by Crispin Beale CEO, Insight250 | Photos by Pixabay
Watch the companion video for this article here.
Another year has flown by, bringing a whirlwind of innovation and intrigue about where the insight industry is heading. Now that we are squarely in the ‘AI Era,’ there is a good amount of observation and opportunity, along with confusion and chaos. The constant hype of artificial intelligence raises questions about the right technology to adopt and the appropriate applications.
So, to get a perspective as to where we have been in the past year (and where we are heading - stay tuned for that) I contacted market research experts and insight innovators from around the world for this retrospective on the primary learnings and lessons from 2024. The question posed was “What do you feel are the primary lessons learned for the insight industry that emerged this past year?”
Here are the intriguing answers.
Sir Martin Sorrell, Founder & Executive Chairman S4 Capital plc, UK
“In 2024 everyone realized that unifying and harmonizing first-party data was essential given the likely deprecation of third-party cookies by Google and Apple’s IDFA rules, particularly concerning using the signals from the six leading digital platforms.”
Kristin Luck, Founder, WIRe, Scalehouse, Growgetter, President ex-officio ESOMAR, USA
“2024 brought us a number of lessons…that embracing AI isn’t optional, that the shift to online methods (particularly in qualitative research) wasn’t just a pandemic fluke, that data quality is fundamental to research and yet continues to be an industry-wide issue, and that we need to develop better skills, particularly around data aggregation and analysis, if we’re going to remain relevant as an industry. The question is…will we learn these lessons? As an industry, we’re often too quick to discount what is staring us straight in the face in favor of defaulting to the comfortable ways of conducting research with which we’re most familiar.”
Ritanbara Mundrey, Global Head of Insights & Innovation (Dairy), Nestle, Switzerland
"The imperative to reinvent the function and remain relevant is an ongoing requirement that becomes increasingly urgent each year. Insights professionals must stay on top of analytics and technology to strengthen and elevate their position as Solution Partners to the business."
Sharmila Das, Chairwoman, Purple Audacity, India
“In my mind, 2024 will be earmarked as a year of reconciliation. This is the year when the acceptance that both AI and HI can co-exist and become a powerful combined force permeated down to the general research practitioner. For many years now we have been feeling skeptical, afraid, and in denial of digital interventions and tools. Slowly but surely, we have started understanding that the trick lies in using these advancements to deepen, not dilute, our understanding of consumers.
“It is not surprising that resilience, curiosity, and the courage to embrace transformation have emerged as key values once again for the Industry. If this year taught us anything, it’s that adaptability and human connection are not trends—they are the essence of our enduring impact.
“If this year taught us anything, it’s that adaptability and human connection are not trends—they are the essence of our enduring impact.“
Melanie Courtright, CEO, Insights Association, USA
“The explosion of data, paired with advances in platforms and AI tools, ushered in a new era for insights generation. Simultaneously, economic pressures and growing concerns around data quality prompted many research buyers to insource more of their operations.
At the same time, rapid sociopolitical changes heightened the demand for brands to gather insights at unprecedented speeds. As we look toward 2025, these trends are expected to continue reshaping the landscape, influencing where both financial resources and talent will be directed in the insights industry.”
Priscilla Mckinney, CEO LIttle Bird Marketing, USA
"This year really drove home that our industry needs to get smarter about balancing efficiency with quality. The market research industry is dealing with increased data quality challenges and fraud, while clients want faster turnarounds at DIY prices. What's making the difference isn't just technology – it's finding reliable partners who can move at our pace and truly understand project requirements. The vendors who thrive are the ones who go beyond transactional relationships to become true problem-solvers."
Sarah Ashley, EMEA Market Insights, Google, UK
“The primary lesson from 2024 has been embracing progress while preserving and building on our strengths as an industry. We’ve seen a step change in innovation and AI’s application to research, from sentiment analysis and synthetic responses to unstructured data analyses and multilingual capabilities. It’s been the year we started moving from AI ‘hype’ to 'how'. At the same time, the value of human expertise in interpreting the “why” behind the data, and the power of storytelling has never felt stronger. And amidst the excitement for the new, we’ve seen a resurgence of foundational methods like MMM.”
Nick Graham, Founder, Vertimis, Portugal
“In 2024, the insights industry got a crash course in AI - what it can do and what it can’t (or at least not yet). The big takeaway? While we must embrace AI’s potential, human intelligence and expertise will remain indispensable: in building and training models, validating their outputs, and - most critically of all - extracting deep human insights and driving them into action.”
Alexander Edwards, President, Strategic Vision, USA
“The primary lesson for the insights industry this past year is the essential need to approach questions without hubris or agenda. When insight professionals abandon humility on controversial topics, they sacrifice accuracy and precision. For example, conflicting predictions about the success of electric vehicles in the U.S. market illustrate how an agenda skews analysis. Similarly, incorrect forecasts about voter behavior in the U.S. presidential election occurred because the personal values and priorities of the voter seemed often neglected for anecdotal experiences by the researcher. ValueCentered Psychology, lack of agenda and an embrace of humility ensures a trustworthy reflection of reality.”
Lucy Davison, Founder, Keen as Mustard, UK
"I’ll skip the usual chatter on lessons from polling (again?) synthetic data and AI. For me, the real lesson this year came from research by the Insights Association, MRS, GRBN, and Cambiar on Consumer Insights (CI) maturity. Updating a 2015 study with BCG and Yale, showed that CI functions today make a bigger impact and are more strategically integrated into decision-making. Satisfaction, insight quality, and ROI are up. But here’s the kicker: while business-wide communication barely mattered in 2015, it's now essential. Proof of value and a clear narrative are crucial to becoming a strategic partner. More data isn’t better—better storytelling is."
Justine Clements, Consumer Insights Manager, Samsung Electronics, Australia
“The clear lesson this year is the more things change the more they stay the same; our expectations may have been that AI would bring rapid and radical change and in the areas of efficiency and real-time and automated tools, it certainly did. But we still have many of the same challenges around privacy, understanding emotions, sampling for inclusivity, adapting to economic realities impacting consumers and businesses, and the need to actively engage consumers in the process of gathering insights.”
Mark Langsfeld, CEO, mTab
“This past year saw the combination of advancing innovation, chaotic data silos and decreasing resources (often in terms of personnel) motivating enterprises across industries to adopt insight management system technology to deliver analytical simplicity to market research teams and insight access to the company-wide teams they support. AI plays a critical role in this, but one that needs to be pragmatic and measured to maintain the integrity and reliability of the insights. It will be exciting to see what 2025 brings to the table.”
Mariela Mociulsky, CEO, Trendsity, Argentina
“The past year has highlighted that data is more than just numbers; it’s about human narratives. The key lies in interpreting this data within ever-changing social and cultural contexts. This isn’t a transition; the pace of change will continue to challenge us, and increasingly so. Ethics have become fundamental, demanding transparency and fairness in artificial intelligence models. Organisations must embrace a mindset of continuous learning, where adaptability and innovation are essential. By recognising that each data point tells a story, we must take responsibility within our industry and demonstrate that we can transform decision-making into a more responsible and human-centric process.”
Simon Atkinson, Chief Knowledge Officer, IPSOS, UK
“This “Year of Elections” served as a reminder, if one were needed, that the information landscape is super-fragmented – just look at how people find out about what’s happening in the world. A plethora of social media channels and platforms have replaced traditional news networks as our main sources of information as to what’s happening in the world. Brands need to plan accordingly!
“We are using AI every day in a wide range of research contexts, even if we are clear that humans need to be on hand to supervise the work, and you need to have some “guardrails” – our Truth, Transparency, Trust framework has been helping us identify, monitor and reduce the potential risks.
“The industry likes to analyze research data according to different generations, but we are constantly reminded that we need to be careful with broad-sweep generalizations. Gen Z women are consistently more liberal in their outlook than their male counterparts, for example.”
Debrah Harding, Managing Director, Market Research Society (MRS), UK
“While advancements in AI offer exciting opportunities for the sector, adopting and integrating it into working practices is an ongoing process and it will be a while until the full benefits can be realised. Research and insights professionals will need to continue to evaluate the impact of this technology across their services and operations.
New technologies throw up plenty of opportunities and risks, but existing challenges remain. Data quality continues to be an issue that requires everyone across the research supply chain to work together to support the GDQ initiative.”
Urpi Torrado, CEO, Datum Internacional, Peru
“The primary lessons for the insight industry this past year highlight the importance of integrating advanced technologies like AI to enhance data analysis, focusing on activating insights to drive business outcomes, and investing in talent development to stay competitive. Building stronger client partnerships and adapting swiftly to market dynamics have also proven essential.”
Ray Poynter, President, ESOMAR, UK
“There has been a journey from AI cynicism, to experimentation to mainstream use, focusing on faster and cheaper.”
Isabelle Fabry - Associate, ACTFUTURE, ESOMAR - Co-Representant, France
"In 2024, the insights industry highlighted the importance of agility in adapting to rapid shifts in consumer behavior and digital landscapes. The rise of AI-driven research tools pushed us to balance automation with the human element, ensuring that empathy and cultural understanding remain central to our work. This year reminded us that, while technology can enhance efficiency, the true strength of our industry lies in our ability to explore human DNA and epigenetic dynamics for a deeper understanding of behaviors and motivations."
Jean-Marc Leger, President/CEO, Leger, Canada
“AI is like a high-speed car: it can accelerate insights with impressive speed, efficiency, and depth but also risks crashing into bias and missing the subtlety only human understanding can provide.”
Ryan Barry, President, Zappi, USA
“Insights has a bad reputation for being slow to adopt change. That is entirely not the case with AI. Insights are LEADING the charge in many places with insights people being on core AI committees, being the experimenters in their org, and getting the attention of their C suite plus the mgmt consulting industry. This is a very exciting time for the consumer because if we integrate consumer data into scaled workflows, we will see a much brighter future for brands!”
Nick Baker, Chief Research Officer, Savanta, UK
“Evolution is paramount and this is not a time to be an Ostrich. The industry is under multiple pressures with the emerging impact of AI the least certain, but undoubtedly most significant among them. Becoming AI literate and understanding how and where to deploy new solutions is critical for the industry and all businesses within it. It is very much a case of evolved die. However, technology alone is not the answer, it remains about how to use ever-changing technologies to increase the value of what we deliver, to get people to think differently and act better.”
Arundati Dandapani, Founder and CEO, Generation1.ca, Canada
“This past year underscored the transformative power of technology in amplifying human intelligence and imagination. The tech-driven insights industry not only boosted global annual turnovers again but also highlighted the urgent need for robust digital governance and a blend of cross-functional, business-outcome-oriented skills. Key takeaways include maintaining a critical lens on assumptions, particularly around demographic stereotypes, constant testing and validation, all while fostering curious optimism about how we can reshape representation with good data creation. Moreover, attitudes and behaviours cannot be understood in silos—integrating unstructured, emotion-rich datasets and advanced analytics is crucial for capturing the nuanced motivations of global citizens and consumers. A holistic approach is essential for delivering insights that drive meaningful action.”
Claire Rainey, Head of Insights, Virgin Media O2, UK
“The insight industry’s role has changed so much, and gradually over time become much more about impact and delivery rather than sampling and methodology. In 2024 this delivery element has blown open even more – you can use AI voices to create podcasts, Copilot to build slide visuals, and Chat GPT to articulate findings. The lessons for us all are trial, evolve, and improve. In short – permit yourself to play! It makes it all so much more fun and engaging.”
Alex Hunt, CEO, Behaviorally, USA
“Fortune favors the bold: there’s an accelerating structural shift underway, away from research design, execution, and analysis, and toward systematized use of data analytics, that deliver more precise guidance, and act as useful foresight and intelligence for marketers who hold responsibility for commercial decision-making. Those succeeding in 2024 are both client-side departments and data and insights suppliers who are bold enough to reposition themselves on the right side of this tidal wave of change and much closer to commercial decision-making. We’ve certainly made this leap Behaviorally, and as with any major decision and notwithstanding that change is never straightforward, we’ve only ever wondered why we weren’t bolder, earlier.”
Mark Ursell, CEO, QuMind, UK
“We have seen a continuation of corporations taking more control of their insight process so I think the trend towards the Agencies needing to offer a hybrid model of tech and consultancy will continue. The upside of this is customer Insight is more and more at the top table of decision-making, which is where it should be. In addition, AI innovations have focussed on time-saving and operational efficiency rather than a radically new approach to gathering customer feedback and disseminating customer insight to decision-makers. There also continues to be focus, quite rightly on improving the quality of data the industry gathers as this is a key area for all of us to focus on.”
Although the role of insights has never been more important and instrumental to brands and industries, the industry stands at an evolution point that will likely accelerate the speed of innovation in the coming years. This will make generating and identifying insights both easier and more complex, but through it all, it should be quite exciting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Crispin Beale - Chief Executive, Insight250, Senior Strategic Advisor, mTab; Group President, Behaviorally
Crispin Beale 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 Group President at Behaviorally.