Impact of Generative AI on Market Research: by Market Researchers

In this 3rd post, I’ll continue with findings from our “Impact of Generative AI on Market Research” survey results, focusing on reasons for no impact or a negative impact perceived by our industry peers on their organization’s competitiveness, or the orange and red bars in the coded results below.

There’s definitely vulnerability and resistance: “The danger of AI taking control. The danger of I&A staff being made redundant”, “Replacing humans, analytics specifically”, “Devastating technology, soulless”, “Lower threshold for low-quality insights”, "because we still rely a lot on assigning meaning to the information we produce. AI cannot do that yet (and I wonder if it will ever)."

There are many others who consider Generative AI an equalizer, therefore hard to gauge its potential impact: “It’s available to all agencies”, “Because it’s available to all companies, why would only we benefit?”, “It's an even contest to take what you can from the tech and systems. I don't expect to do any better or any worse.”

The biggest uncertainty comes from how quickly their organizations will adapt and adopt; I will include a few quotes to illustrate:

"In the financial industry, it is common practice to utilize technologies with a proven track record of reliability and security to ensure that operations and data are kept secure." - Clientside

- "We work in the public sector. By the time they get around to using it and trusting it, we'll all be retired. We would need client demanding for it and clear use cases." - Agency

- "I just don't think we are going to move quickly enough to leverage this technology in a meaningful way. I think they will start with the low-hanging fruit, which everybody will use. I would like to see them take some more risks and make some hires on the product development team who truly understand how to leverage this technology." - Platform / ResTech / Panel

- "I don’t think they can adapt fast enough. (inca: What do you think your company could do to stay competitive in the face of generative AI?) Start a new business" (Wow, that's bold - my own annotation)

So far, we've shared how our industry peers feel about the impact of Generative AI on their organizations. Next up, we will look at the perceived impact on their own roles. Really interesting, nuanced and rich emotions shared - please stay tuned.

Methodology: inca | Nexxt Intelligence conducted a survey using inca, its conversational AI survey platform, in the two weeks before and after IIEX Europe 2023 (March 23 to April 6). This report is based on 172 completed surveys collected (Clientside n=41, Platform/ResTech/Panel n=33, Agency n=69). The coded results used inca AI Coding.