November 17, 2025
What Happens When Insight Stops Sitting on a Shelf? Viasat Found Out
Behind Viasat’s gold win for Best Innovation in CX at the UK Customer Experience Awards 2025 is a simple but striking question: what happens when a company with thousands of insight reports finally unlocks all of them for every employee, instantly?
This very challenge sparked the creation of Vera, an AI research assistant built with Cognni, an AI-powered knowledge platform, and woven into Viasat’s Insights Space to put trusted knowledge directly into the flow of work. The result is a shift in how teams think, decide, and stay connected to what customers need in a fast-moving market.
To explore how Vera was built and what it’s changing inside the organisation, CXM spoke with Ross Anderson, Director of Customer Insight at Viasat, and Gareth Ratcliffe, Co-Founder and CEO of Cognni.
How did the idea for Vera first come about? Was it created to solve a specific problem or to change how people use insights at Viasat?
RA: Viasat and Cognni have built and launched a leading insights portal, Insights Space, with over 20,000 reports and articles, a great user interface, and hundreds of users. However, only super users were using the portal as a tool for strategic decision-making. At that time, Gareth was exploring how to use AI to enhance Cognni’s platform. During a conversation about the Insights Space roadmap, we realised that an AI-powered chatbot would be a game-changer: making it much easier and quicker for all Insights Space users to use the portal for decision-making, while also driving usage. We worked closely with Gareth and his team to build, test, refine and launch the Viasat Enhanced Research Assistant, Vera, which enables users to receive answers to strategic questions, based on trusted content – including customer insight and experience reports.
GR: We’ve always been passionate about helping organisations make better decisions, faster. Vera was a natural next step — a way to put the right knowledge in front of people instantly, in a way that feels simple and intuitive. It’s always fantastic to work with clients like Ross and the Viasat team who share that same ambition and are willing to push boundaries to deliver real value for the business in an innovative way.
Vera was built together with Cognni and integrated into your Insights Space portal. How did this partnership help make it secure, reliable, and useful for different teams?
RA: We have a strong relationship with Cognni. From the start, we worked closely together on design and testing to make sure Vera genuinely met our needs, not just technically but in how people would actually use it across the business.
GR: Insight Space is Viasat’s single instance within Cognni’s secure environment, and Vera is the highly customised Gen AI capability within it. Both were designed with enterprise-level security and governance at their core, giving Viasat full control over access and permissions. It means people can find and use knowledge confidently — safely, instantly, and always within the right boundaries.
RA: Before launch, we ran an extended testing period and soft rollout to make sure Vera was consistently delivering accurate, trusted answers drawn from verified internal and external sources. It gives users confidence that every response is based on quality insight — Vera will let users know if there isn’t enough knowledge to answer a question, ensuring it never misleads with incomplete or invented information. We also involved teams from market intelligence, corporate development, marketing and comms throughout development, so everyone could help shape how Vera supports their work.
Many people are unsure about using AI tools at work. How did you help employees trust Vera and see it as something that could really help them?
RA: We chose the name carefully – Vera is a research assistant that helps with strategic decision-making, leveraging the carefully curated content on the portal. Vera frees up people’s time – asking Vera questions is much quicker than running lots of keyword searches – but we still encourage users to read the source material before making decisions. In the launch communications we gave examples of questions that people in different teams could ask. When we run live demonstrations, we ask relevant questions for the specific teams we are talking to.
GR: For us, it was really about building trust through experience. We designed Vera to feel approachable and useful from the first interaction — more like a helpful colleague than a piece of technology. It’s not there to replace people or their expertise; it’s there to make their day easier by helping them find what they need, faster. Every client is different, and we worked closely with Viasat to support how they felt was the best way to engage people.
Since Vera launched, how has it changed the way people at Viasat work or make decisions together?
RA: Vera is helping us to become an even more customer-centric company with even more focus on the external environment, which is really important in the fast-changing satellite communications market. Our customer insights and experience research is being used by more and more decision-makers. Vera also enables agility and innovation.
GR: We’ve seen a real lift in engagement since Vera launched. It’s made insights easier for everyone to access and use, not just the experts. That’s always been our goal — helping people make faster, smarter decisions by putting trusted knowledge right at their fingertips.
AI technology is transforming fast. How do you plan to keep Vera useful and up to date as new tools appear?
RA: We listen to feedback from our users and make improvements, such as adding tips above the chat box to make it even clearer how to use Vera and reminding people to read the cited sources. We pay close attention to the questions that are being asked and not being asked. We’ve also got some AI enhancements on our roadmap.
GR: At Cognni, innovation is never about chasing the next shiny thing — it’s about helping our clients make better decisions, faster. We stay at the forefront of AI and knowledge technology so we can keep delivering meaningful improvements, not just new features. Working with forward-thinking partners like Viasat helps shape that direction — their roadmap and feedback push us to explore what’s possible while keeping the focus on value. For us, it’s about using innovation with purpose — making knowledge work harder and driving real impact across organisations.
What has surprised you most since launching Vera: either a success or a challenge you didn’t expect?
RA: I knew that users would ask a wide range of questions, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the sheer variety.
GR: The biggest success has been seeing how Vera has expanded people’s sense of what valuable knowledge really is. It’s helped surface strategic insights and highlight where gaps exist, but also shown that everyday information matters too.
Viasat works in many different markets around the world. How do you make sure AI innovation like Vera always connects back to what customers actually need?
RA: Viasat is a global company with a truly global footprint, serving customers in aviation, government, maritime, enterprise and consumer broadband. It’s very important to understand what our customers and partners need. Research goes onto Insights Space and is referenced by Vera when users ask questions about customers. This has really helped with our customer-centricity.
GR: What makes Vera so powerful is that it connects the voice of the customer directly to decision-making. By grounding AI in trusted research and insight, it helps ensure every answer — and every decision — reflects what really matters to customers.
