Strategic Takeaways

👉  Here’s what most brands get backwards about AI creative: the problem isn’t making more ads, it’s knowing which ones will actually work. You can crank out 50 variations with ChatGPT, but if you’re still spending weeks and thousands of dollars testing them one by one to see what converts, you haven’t solved anything—you’ve just automated the wrong part of the process. Whether you’re spending $500 or $50,000 monthly on ads, the real win is validation before launch. Know what your target audience will respond to before you spend a dollar on testing, and suddenly you’re not producing volume for volume’s sake—you’re producing winners.

👉  Your store probably has five distinct customer segments you’ve never fully considered, and that’s costing you conversions. When Extuitive analyzes your products, it doesn’t just confirm who you think your audience is—it builds detailed psychological profiles for five different consumer groups, often revealing segments you didn’t know existed. If you’re running the same generic “one size fits all” campaigns for everyone, you’re leaving serious money on the table. Let the data show you who’s actually ready to buy, then create specific ads for those groups instead of guessing.

👉  Think of AI as your creative team’s force multiplier, not their replacement. The goal isn’t to eliminate your designers and copywriters—it’s to make them exponentially more productive. Instead of spending days creating 20 ad variants and then testing them sequentially over weeks, use consumer validation to show which four to six concepts are actually worth refining. Then your creative talent focuses on perfecting winners instead of polishing ads that consumers will scroll right past. That’s leverage.

👉  If your agency or team already created campaigns, validate them before launch—even if AI didn’t touch them. Here’s something valuable: you can upload your existing creative to a consumer validation system and get rankings showing which ads will perform before you spend testing budget. This works for brand campaigns, product launches, seasonal promotions, whatever you’re running. It eliminates the “creative by committee” trap where decisions get made based on internal opinions instead of actual consumer feedback. You stop guessing and start knowing.

👉  The “selective pressure” concept from evolutionary design applies perfectly to ads. Instead of asking one AI system to generate your perfect ad, create 20 variants and let 150,000 consumer agents rank them, debate what works, and iterate on the strongest concepts through multiple rounds. The ads that survive this process are inherently better because they’ve been refined through actual consumer feedback, not just algorithmic outputs. This is the same methodology enterprise brands have used for product testing for 20 years—Nielsen acquired the original company behind it. Now it’s available at Shopify scale.

👉  Stop waiting for the perfect moment to test new approaches—whether you’re three weeks from Black Friday or planning Q1, start now. The brands that win aren’t sitting around waiting for ideal conditions to try consumer validation. They’re testing today, learning what resonates with their audience, and iterating based on real data. If you’re still “dialing in your strategy” before trying validated creative, you’re optimizing for planning instead of results. The system works whether you have three weeks or three months—the question is whether you’ll use that time to learn or to keep guessing.

Armen Mkrtchyan
CEO & Co-Founder, Extuitive

Armen Mkrtchyan comes from a background you wouldn’t typically expect to land in the Shopify ecosystem—he spent years at Flagship Pioneering, the innovation lab that originated Moderna and dozens of other breakthrough companies in biotech and healthcare. But here’s what makes his story interesting: Flagship’s connection to consumer intelligence actually goes back 20 years. They founded a company called Affinova that used genetic evolutionary design principles to test consumer products—real enterprise-level testing methodology. Nielsen saw the value and acquired Affinova in 2014, and that same framework became the foundation for Nielsen Basis, which major brands still use today for product concept testing.

When ChatGPT’s API came out about three years ago, Armen and his team saw something most people missed: an opportunity to bring that same enterprise testing infrastructure to the brands who’d been locked out of it—small to mid-sized ecommerce operators who couldn’t afford six-figure testing budgets. They spent years building Extuitive’s proprietary database, training 150,000 AI consumer agents on real people living in the US and capturing detailed psychological profiles, demographic data, and purchase behavior patterns. What emerged is what Armen calls the Polyintelligence framework—multiple AI systems working together, combining human intelligence, machine intelligence, and nature-inspired evolutionary design principles.

What sets Armen’s approach apart is his focus on validation over generation. Most AI creative tools are racing to produce more images and more copy faster. Extuitive is solving a different problem: knowing which creative concepts will actually convert before you spend testing budget. The platform analyzes Shopify stores in under three seconds, identifies target audience segments you might not have considered, generates 20+ ad variants, and applies “selective pressure” from those consumer agents through multiple rounds of iteration—surfacing only the concepts that survived real consumer feedback.

Before launching for Shopify merchants, Armen’s team tested the methodology with larger DTC brands, refining the system until it could deliver validated creative at the speed and price point smaller operations need. His commitment to accessibility shows in how simple Extuitive is to try: paste your URL, see sample audience profiles and ads instantly, and decide if this approach fits your workflow. Whether you’re three weeks from Black Friday or planning Q1 campaigns, Armen personally responds to prospective customers—he’s not handing this off to a support team. He’s making sure brands actually get the help they need as they figure out how consumer validation fits into their creative process.