AskIGD. Talk to ten thousand reports.
IGD's members pay for insight into the food and consumer goods industry. That insight lived in more than 10,000 reports and articles, findable if you knew where to look. AskIGD lets a member ask the organisation a question and get a cited answer in about two seconds, with the sources one click away.
An organisation that knows more than any one search can surface
IGD is a research and training body for the food and consumer goods industry, with members in more than 50 countries. Edge has run igd.com for two years. The frontier report flagged the shift from search to conversation as the biggest change coming to how members consume research, and the concept that followed was simple to say and hard to build: let people talk to the whole body of work, not browse it.
A conversational layer over everything IGD has published
Report ingestion at scale, with structure preserved so a chart or a table can be cited, not just a paragraph. Real-time factual augmentation from around the web when a question reaches past the archive, clearly separated from IGD's own findings. Every answer carries citations with a snapshot of the source and a deep link into the IGD platform, so trust is checkable rather than assumed. And a net new research tool for IGD's internal teams, who ask harder questions of the same corpus than members do.
Multi-model, retrieval first, on Edge
Different models for ingestion, retrieval ranking and answer generation, chosen by measured performance on IGD's own material rather than by brand. Retrieval is grounded in the archive before a model is allowed to write; augmentation from the web is opt-in per answer and labelled. The whole pipeline runs on Edge infrastructure alongside igd.com, so the answer and the source it points to live in the same place.
From “where is the report on X” to “what does IGD think about X”
Live internally in September 2026 after a six-week build from brief to first working version, and a two-month build to the version now in use. A member question that used to be a search, a download and twenty minutes of reading is now a two-second answer with the reading one click away, if they want it. IGD's own analysts use the internal tool to interrogate a decade of work before starting new research.
Members' agents will ask too
Handed to Edge Expert Services to host, operate and evolve. The next design decisions, covered in IGD's quarterly report, are about who is allowed to ask: as members' own AI agents start querying research programmatically, AskIGD becomes the front door for software as well as people. Labs stays on the retainer and keeps watching.
Report, concept, build, handover.
The standard Labs path. Flagged in the frontier report, scoped as a concept with the number it would move, built by the Labs team, then handed to Expert Services to run. AskIGD is members-only, so there's no public link; ask us for a walkthrough.
- Client
- IGD, a customer of Edge since 2024. Edge hosts and runs igd.com.
- Sector
- Food & grocery · Membership and research body
- Status
- Live, internal launch September 2026. Members-only.
- Build
- Six weeks brief to first live. Two months to the version in use.
- Labs' role
- Frontier report → concept and spec → build → handover
- Now run by
- Edge Expert Services
- Stack
- Multi-model retrieval and generation · Web augmentation with source snapshots · Edge Compute, Storage and CDN
- Related
- Photo AI for IGD · The IGD sample report
Your archive has answers in it.
If your organisation's value sits in a body of research, documentation or reporting that people have to hunt through, this is a conversation worth having.
Talk to Edge Labs