Studio intO: Why Local Insight Powers Global Innovation

Shortlisted: Multi-Territory Agency of the Year – Global Agency Awards 2025

At Studio intO, our purpose is simple but powerful: to ensure that innovation serves everyone—not just the dominant few. We partner with the world’s most ambitious brands to help them deeply understand diverse people, places, and contexts—so that their strategies, products, and services succeed in any market, anywhere in the world.

Our model is designed for exactly that. We’re a remote-first research agency with a fully distributed Central Team operating across the UK, Spain, Poland, and Colombia. This team orchestrates a network of 130+ Local Researchers working in 60+ countries, speaking 41 languages, and bringing cultural insight from within the markets they study.

Being shortlisted for Multi-Territory Agency of the Year at the 2025 Global Agency Awards is a proud moment for us. It’s a celebration of how a small agency with a big global footprint can lead the way in ethical, inclusive, and scalable international research.

What We Do – and How We Do It Differently

We specialise in four key areas of research that support global innovation:

• User Insight – on-the-ground and remote methods to uncover authentic human behaviours, needs and motivations.
• Strategic Foresight – identifying emerging shifts to support resilient long-term innovation.
• Market Context – mapping regional ecosystems, brand landscapes, and competitive positioning.
• Global Research Operations – seamless delivery of multi-region research, led by our Central Team.

Where most global agencies rely on regional offices or outsource international research, we offer something different: an integrated global network, coordinated centrally, with research led by people who live within the cultures we’re exploring.

That means our clients—brands like Google, Amazon, WhatsApp, Pinterest, and Miro—can trust that their insights reflect real, contextual, and contemporary user experiences across markets.

Our Award-Nominated Work: Equitable AI at Global Scale

Our 2025 award submission focused on a standout example of our work: a multi-region project with Google YouTube, focused on responsible AI image generation.

We conducted deep cultural research in six countries—including in-person immersion sessions in India, Nigeria, and Indonesia—and provided clear recommendations for inclusive AI design. Our insight is helping to shape Google’s GenAI fairness principles and inspiring new approaches to AI tool development.

This is one example of how our Equitable AI Framework is now influencing some of the most powerful technology platforms in the world. It has also been the basis for our recognition at other awards, including:

• Research Company of the Year – Forttuna Global Excellence Awards
• Women in Innovation ‘Movers & Makers’ Award

In April 2024 alone, our team ran 12 simultaneous country studies, making it our busiest and most impactful month yet.

Global Impact, Local Intelligence

This kind of work is only possible because our operating model is inherently flexible, scalable, and rooted in equity. In fact, we’ve recently expanded into eight new emerging markets, added 20 UX-specialist researchers, and achieved WeConnect International Certification as a women-owned, diverse business.

We are also the co-organisers of the 2024 AIBA Conference in Poland. Last year, this brought together over 550 industry professionals to discuss the future of business and AI. The global research community is growing more interconnected—and Studio intO is proud to be helping lead the conversation.

What This Shortlisting Means to Us

Being named a finalist at the Global Agency Awards is meaningful for our entire team. For a remote-first agency with just 13 core team members, working across time zones and continents, validation like this is more than a professional milestone—it’s recognition that our approach is working.

We’ve proven that global research doesn’t need to be controlled from regional offices or delivered through rigid, top-down structures to be credible or commercially successful. It needs to be responsive, inclusive, and rooted in the everyday realities of the people it represents.

This shortlisting has offered us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the impact of that approach—on our clients, our team, and the communities we research with. As Joanna Brassett, our CEO, puts it:

“Innovation should be informed by those who live it. We’ve built a model that values local expertise and strives to address global inequity, because that’s what makes research more useful, more ethical, and ultimately, more powerful. Recognition like this tells us that those values matter.”

Connect with Us

• Website: www.studio-into.com
• LinkedIn: Studio intO on LinkedIn