Navin Williams
CEO | MobileMeasure Consultancy
Author of Handbook of Mobile Market Research. Speaker, Researcher, Technologist, Change Adoption
Evangelist.
Navin brings his interesting perspective on how the industry is abuzz with talks on AI and
synthetic respondents from the recently concluded ESOMAR CONGRESS, as the future research looks
poised towards technological transformation.
I am fresh after attending our industry’s oldest Insights Conference “ESOMAR CONGRESS”, held
in Amsterdam, Netherlands between 10th and 13th of September 2023. ESOMAR celebrated its 75th
year and this conference was the largest ever for ESOMAR with over 1200 attendees, of which we had 250
odd clients. While the numbers are impressive, the true success of the conference lies in its diversity
with participation from over 80+ countries. Of all the global conferences I have attended over the
years, I can honestly say this was the most diverse conference I have ever attended with participation
in significant numbers from all continents, especially the developing and emerging markets.
While as professionals we keep track of the happenings in our industry via our environment, market,
clients, partners, technology, etc., a research conference like ESOMAR CONGRESS allows us to see all the
actions in one place and see where the most noise is coming from. In addition to that, the
post-conference and parallel networking events allow us to get to know each other better. One of these
events I attended was a CEO networking event and got to see and hear the voice of CEOs and get a glimpse
into the “2023 ESOMAR CEO INDUSTRY INSIGHTS” based on a survey amongst 300+ CEOs/MDs from the largest to
niche boutique research agencies globally.
The Survey was managed by Leger (Canada’s largest research agency) amongst ESOMAR members and
non-members. It was conducted in August 2023, so was recent enough to give us a good insight into what
the leaders of the research world are seeing and where they are taking us.
The ESOMAR CEO Industry Insights Report was comprehensive, and I wanted to
share some interesting takeaways which touched upon the future / technology adoption for our
industry:
-
AI can accelerate your internal process – currently the focus and utility of AI is
on improving processes and operational efficiency. Over half of the leaders claimed to
currently be using AI, while over a third plan on using AI in the next 12 months.
-
Many market opportunities – The top 3 activations planned in the next 3 years by our
industry leaders are “launch a new technology or platform”, “enter into a strategic
partnership”, and “open a new office outside your home country”.
-
Match made in Heaven - The most interesting responses were around the areas of sale
and purchase of firms in the market: 1 in 7 of the research leaders are looking to “sell
their business” vs the same number looking to “make an acquisition”.
NOTE: The 2023 ESOMAR CEO INDUSTRY INSIGHTS report was managed, compiled, and presented by Jean-Marc
Léger (Economist and founding President (CEO) – Leger, North America Member of the ESOMAR Board) and
Paige Schoenfeld (Senior Vice-President – Leger, North American Representative ESOMAR).
In addition to renewing connections and making new ones, the objective of a conference is to seek out
the next big thing and what the futurists are offering. Even before I reached the conference, the
industry was abuzz with talk about AI. The reality from the CEO survey and my talks with the numerous
researchers and leaders I met is that very little actual demonstrable work is happening using AI. Even a
lot of the work around process improvement and automation, I will classify as Machine Learning rather
than AI. This is mainly because the current AIs are mainly large language models, more like a Jack of
all trades and master of none. None are optimized and built exclusively for the purpose of market
research.
We may not see an LLM exclusively for market research anytime soon. However, we will start to see Small
Language Models which will be very specific and deep in knowledge in different areas like Sensory
Research or TVC Communication Research, etc. These will be prone to be more accurate, with less
hallucinations and have deep knowledge and usage within a narrow sphere of research. They may also be
proprietary, limiting their use and reach in the short term.
I heard and saw evidence of AI usage in two broad areas:
-
Operational excellence, process improvement and data management. Specifically, in the areas
of questionnaire design, data processing, data validation and data analytics.
-
Qualitative research in the areas of automated translations, transcriptions, summarizing
large interview / focus group transcripts, analysis, categorization of data into different
buckets for ease of analysis.
"We may not see an LLM exclusively for market research anytime soon. However, we will start to see Small
Language Models which will be very specific and deep in knowledge in different areas like Sensory
Research or TVC Communication Research."
Both these areas fall firmly in optimization and operation efficiency improvements and will continue to
evolve. Researchers will need to ensure the checks and balances added to validate these improvements are
in place before wider adoption. This is because if the researcher of the future is not involved in
certain processes that are handled entirely by an AI, then how can these researchers of the future be
able to catch, validate and correct. Currently processes are heavily based on experience of handling and
working with data. If this is replaced by AI, then we need to be able to ensure nothing unreliable gets
past. So, as we build efficiency with these new AIs at our disposal, we will also need to create new
processes to ensure the AIs are doing their job correctly. Giving rise to new jobs and opportunities;
“AI isn’t going to replace your job, but someone using AI will.” – bcs.org
Another area of interest that is being looked at as the holy grail of market research is “synthetic
respondents”. The synthetic respondents would be a pool of artificial respondents who are developed
based on existing databased and publicly available social media content to develop artificial consumer
profiles and personas that will mimic real consumer responses. The challenge is not in creating these
profiles to begin with but to refurbish, update, upgrade and evolve these profiles in an ongoing manner.
Further these personas will need to evolve based on their environment and dynamic ecosystem. While this
may change things drastically this will give emphasis and opportunity to areas like synthetic user
creation, user testing, user validation, user refurbishment and even user entombment.
Whichever direction a research service provider takes, they will have to answer some fundamental
questions around what kind of a business do they see themselves as a “research consulting service” or a
“technology product lead service”. The skill sets and resources required would be vastly different for
each. The new technology implementations today require specialists and dedicated teams to ensure we get
the best out of them. One solution or technology to fit all with minor tweaks is a thing of the past.
And finally, regulation and government policy around AI is still evolving. Regulatory policy may have
the final say on how we can and cannot use AI. Historically, market research has threaded a fine line
between privacy and delivery of insights. Hopefully, we can be part of the solution in growing this
potentially once in a lifetime technology transformation we find ourselves in.