Greenbook hosted its annual IIEX North America Insight Innovation Exchange this past week in Austin, Texas, celebrating 10 years of the professional market research collaboration event. The venue featured several unique stages within the exhibit floor, allowing attendees to listen to presentations via wireless headphones. Unsurprisingly, the primary discussion topic among panelists and attendees revolved around AI and the potential implications, threats, and innovations for the market research industry.
Some key takeaways and learnings from this conference:
- AI is at the heart of market research’s future. Kathryn Topp, CEO/Co-Founder of Yabble joined Green Stage with Charlie Rader, Digital Insights Designer at Procter & Gamble to discuss how they are working together to explore AI and its implications for supercharging innovation and product research. As with many other sessions, the key theme was time being of the essence – research must happen at depth and same-day in order for companies to remain competitive during unprecedented market speed. As these teams presented, AI in its current form already can:
- Generate a survey
- Generate images or video
- Summarize data
- Theme or code data
- Analyze emotions in voice or video
- Read facial expressions and body language
- Detect fraudulent activity in surveys
- Search articles, documents, videos, web, and write a synopsis
- Write presentations
- Organizations must embrace AI tools to accelerate time to insights, today. It is clear that those who are not open to the changes that emerging AI presents. Organizations that shy away from embracing AI tools will not be able to compete with the pace that primary research is moving towards. New tools popping up every day will empower organizations to accelerate time to insights (instead of days, it becomes minutes) so that actionable decisions can be made faster.
- To beat the competition, research needs to be accelerated. Throughout the years, speed has always been paramount to market research professionals. The insights industry is responsible for future-proofing the businesses that support the needs of tomorrow’s consumers. Providing accurate and high-quality market analysis continues to be key.
- As it stands, there are certain things that AI cannot do. Undoubtedly, AI will transform market research, but it is also important to not lose sight of the human touch in insights. There are still many things that AI is not fully capable of such as understanding the nuances of multicultural research, conducting, and comprehending in-person research, and the emotional feelings of consumers that may drive purchasing habits in a less direct way.
Conclusion
AI is here to stay, and its continued evolution will heavily impact how market research is conducted. Speed remains of paramount importance as culture continues to progress, and it is on insights companies to embrace change to prepare for the future. It is clear that the traditional role of the researcher is not going anywhere, but how researchers conduct business and the scale at which they rely on technology will be highly subject to change in the coming years as AI continues to develop new capabilities.
About InnovateMR – InnovateMR is a full-service sampling and ResTech company that delivers faster, quality insights from business and consumer audiences utilizing cutting-edge technologies to support agile research. As industry pioneers, InnovateMR provides world-class end-to-end survey programming, targeted international sampling, qualitative and quantitative insights, and customized consultation services to support informed, data-driven strategies, and identify growth opportunities. Known for their celebrated status in customer service and results, InnovateMR combines boutique-level service with extensive global reach to achieve partner success.
