Radius Tech Debuts, Making the Case That ChatGPT Isn’t a Strategy Team

Somewhere between “AI will replace your entire go-to-market team” and “Here’s a $20 tool that does 80% of your job,” something profoundly unsexy happened this week: a market research firm launched a new practice.

No dramatic rebrand video. No keynote promising to “reinvent insights.” No founder pacing a dark stage saying the word platform seventeen times. Just a clean press release announcing that Radius Insights has officially introduced Radius Tech, a dedicated technology-focused research arm designed for tech companies that want to make better decisions, faster.

Under the radar? Completely. Important anyway? Surprisingly, yes.

And because this is SiliconSnark, we’re obligated to ask the real question immediately: is this genuinely useful in 2026, or is it just a very expensive way to replicate what half your team is already doing with ChatGPT Pro?

Let’s talk about it.

A Very Grown-Up Launch in a World Addicted to Hype

Radius Tech isn’t pretending to be a shiny new product. It’s positioning itself as a formalization of work Radius has already been doing for years, especially since acquiring Illuminas North America back in 2024.

The subtext of the launch is refreshingly blunt: tech has never fit neatly into traditional market research models, and pretending it does has been quietly breaking strategy teams for decades.

Enterprise buying cycles are long, political, and irrational. Buyers are skeptical by default. Features don’t equal value. Ecosystems matter more than positioning decks. And yet, plenty of research firms still treat SaaS like flavored yogurt, running surveys that look rigorous but explain very little about why deals stall or products fail to land.

Radius Tech exists because someone finally said, “What if we stopped doing that?”

“Better Decisions, Faster” Is Boring—Until You Need It

CEO Rob Wengel frames the entire launch around decision-making speed and quality rather than raw data volume. That’s a subtle but important distinction in an era where every company already has dashboards coming out of its ears.

The problem in 2026 isn’t lack of data. It’s lack of clarity.

Most tech companies are swimming in signals: product analytics, CRM notes, win/loss interviews, support tickets, social chatter, intent data, and now AI-generated summaries of all of the above. What they’re missing isn’t information—it’s confidence. The confidence to say, “This signal matters more than that one,” and then actually act on it.

Radius Tech is selling judgment, not just insights. That doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s what breaks ties when internal teams are deadlocked between opinions dressed up as strategy.

Humans, Somehow, Are Still Involved

Managing Director Carrie Angiolet leans heavily on the idea that Radius Tech engagements are tailored to how tech companies actually operate. That means researchers who understand why buyers say one thing in surveys and do something completely different in procurement meetings.

In today’s landscape, emphasizing human expertise is almost a contrarian move. AI is everywhere, summarizing, clustering, predicting, and confidently hallucinating insights that sound right until you try to bet your roadmap on them.

Radius Tech isn’t anti-AI. It integrates AI and advanced analytics directly into its work. But it treats AI as an amplifier, not a replacement, which is an important distinction that gets lost in far too many decks right now.

The $20 ChatGPT Question (Because We All Thought It)

Here’s where the snarky skepticism kicks in.

For a huge percentage of tech teams, the modern research workflow already looks like this: customer feedback gets pasted into ChatGPT, themes are extracted, positioning is brainstormed, messaging is refined, and everyone feels productive. And honestly? For early-stage companies or tactical decisions, that approach works disturbingly well.

So why would anyone pay for Radius Tech?

The uncomfortable answer is that AI tools are excellent at synthesis but terrible at knowing what they’re missing. They can summarize what’s present, but they can’t tell you which questions you forgot to ask, which buyers didn’t respond, or which signals are being over-weighted because they’re louder, not more important.

ChatGPT gives you answers. Good research gives you judgment under uncertainty.

Radius Tech is clearly aimed at companies making decisions where being directionally wrong is expensive. Pricing changes. Product pivots. Market expansion. Brand repositioning. The kinds of calls where six months of optimization in the wrong direction quietly burns millions.

If you’re deciding between two headline options, save your money. If you’re deciding whether your product roadmap aligns with how buyers actually evaluate solutions, relying solely on a chatbot is a bold choice.

The Quietly Smart Part of the Pitch

CTO Jay Shutter describes Radius Tech as creating a unified intelligence layer that connects product, customer, and market signals. That might be the least flashy line in the entire release, and also the most important.

Most tech companies are structurally fragmented. Product teams see usage data. Marketing teams see perception data. Sales teams see objections. Leadership sees summaries filtered through politics and optimism. What almost never happens is a truly integrated view of reality.

Radius Tech is essentially offering to referee that chaos.

Not by generating more charts, but by forcing coherence across competing narratives. That’s not something AI tools are particularly good at yet, because it requires context, tradeoffs, and sometimes telling executives things they don’t want to hear.

Why This Matters More Than It Looks

This launch won’t dominate headlines, and that’s kind of the point. It reflects a broader shift happening quietly across the tech industry. As AI makes surface-level insights cheap and ubiquitous, the value of interpreting those insights correctly goes up.

Market research didn’t die. It specialized.

Radius Tech isn’t a moonshot or a reinvention of anything. It’s an acknowledgment that in a world obsessed with speed and automation, someone still has to think carefully about what the data actually means.

That won’t trend. But it will matter.

Final Take: Not for Everyone, Probably Necessary for Some

Radius Tech won’t replace your ChatGPT tab, and it’s not trying to. It exists for the moments when stakes are high, signals are messy, and guessing starts to feel irresponsible.

For everyone else, enjoy your $20 subscription, your AI-generated summaries, and your newfound confidence.

Just don’t be surprised if the companies making quieter, research-backed decisions are the ones still standing when the hype cycle moves on.