How AI Tech is Doing the ‘Heavy Lifting’ for Insights

The Insight250 spotlights and celebrates 250 of the world’s premier leaders and innovators in market research, consumer insights, and data-driven marketing. The awards have created renewed excitement across the industry whilst strengthening the connectivity of the market research community. Winners of the 2024 Insight250 were announced this past September - you can see the full list of Winners at Insight250.com.

With so many exceptional professionals named to the Insight250, it seems fitting to tap into their expertise and unique perspectives across various topics. This regular series does just that: inquiring about the expert perspectives of many of these individuals in a series of short topical features. 

This edition features John Sevec. For over 35 years John has been at the forefront of research innovation. As Senior Vice President of mTab, he oversees client strategy for the industry's premier Decision Intelligence Platform to generate and democratize insights. He has also been honored as an MRS Research Hero.

I sat down with John to discuss how technology advancements, including AI, are enhancing the speed and efficiency of insight discovery and doing an increased amount of ‘heavy lifting’ for the market research process in leading enterprises facing decreasing resource.

Crispin: John, based on what you’re seeing, what role is AI playing in the realm of insights?

JS: “As the capabilities of AI continue to emerge the technology is starting to make some significant impacts with the ‘heavy lifting’ of data processing, research analysis and insight identification. However, we’re still in the relatively early stages of the advancements we’re seeing, so as the innovation around AI expands so will its role and impact.”

Crispin: mTab delivers decision intelligence, what exactly does this provide to enterprises?

JS: “The foundation of most Insight Teams is to deliver intelligence for teams across their organization, like Marketing, Product, Engineering, Production, etc. Our decision intelligence technology focuses on providing this intelligence more efficiently and effectively to make more rapid and impactful decisions company-wide.

“Streaming the foundation and function of consumer insights allows Insight Teams to accomplish more and focus on delivering value to the organization faster.”

 Crispin: How do you see this sort of technology impacting the personnel of insight teams?

JS: “Across many industries we support we have seen a reduction in personnel, largely related to the state of the economy. This sort of technology allows teams to do more. These advancements augment the research tasks, helping insight professionals to focus on higher-value activities like strategy, innovation and story development. It’s taking teams from spreadsheet immersion to streamlined insights.”

Crispin: Do you think AI will replace insight operations down the road?

JS: “Some would say ‘predicting the future is futile,’ however context and creativity are critical to uncovering and explaining insights. Technology can process and sort through data at incredible rates but it cannot interpret the business context of issues and deliver the creative problem-solving, which is why Insight Teams will continue to be fundamental to innovation and understanding.

“Insight Teams play a critical role in interpreting data and aligning it with broader business goals. AI lacks strategic judgment. Beyond this, insight professionals often serve as connectors between data analysis and business stakeholders, fostering alignment across departments. This is too critical to the operation of a business to put it in the hands of algorithms.”

Crispin: What are the primary applications where AI-powered technology can make the largest immediate impact?

JS: “That’s the key question for most companies. AI is a great buzzword, but adopting proven technology and knowing where to apply it is the vital answer everyone is after. We see some of the most immediate impacts of technology when it’s applied to data synthesis and processing and automated workflows. It’s the ‘heavy lifting’ that we talked about earlier, where burdensome processes can now be done in seconds or minutes instead of days or weeks. 

“While there are often universal applications that get an immediate lift from this sort of technology, every market research process is unique, so identifying the appropriate applications (the where and how) across the workflow is essential to the technology becoming a boon rather than a burden.”

HOT TOPIC: AI Expertise

Crispin: As AI becomes more mainstream, should Insight Teams make AI expertise part of their hiring process? 

JS: “Ideally, no. And this is a focal point of how we develop our technology at mTab. We’ve been at the forefront of insight innovation since the 1980s, which has always been built around the insight professional. They have enough to worry about without needing to have special skills to operate the latest tech advancements.

“As our market research solutions evolved from the personal computer to the Internet to the cloud and beyond, every step has been tailor-built for the market researcher to easily operate it. It’s no different with our decision intelligence platform which is built on point-and-click solutions. A lot of technology today will demand additional expertise on your team to operate and maintain it but with resources at a premium, most Insight Teams we work with don’t have that luxury, which is why we take the approach we do in our design and development." 

TOP TIP

JS: “My top tip for insight and research pros is to cautiously embrace innovation. There is danger in being an early or late adopter of technology advancements. Pouncing early can make you a guinea pig assuming a lot of risk, whereas holding back too long can have you fall way behind.”

Crispin: John, thank you for sharing your unique perspective on how so many industries are elevating their connection with and impact on comsumers by enhancing the discovery and utility of insights. It’s particularly interesting how decision intelligence is elevating the impact of Insight Teams to help enterprise-wide teams make smarter, faster decisions that enhance products, increase business and elevate brands.