A psychologist who learned to count, a counter who learned to listen - now running the research company betting that AI and human empathy belong in the same room.
The face of asking better questions.
She spends her days proving that the thing brands believe about their customers is, more often than not, politely wrong.
In February 2025, Alexandra Frankel took over as CEO of Getwizer, a New York consumer-insights platform with a stubborn idea baked into its founding: that technology and human judgment should not take turns. They should work the same shift. Getwizer calls itself a hybrid - part software, part research team - and Frankel is the person now responsible for making that hybrid run faster than the agencies it competes with and smarter than the self-serve survey tools it undercuts on price.
She did not parachute in. Frankel had already spent close to five years inside the company, building its insights and strategy function, stitching together qualitative and quantitative methods, and quietly assembling the AI-driven capabilities she now wants to push to their limit. By the time the title changed, she had touched nearly every department. The promotion read less like a gamble and more like a coronation that everyone had seen coming.
I get to work with some of the most brilliant and empathetic souls in the industry and, together, we're creating the future of research tech.- Alexandra Frankel, on the Getwizer team
Her credentials read like a setup for a joke about left brains and right brains calling a truce. A bachelor's in psychology from McGill. A master's in quantitative methods from Columbia. One degree teaches you why people lie on surveys; the other teaches you how to catch them at it. Frankel spent a career holding both at once.
That combination is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of market researchers can run a regression. Fewer can run a regression and then tell you, in plain English, why the number on the screen contradicts what the focus group swore was true. Frankel's work has always lived in that gap between the data and the human who generated it.
Before Getwizer she logged time at Vivaldi Partners, The Nielsen Company, and Ipsos, and led the Business Insights team at Simulmedia, the NYC startup that dragged granular audience targeting and closed-loop ROI into the world of television. At Hotspex she ran the media division with more than a decade of media research behind her. Two of the startups she helped build were acquired - one by Nielsen, one by Ipsos - which means she has twice handed the keys to the very giants she once worked for. That is a particular kind of career symmetry.
The NFT ReceiptIn 2021, while brands tripped over each other to mint digital collectibles, Frankel and Getwizer ran the unglamorous study: do people actually own this stuff? The answer landed like a cold towel. Just under 11% of consumers owned one or more NFTs. The technology had a marketing problem dressed up as a demand problem - plenty of avenues for brands to add value, but a wall of low consumer knowledge to climb first.
Source: Getwizer consumer research, as reported in industry coverage. Bars illustrate the reported ~11% ownership figure against the surrounding hype.
It is a small example of a larger habit. Frankel's research tends to arrive at the meeting carrying the inconvenient number, the one that turns a launch plan into a longer conversation. That same year she sat alongside Variety's senior media analyst at a Nashville industry conference, walking brands through how media consumption splinters across generations - useful, slightly uncomfortable homework for anyone planning to spend money reaching the wrong people.
The MandateFrankel's brief as CEO is deceptively simple to state and very hard to do: build research systems that are both automated and personalized. The industry usually treats those as a trade-off. Cheap and fast means generic. Custom and deep means slow and expensive. She wants to collapse that choice using generative and agentic AI on one side and human specialists on the other.
Getwizer's pitch is a modular, building-block approach - clients snap together the methods they need, whether that is concept testing, brand tracking, virtual shelf and pricing studies, or deep consumer profiling. The newer layer turns raw data into recommendations a brand can use from the get-go, rather than a 90-slide deck that someone has to translate into action three weeks later. The roster watching this experiment is not shy: Mars, Coca-Cola, Campbell's, BIC, Paramount, Sony, Variety, Wilson, Puma - and, fittingly, Nielsen.
There is a second business card. Away from survey panels and dashboards, Frankel founded Rainbow Zebra Co., a nonprofit children's publishing venture making books, games and toys built around a single theme: kindness. The stated aim is unsubtle and entirely on-brand for a psychologist - to develop compassion in young readers and, in her words, build a kinder world.
It rhymes with the day job more than it first appears. Both are about understanding how people - tiny ones included - actually think and feel, then nudging the outcome toward something better. One uses AI and a 40-country panel. The other uses a picture book. Same instinct, different tools.
The breakout groups are small enough to foster somewhat deeper conversations.- On why she values intimate rooms over big networking events
That preference - small rooms, real conversations - is a tell. Frankel collects two innovation awards (the ARF's Great Minds Award and the MRIA's Innovation and Advancement of Market Research Award) and yet describes her favorite professional moments as the quiet breakout sessions where you can actually hear someone think. For a person whose job is reading other people at scale, she seems most at home reading them one at a time.
Put it together and the shape of the career is clear. A psychologist who got serious about numbers. A researcher who keeps building the companies, not just running the studies. An executive handed the AI keys to an industry full of people allergic to being told they are wrong. And, on the side, a publisher betting that the most important research subject of all is a five-year-old learning to be kind. Alexandra Frankel asks better questions for a living. The interesting part is that she keeps asking them of herself.