Insights & Ideas

Why I am Bullish on the future of Market Research (when most arent)

Seems like everyone's panicking about AI replacing knowledge workers. Much of the fearmongering comes from people with the biggest stakes in AI adoption: tech CEOs, investors, AI company founders. Brilliant technologists, sure. But not labour economists.

Things move fast... AI Moderated interviews for the masses

Fireflies.ai just launched Voice Agents... basically a lightweight AI-moderated interviewer. A dollar or two per interview. Maybe less at scale. What is interesting is the speed at which these tools are commoditizing. A meeting transcription app pivots into "ïnterviewer" territory almost as an afterthought.

To see the future of research, just look East

Shein adds thousands and thousands of new items to their app. 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆. 𝗦𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲. 𝗗𝗮𝘆. This is all being driven by what they call their LATR model (Large-scale Automated Test and Reorder)

What if most "AI" headlines are meaningless?

Not wrong. Not right. Just... saying nothing at all. On any given day, my feed serves up headlines like: "AI will eliminate 40% of white-collar jobs by 2030" ...followed immediately by... "AI adoption stalls as companies struggle to find use cases" "AI is transforming market research!" ...right next to... "AI-generated insights lack the depth of human analysis" 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲?

The Say-Do Gap is the Insight (not the problem)

I've seen some interesting discussions lately about AI-driven research unlocking more "honest" responses: the idea that people open up more to AI than human moderators because they worry less about judgment. Some even claim that that makes AI-driven research superior to 'traditional' research. But here's what concerns me: if we optimize purely for "honesty" 𝘄𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗹𝘆.

Big Agencies are dead!

We've been hearing this for a long time....Especially now with AI-everywhere, and the argumentation is always something like: 𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗜-𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗶𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝘀𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁

We might be ignoring the biggest variable in the room....

In Market Research, we obsess over data quality. We try to fight bots, fraud, and measurement error to make sure our 'raw material' is clean. But we might be ignoring the biggest variable in the room... the researcher....

What happens if you replace traditional open ended answers in a survey with an AI moderated "interview" (AIMI)?

Glaut publised a study by University of Mannheim that looked exactly into that. Commendable, with all this new ResTech coming on the market we need some proper Research-on-Research to understand what works, where, when and why. 𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙣𝙤𝙩.

Can AI fully automate the research process?

Researchers at ByteDance have released DAComp, a benchmark created to test how well AI can manage the full analytics lifecycle — from data processing to insight and recommendation. And they've looked at how well state-of-the art models perform on these benchmarks today.⁣ ⁣ 𝐓𝐋𝐃𝐑: AI is now an OK analyst (for less complex tasks) and a terrible strategist.⁣

If you were born again, how would your life change?

More investment to Insights in 2026?

McKinsey recently published their State of Marketing Report for Europe in 2026, based on interviews with 500 senior Marketing Leaders. It's a good read, not the least to understand where the Marketing puck is going. Obviously AI dominates the report ('AI' appears 182 times in the report...).

The Future of AI in Market Research

Exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we gather and analyze consumer insights.