Insight-led feels like a baseline for how businesses say they operate right now: in particular, design thinking has popularised the idea that to grow or do good things in the world, an insights-led approach is critical. I don’t disagree, having built my career in the market research industry up to now, I love that more people are seeking out insights.

Image credit: Tiero, iStockPhoto, Stock photo ID:1285957020 (I have licensed this myself)

But I see a real shift in the ways people think about, seek, and use insights. This makes me wonder about a wider shift in the way businesses will use data and insights into the future, and the models that bring insights into businesses. I’ve done a deep dive into the future of the market research industry, but I think it could actually be expanded to encompass all industries that seek to provide businesses with information that helps to change their minds or directions, not least the foresight industry.

Within that deep dive just a few of the clear drivers that will shape the future include:

  • The role of AI (obviously, what post would be complete without mention of AI). But more specifically, who owns and directs the AI could have massive impact on the agenda that AI has in an insights space. Within the market research industry there are a myriad of companies developing proprietary tech, at some point this will be rationalized. Whoever takes up the mantle of buying smaller players and owning this space will have a huge amount of power to drive the slant AI gives us on our insights.
  • Synthetic respondents are a part of this – there’s a shift away from asking humans to loading historical human data into AI and asking it to answer new questions with old data. The question that raises for me: will innovation stall at the point where we shifted from human to AI? What happens to those innovations built off the things we can’t express, the problem spaces defined between the gaps in what we are able to verbalize?
  • The models for consultancy and how consultants interact with the client. With so many tools available, the big consultancy (market research, strategy, foresight, design thinking, you name it…) just doesn’t seem feasible in many cases. Why pay $200k for a project when an internal team can get it to 80% with out any external outlay. Rather than the consultant as the expert the consultant is simply one tool out of many, unless we shift the model in how we serve customers.

There are a whole host of other drivers that are shifting the insights industry, but these ones feel like they have the largest possibility of creating very different futures for the insights industry.

As with any good foresight project this deep dive explored four very different scenarios for the insights industry, which I’d be happy to chat anyone through. But beyond that, some of the questions these scenarios raised are things that we as foresight consultants might do well to consider:

  • In a world where insights (and foresight scanning) becomes automated and cheap, what is the role of the insights professional in the industry? My gut feel is that the models are likely to shift. For example: can we step up to become the ‘creative director’ that bolts onto insights teams, providing a strategic direction for the activity that is happening within our client organisations.
  • In a world where AI becomes the engine that drives data (not even insights, but base data that we build insights off), how can we avoid the hidden (or not so hidden) agendas of the people driving that engine? What do we need to bring from traditional models to sit alongside the AI to keep it honest or test for biases to ensure insights don’t lose power as they lose veracity?
  • In a world where clients are more used to seeing ROI for everything – from machinery investment to marketing spend how do we two very distinct things in the face of this: 1) Show the ROI of actions taken from insights (or foresight), while at the same time 2) make people understand that true strategic insight (and foresight) has power that is beyond the immediate financial year, that it builds future resilience and direction that is hard to truly quantify?

What is clear from the deep dive on market research: if we don’t have answers for this for ourselves and our own practice, someone else will decide for us and/or we’ll be left behind. We need to find a place to stand and think wider about the models we want to work in and start driving clients towards them now to be seen as leaders worth following in the insights space.

Sarah Woollett is a currently a Master’s student in the program from New Zealand. She is a market research professional who wrote this essay as part of Pro Seminar class.