a report on the state of enterprise generative AI, market perceptions of the client and a set of final takeaways.

The market context set the bar. Respondents overwhelmingly worked with the leading closed-model provider, and they ranked security and compliance, integration with existing enterprise systems and scalability as the features that decide platform selection. Content generation, automation and summarization were the most common use cases, and nine in ten respondents rated enterprise-level search and knowledge retrieval as critical or important.

Against that backdrop the client's problem was as much awareness as product. More than a quarter of respondents were unfamiliar with its generative AI offering, and a share of non-evaluators still thought of it as a conversational AI vendor only. Buyers who had evaluated it relied on product demos, trials and analyst reports, while word of mouth among peers carried more weight for others. The reasons for not selecting the client were complexity of implementation, price and a poor trial experience, followed by missing integrations. Respondents rated its security adequate, which fell short of the high bar they had set. Asked what would bring them back, buyers pointed first to pricing and cost, then to scalability, richer features, stronger enterprise support and industry-specific use cases. Asked what they wanted built, they named customization and model flexibility, explainability and monitoring, integrations, and auditable security and data privacy.

PP&A's takeaways gave the client an ordered agenda: build word of mouth and customer evangelism first, because promoters justify the value proposition and soften cost concerns, then address pricing and security as the secondary flaws, and improve the trial and evaluation experience so that the platform's breadth reads as capability rather than complexity.

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