By Crispin Beale, CEO, Insight 250
(Photos courtesy of Pixabay)
With the Fall (aka Autumn) season upon us, change inevitably comes with decreasing temperatures and changing colors across many landscapes. This shift mirrors the variety of changes we’re seeing across the insight industry, driven by emerging technology and methodological advances. With the Fall season, many turn their attention to the Halloween holiday and its spookiness. Given this, I spoke to a cross-section of insight experts around the world, asking:
"With the insight realm facing a myriad of changes, from synthetic data and data twins to LLMs and AI, what aspects of market research do you see as a risk to the industry and currently keeping you up at night?"
Anne Sophie Damelincourt, Consultant, Esomar President, France
"What keeps me up at night is whether our profession can adapt, and adapt fast, without losing what makes us credible. Synthetic data, data twins and LLMs are moving quickly, and standing still is no longer a neutral choice. But speed alone is not the answer. Our value rests on accuracy and rigour, and the real challenge is balancing the two: experimenting early, learning quickly, yet validating relentlessly.
Those who move too slowly will be left behind; those who move too fast, without rigour, will erode trust in the industry. The researchers who get that balance right will define what comes next.”
Ritanbara Mundrey, Area Head of Strategy, Performance & Insights, Central Europe, BAT, Germany
“Most of us would automatically think of ‘misuse,’ ‘mutated insights’ as an obvious risk of synthetic data and the new AI world. All true, but another great danger is the ‘dumbing down’ and averaging of information and analysis, losing the richness and the peculiarities of the new, the niche, the fringe, and the unusual, force-fitting research into sameness and bland mediocrity. With the potential of forestalling wheels of innovation in its ugliest avatar.
Just ask AI to write a paragraph for you on any subject, and it reads like a colourless, artificial text peppered with politically correct words.”
Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and Co-founder, Stravito, Sweden
“What keeps me up at night is AI that can’t find your research but answers anyway. For global brands, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer, because it risks nobody questioning it. Whether you’re using an assistant, an AI persona, or an agent, the output should be grounded in trusted research. That’s why we champion a Glass Box AI approach: making the consumer and market evidence behind an answer visible, so teams can check it before they act. Synthetic data isn’t the monster. Sourceless answers are.”
Melanie Courtright, President, Sago, USA
“The biggest risk is not AI, synthetic data, digital twins, or any other emerging methodology. It's losing our discipline and balance. If we move too fast, we risk making decisions based on unproven approaches; if we move too slowly, we risk becoming irrelevant. Both undermine our credibility. The challenge is finding the right balance between innovation and validation, demanding both while grounding every advancement in rigorous testing, expertise, and transparency. That's where our industry creates its greatest value.”
Debrah Harding, MD, MRS, UK
“What keeps me up at night is not AI itself, but how we use it. Synthetic participants, digital twins and LLMs can offer real value, but plausible outputs still need to be matched by robust evidence. Transparency about provenance, validation and limitations, alongside professional expertise and judgement, is essential to maintaining trust in our profession. The real horror story would be mistaking speed and efficiency for certainty and confidently giving clients the wrong answer.”
CiCi Fang, ESOMAR Rep in China, MD of eBridgeAI - Smarter AI, Easier Bridge In &Out, China
“In the short term, AI moderators and synthetic data will eat into market share much the way online eroded offline twenty years ago. But the real long-term risk lies elsewhere: if AI rewrites the entire process paradigm of market research — rather than any single function — then what our industry faces is not a new product, but a process-level reshuffle.”
Nick Graham, Founder, Vertemis, Portugal
"What keeps me awake at night is the risk that AI simply ends up entrenching our “zombie” research processes. We could become frighteningly efficient at industrialising research, generating more convincing-sounding answers, faster and cheaper, but without necessarily producing better insights or better decisions.
Instead, AI gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally redesign how Insights works, freeing teams from the day-to-day heavy lifting and finally elevating their role in the business. If we settle for simply automating what we already do, we’ll remain haunted by the ghosts of Insights past. Now that would be the really scary outcome"
Mariela Mociulsky, CEO, Trendsity, Argentina
“We’re entering a stage where we can generate synthetic data, talk to simulated audiences, build digital twins, and analyze huge volumes of information in minutes. But these capabilities also bring new risks.
My first concern is that we’ll mistake speed for understanding. Getting to an answer faster doesn’t mean we understand the problem better. In our profession, value often shows up in the unexpected: a contradiction, a behavior that doesn’t fit, or something people do without being able to explain why. If all we look for is efficient answers to questions we’ve already framed, we risk becoming very good at answering questions that are irrelevant or simply wrong.
Another concern is mistaking simulation for reality. Models learn from a world that has already been observed, recorded, and digitized, but societies are constantly changing. New codes, sensibilities, and behaviors tend to emerge as small, ambiguous, or peripheral signals, precisely where data is still scarce.
I’d add one more risk: AI’s tendency to pull us toward the average, when innovation is often born at the edges. If we all work with models trained on massive, similar corpora, we may end up building organizations that know more and more but see things more and more alike. For an industry whose purpose is to uncover what’s emerging, that’s no small risk.
That’s why the conversation we need to have is about which tasks we want to delegate and which ones we need to strengthen. Technology may commoditize part of research, but it also forces us to shift our value toward what’s hardest to automate: asking better questions, connecting signals, interpreting cultural tensions, and turning information into decisions.”
Herbert Höckel, CEO, moweb research, Germany
"The ghost that haunts me isn't synthetic data itself - it's synthetic data dressed up as authenticity. That's not innovation; best case it's merely a costume. Give a survey a mask of 'AI-augmented,' and suddenly nobody checks what's underneath. My real fear for 2030 and beyond: we win the speed race and lose the trust war. Real respondents vanish or become unaffordable, LLMs fill the gaps, but nobody stops to ask 'is this even real?' because the dashboard looks convincing enough. It's strategic garbage and industry madness - only now the madness has better graphics."
Jeff Haselum, Insights & Business Strategy Leader, United States
“What keeps me up at night, as synthetic data, digital twins and LLMs become increasingly sophisticated, is the possibility that we, on both the corporate and agency sides, lose sight of what makes research and insights valuable. There's a real danger that, by allowing technology to replace capabilities such as creativity, critical thinking and storytelling rather than enhance them, we risk becoming exceptionally good at producing answers without challenging whether we're asking the right questions or delivering meaningful business impact.”
Anita Watkins, CEO, Insights Association, USA
"The scariest thing I can imagine for our industry this Halloween isn’t the rapid pace of change. It’s insights becoming a spectator sport, or worse, mistaking a finding for a true insight. An insight is a human-centered truth that reveals a meaningful tension and creates an opportunity for the business to act.
We can have mountains of data and lightning-fast answers, but if we lose the human truth and context behind them, that’s when things get scary. Our role is to uncover the ‘why,’ bring the human into the room, and make sure insights professionals have a seat at the table where the decisions that matter are being made. Because the future shouldn’t be haunted by decisions that forgot about the people they are meant to serve.”
Urpi Torrado, CEO, Datum, Perú
“What keeps me up at night is not AI itself, but the speed at which it is redefining where value lies in our industry. Platforms can already integrate multiple data sources, generate insights and simulate consumers at a scale we could hardly imagine a few years ago. The risk is that research companies adopt these technologies without redefining their own role. Our advantage cannot be technology alone, which is increasingly accessible. It must be our ability to add context, interpretation and human judgment—while transforming fast enough to remain relevant.”
Isabelle Fabry, Founder & Managing Director, ActFuture Strategic Client Partner France
“The next revolution may not be artificial intelligence itself. It may be the rise of organisations able to learn faster than the world around them. What keeps me up at night is the opposite: an insight industry overwhelmed by synthetic data, LLMs and endless signals, yet increasingly unable to distinguish what truly matters. When information becomes abundant, insight cannot simply mean producing more of it. Our value will lie in connecting reality, context and human judgement fast enough to turn complexity into understanding — before the world has already moved on.”
Roland Abold, Managing Director, infratest dimap, Germany
“The greatest risk is not technological change but losing sight of what makes research valuable: evidence. As synthetic data and AI become more powerful, we must ensure that speed and efficiency do not replace transparency, validation, and professional judgment. Trust in research will depend on our ability to prove how insights were created.”
Victoria Usher, CEO, GingerMay PR, UK
“The biggest risk I see is a crisis of trust. As synthetic data, digital twins and AI-generated insights become more prevalent, the industry needs to be absolutely transparent about where data comes from and how conclusions are reached. From a PR perspective, credibility is incredibly hard-won and very easily lost. If consumers, clients, or journalists begin questioning whether research reflects real human behaviour, the value of the insight, and the reputation of the organisation behind it can quickly unravel.’’
Christian Dössel, Head of Innovation, Bonsai Research, Germany
“What keeps me up at night is the threat of "synthetic limits" driving absolute conformity. The rapid adoption of AI and synthetic data promises unprecedented efficiency, but confusing algorithmic precision with human truth is our industry's greatest risk. While AI excels at pattern recognition, it suffers from a fatal lack of emotional understanding. If we let machines dictate innovation, we risk engineering technically brilliant products that die on the shelf because they solve problems no real human actually feels. We must stop worshipping the math and start interrogating the messy, irrational psychology of shoppers.”
Sharmila Das, Chairwoman, Purple Audacity, India
"With more than forty years of experience in the insights industry, I know that understanding people demands curiosity, cultural sensitivity and the creativity to connect what they say with how they live; qualities that give human intelligence a distinctive, often superior advantage.
Synthetic data, data twins and LLMs expand our toolkit, but when technological proficiency becomes our definition of research, we risk making this wonderfully stimulating profession look like a mechanical, technical exercise.
My concern is that young researchers will see little room for their imagination and conclude that their creativity would be wasted here, depriving our industry of the minds that should shape its future. We must make research a place where technology strengthens human inquiry and creativity flourishes.
Let’s invite AI to Halloween without scaring away the humans!"
Danny Russell, Chief Customer Officer, IDX, UK
“What keeps me up at night isn't the impending arrival of the Terminator robots; it's the ghosts. Synthetic respondents and digital twins are brilliant tools, but they're built from what people have already said. The risk is that we start mistaking the echo for the true customer voice: an industry quietly interviewing its own ghosts, getting perfectly tidy data with no contradictions, no surprises, and no real humans in the room. AI should help us ask better questions faster, not give us an excuse to stop asking people. Keep it real, otherwise things will get really scary.”
Arundati Dandapani, CEO and Founder, Generation1.ca, Canada
“What keeps me up at night is human ignorance amplified by powerful tools: lack of curiosity, empathy and judgment that makes us mistake convincing outputs for credible evidence. When models privilege dominant narratives, marginalized voices can become even less visible. Synthetic data can extend research, but generating more records does not mean hearing more voices. Strong ground truth, observed data anchored in people’s lived realities, is essential to validate what we model and reveal what we miss.
We want to keep innovating with technology, but that requires innovating with our humanity first: knowing, seeing and feeling different ways of being, acting on that understanding and imagining futures that make room for them. Our greatest risk is losing the curiosity to ask whose reality is missing, and the judgment to know when we need more human evidence.”
So, as you can clearly see, there are a lot of ghosts and goblins haunting insight experts worldwide. Keeping these frights at bay is certainly a challenge, but it is pushing the industry to elevate its attention to finding solutions. It will be exciting to see where these approaches take us as we look to close out 2026 and whether they can exorcise these ghosts. Have a wonderful Fall season.
About the Author
Crispin Beale - Chief Executive, Insight250, Senior Strategic Advisor, mTab; Worldwide CEO, IDX
Crispin is a marketing, data, and customer experience expert. Crispin spent over a decade on the Executive Management Board of Chime Communications as CEO of leading brands such as Opinion Leader, Brand Democracy, Facts International, and Watermelon. Before this, Crispin held senior marketing and insight roles at BT, Royal Mail Group, and Dixons. Crispin originally qualified as a chartered accountant and moved into management consultancy with Coopers & Lybrand (PwC). Crispin has been a Fellow, Board Director (and Chairman) of the MRS for nearly 20 years and UK ESOMAR Representative for over 10 years. Crispin is currently a Senior Strategic Advisor at mTab as well as worldwide CEO at IDX.