The party’s over. Among the many consequences of the Iran conflict is a shortage of helium, leading to anxious times at balloon suppliers as its industrial applications take priority. Our advice - start building up that lung capacity now.
Scroll down to read about survey serendipity, a Sinner’s downfall, and one of the sweatiest audiences around.
Stats to power your week
🥵Europe has been in the grip of a heatwave recently, culminating in tennis world #1 Jannik Sinner being dumped out of the French Open while sweltering in the midday heat. How exactly do consumers adapt when the thermometer rises? Sinner’s fellow Italians stand out for being 25% more likely to have less hot food and drink. Make that an iced cappuccino, per favore. GWI Pulse
🧩How’s this for survey serendipity? In recent weeks frontier AI models have been ploughing through some tough unsolved mathematical problems, culminating in a breakthrough solution for an 80-year-old problem. At the same time, we fielded a survey that found only 4 in 10 believe AI was capable of doing such a thing. It’s safe to say many of AI’s best capabilities are still broadly unrecognized. GWI Pulse
📉As you might have seen in our Financial Times feature last year, we’ve passed “peak social media” worldwide, as time spent on it goes through a post-pandemic correction. Another trend draws attention to that - the average number of social media accounts an internet user has dropped from 6.4 to 5.6 since 2021. GWI Core
🟩The color of the decade might be Blank Street green. The matcha (and coffee) chain has done more than most to make the Japanese tea ubiquitous, and its popularity is still growing. In the UK, it’s hit a neat milestone where matcha is now more popular with Gen Zs than its similarly-named coffee counterpart, mocha. GWI Core Plus
Meet the audience:
Brits planning to buy air conditioning
Without GWI data
With GWI data
The UK just recorded its hottest ever May temperature, leaving Brits facing the annual question earlier than usual: do we finally bite the bullet and buy air conditioning?
AC is still a rarity on the British Isles, which prompts the question of who exactly the early adopters are. The obvious answer is affluent homeowners, and the audience does skew high-income. But that misses a more interesting pattern - intent also over-indexes among Black and Asian British consumers.
Those groups are more likely to live in cities, particularly London with its smaller homes, crowded accommodation, urban heat island effect, and less control over home retrofits.
There may also be a cultural factor: some households may have stronger links to countries where AC is already normalised.
Chart of the week
Last August, Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson said he regularly consults AI tools for a second opinion on decisions. And to be fair, you often hear people joke that “ChatGPT could do a better job” than certain high-profile decision-makers.
So we tested the idea in our latest GWI Pulse survey, asking people whether they thought AI could do better than those important arbiters.
You could read these results two ways. On one hand, more people still think AI would perform worse than humans across every role we tested. But on the other, two-thirds think AI would be at least as good as politicians at making decisions.
One audience signal stands out too. Young men’s sense of political disillusionment comes through as they’re just as likely to say AI would make better decisions than politicians as they are to say it would make worse ones.
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