Jason Mander

Mander began in academia, holding a research fellowship at the University of Oxford, where he studied classical archaeology and completed a PhD in the social sciences examining how families across the Roman Empire behaved. When he realised those skills were transferable, he moved from predicting what Romans did 2,000 years ago to reading how consumers around the world now think, act and feel. He joined GWI, by his account, around twelve years ago when the business had roughly 13 people and no proprietary platform, delivering data through a third-party vendor and PowerPoint reports.

GWI was founded in 2009, Mander says, to revolutionise market research by going digital with global reach, and now surveys more than a million individuals a year across more than 50 countries, drawing on about 30 panels. Under his watch the company has rebuilt itself around agentic interfaces and connections with the leading AI models, while positioning its volunteered human data as the third pillar of intelligence beside a company's own data and its AI tools. He is a regular on the conference circuit, from South by Southwest to Cannes Lions, where he argues for scrutiny of synthetic data and for keeping the human firmly in the loop.