​With AI now in the mix, insights organisations must ask themselves whether research skills are still relevant; what will AI do better and how AI will enable insights professionals to do better as a result. Read the first article in a series about the impact of AI on key areas of Insights, along with implications for the commercial and business role of insights leaders.

AI and Research

With AI now in the mix, the question on the table for insights organizations is whether research skills are relevant anymore. Or rather, which skills will be relevant for the future of commerce.

In particular, insights must reinvent itself as AI takes over the research process—writing and programming questionnaires, sampling and interviewing respondents, tabulating and modeling results. As things like synthetic sampling become more refined, data collection may shift from survey responses to social mood. Even some of the thinking that we believe is uniquely human will be done by AI, such as figuring out the headline takeaways for charts or recommending the next iteration of ad copy based on test results.

Much of this future is here already. We know because we are doing these things at Kantar. Not to make insights irrelevant. But to improve insights by helping insights teams navigate this transition to win.