What 30 coffees with Head of Insights taught me

Thirty of them. Different industries. Different team sizes. Different budgets. Different countries too

Every conversation I had, people were raw and honest which I hugely appreciated.

But the same truth kept coming up.

Most insight teams felt like they weren’t taken seriously enough, in comparison to a different department.

Not because the work is bad. The work is often A*.

Mostly because it either didn’t land where it needed to, or people found it interesting but now ‘wow’!

Here's what I learned.

The gap nobody wants to talk about

Almost every Head of Insight I spoke to believed their team operated as a strategic partner to the business.

It was great to hear, and sounded positive.

Interestingly Research by GRBN and BCG shows that nearly 60% of insight professionals consider themselves strategic partners. However, an Independent assessment placed only 1 in 3 at that level.

That gap, between how teams see themselves and how the business actually sees them, is the tactical challenge and opportunity our industry faces.

And most teams aren't even aware it exists. 

The four signs your team isn't being taken seriously

I started asking every Head of Insight the same question early in our conversations.

"When did your research last change a decision? Can you name it?"

Teams who struggled to answer shared the same habits.

They reported data as it came in. No translation. No consequence. Just findings.

They waited for briefs. Reactive by default, proactive only when pushed.

They spoke in percentages. Not in risk. Not in revenue. Not in the language their stakeholders or general business actually used.

And they measured themselves by outputs. Such as when reports were delivered. Projects completed. Trackers running. Not by decisions influenced.

One Head of Insight told me something that stuck: "We were obsessed with the quality of our work. We never stopped to ask whether anyone was doing anything with it."

Sound familiar? 

Think like a content creator, not a researcher

Here's something the best teams understood that the rest didn't.

Research isn't finished when the analysis is done.

It's finished when someone acts on it.

And to get someone to act on it, you have to think about how they receive it.

Every great marketing campaign has a distribution strategy. A format designed for the audience. A message built for the moment it'll be read.

Research teams do all the hard work and then hand over the same 15-slide deck. To stakeholders who are busy, distracted, and have three other priorities.

The insight isn't the problem. The format is.

The best insight leaders I met had started asking a simple question at the end of every project:

"How would I want to receive this if I had five minutes?"

Then they changed the output into:

- A one-page decision memo.

-    A short Slack stat.

-    A voice note summary.

-    An infographic.

-    A two-minute video.

The insight didn't change. The format did.

And format is what gets read, shared, and acted on.

This isn't dumbing down, but it’s providing the highest form of clarity. 

AI won't kill our industry. But it will create a two-speed profession.

Every conversation I had eventually landed here.

AI. What does it mean for us?

Lets face it. Everyone is asking the same question.

The researchers who were worried about AI replacing them were, almost without exception, the ones still describing their value in terms of what they do.

The surveys they run.

The focus groups they moderate.

The reports they write.

The researchers who weren't worried were the ones describing their value in terms of what they change.

Here's the uncomfortable truth:

AI won't make great insight leaders redundant. But it will make the gap between good and average researchers much wider, much faster.

If your competitor's insight team is using AI to synthesise qual in minutes, build stimulus overnight, and turn a debrief into a board-ready one-pager before you've finished your first draft. You won’t be just slower, you’re becoming less relevant.

The researchers who treat AI as a threat are going to feel that squeeze.

The ones who treat it as leverage, more time for the thinking, the relationships, the commercial conversations that machines can't have are going to look indispensable.

The tool isn't the point. The time it gives you back is. 

The shift that changes everything

After thirty conversations, one thing is clear.

The researchers who command respect by being invited to strategy meetings, influence decisions they want to have a say on, all have made a similar shift in their careers.

They stopped measuring their value by what they produce.

They started measuring it by what actions have happened as a result of their work.

That's not a skills upgrade. It's an identity shift.

And it's available to every insight team, right now, without a bigger budget or a better methodology.