Tales from the Trenches

The future of research and AI being part of it? “Can't get away.”

Why secondary research is great for painting the landscape and giving you the 50,000 foot view of what consumers are doing.

Why AI "will be an enabler, not a replacer."

"I avoid it Google all costs. A lot of it has to do with: 'is it relevant to my question?' 90% of the time it's not."

"We're not doing research for the sake of doing research. We're doing research to make a business impact. How is AI ultimately translating to the executive business decision making that we're making as an organization?"

On why staying relevant is super important and how three types of insights are interconnected. 

On how "research will get better, not because of AI, but because of how people continue to use AI."

"One person, one company, honestly can't do it all anymore. Things are just so complex. Because of that, we're now having to get more and more partners to help us accelerate faster and innovate faster – the world doesn't wait. "

"I can Google all day and still be missing things and LLMs can be hallucinating all day. But I know that there are still sources out there that I haven't thought of."

"It's exciting and I’m interested in seeing what it can do. Where can it come in? Where is it best used? Where to steer clear?"

"That external view on what trends are happening? It’s really, really useful, and is really beneficial to provide a contextual framework."

"AI can be innovative, but also sort of dangerous. Innovative in the sense of it can help change things, but dangerous in terms of knowing how to use it."

"That kind of tangential link is not going to be made so easily by AI. That’s what it means to be a human being: you are the product and the sum total of a range of cultural influences."

"Having this baseline of desk research in terms of understanding the general landscape is super important. But staying up with everything is just an endless, endless task."