2026 Agenda

The next breakthrough in insights won't come from a new tool - it'll come from a new method. Join us to explore why traditional research is becoming a liability, what behavioral measurement makes possible, and how Church & Dwight is using it to move faster, spend less, and make decisions their leadership actually trusts.
Key Takeaways:
1. The old research model isn't slowing you down - it's pointing you in the wrong direction.
2. The trade-off triangle is obsolete. Speed kills accuracy. Rigor kills relevance. AI convolutes.
3. Winning brands don't have bigger budgets. They have better signals, collected at the right moments.

Research only matters if people listen—and remember. This session explores how giving data a clear, creative voice helps research cut through, stick inside organizations, and travel externally. Joined by People Inc., we’ll unpack a project where the research itself became the content—a real-world example of making data truly talk.
Key Takeaways:
1. Why research needs a strong voice to capture attention and earn buy-in across teams
2. How creativity and storytelling help data stick internally and travel externally
3. How to make research memorable without losing rigor

Research teams are expected to answer more business questions today than ever before, but few have found a way to do it without sacrificing quality. In this session, Gordon Toon, Staff Researcher at Calendly, shares how his team leveraged AI-moderated research to inform their most ambitious product decisions. 

Key Takeaways: 

1. Where traditional research methods fall short and why Calendly turned to AI-moderated research 

2. How Calendly applies AI-moderated interviews across all parts of their business 

3. Where AI accelerates learning at scale, and where human judgment remains essential 

Synthetic data has moved from innovation labs into client decks, procurement conversations and live decision-making, requiring ever-stronger standards for guiding its use. In a landscape shaped by AI acceleration, budget pressure and demand for speed, buyers are being asked to trust augmented synthetic outputs without a shared language for evaluating them. This session offers a practical, globally relevant framework to help research leaders separate credible augmentation from statistical theatre and make confident, responsible decisions.
Key Takeaways:
1. Clarify what buyers are actually being offered by distinguishing augmented data, fully synthetic data and persona-based systems, and understanding where each can and cannot add value.
2. Move beyond surface validation by assessing fidelity, correlations, dependencies and real-world performance against intended business use.
3. Evaluate privacy, bias, compliance and vendor transparency considerations to ensure synthetic data strengthens, rather than weakens, trust in insights.

The sauce industry innovates on flavor. For Winland Foods analyzed over 40k+ consumer videos and discovered the real drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction have almost nothing to do with taste. This session shares what they found and how it's shaping product strategy.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Why sauce’s biggest negative sentiment driver isn’t flavor—and what video revealed surveys missed.

2. How sauce became a restaurant destination driver, not a side item—and what it means for brands.

3. The widening gap between what chefs create and menus offer—a whitespace hiding in plain sight.

Technology and AI have amplified consumer expectations and brand capabilities. Yet, as AI reshapes marketing, brands risk sliding into sameness: a loss of distinction, authenticity and growth. In this session, we explore how brands can thrive by reigniting the Human Spark: the creativity, cultural insight and community connection no algorithm can replicate.
Key Takeaways:
1. Understanding the paradox: How AI accelerates marketing but erodes brand distinction
2. How people are reframing what matters to them against the backdrop of AI acceleration
3. Applying the Human Spark framework to unlock differentiation in an AI world

How do you know if an activation worked — while it's still happening? CAA partnered with Reach3 Insights to find out. Using the Brand Experience Predictor (BXP), a proprietary measurement platform, 325 attendees at a major Super Bowl fan zone activation were surveyed in the moment via QR code—no post-event recall. The result was a rich, benchmarked picture of engagement, sharability and impact.
Key Takeaways:
1. In-the-moment measurement captures what post-event surveys miss.
2. Benchmarking across an experiential database transforms single-event data into strategic guidance.
3. Measure beyond recall — shareability and brand impact are just as critical.

Don’t miss the 2026 Greenbook Insight Innovation Competition at IIEX North America, where five finalists—AddMaple, BluePill AI, N-Infinite by Livepanel, Nichefire, and Panoplai—will take the stage to present their pitches live. 

Voting will close following the lunch break at 4:00 PM ET. Winners will be announced on Day Two of IIEX, Thursday, April 30 at 9:50 AM ET on the Blue Stage, with three awards presented: Experts’ Choice, Audience Favorite, and Industry Impact.

Most insights platforms assume the same workflow: log in, click through, export. We built one. It worked. Nobody opened it. In this talk, we'll share the pattern we kept seeing: when CMI teams stopped treating research as a destination and started treating it as a conversation inside Teams, everything changed. You'll leave with three questions to ask any vendor who pitches you a new dashboard.
Key Takeaways:
1. CMI teams make decisions in Teams and Slack, not in the research platform they bought
2. A research copilot inside existing tools beats another dashboard nobody opens
3. Three vendor questions that separate a useful copilot from a brittle one

As audiences increasingly “snack” on short form content, what do we lose when iconic scenes are consumed out of narrative context? This neuroscience-led study, a collaboration between Warner Bros Discovery and Neural Sense, compares short versus long formats using eye tracking and EEG to reveal how context shapes enjoyment, emotional engagement and memory, and what this means for content strategy.
Key Takeaways:
1. Snack grabs attention. Savour builds emotion. Learn when each works best.
2. Recognition is easy. Understanding is harder. See why context matters.
3. Familiarity feels good, but it doesn't improve memory. Rethink how brands use it.

Synthetic research is generating buzz, but most teams still lack a clear framework for when to use it and when not to. This session builds that framework. Qualtrics' Kayla Schou shares findings from dozens of controlled experiments to define the use cases where synthetic delivers real value—and the conditions where human data remains essential. You'll get an honest look at the traps researchers hit when adopting synthetic for the first time, the signals that tell you when a synthetic read is decision-grade, and the lessons learned by a team running these tools daily.

The Insights world is undergoing rapid, radical change—first from automation and SaaS tools, now from AI disrupting everything. Susan Griffin chats with researcher Sarah Snudden, who has tested emerging tools on both client and supplier sides and interviewed 50+ Insights leaders, to explore how practitioners are adapting, delivering impact, and pragmatically adopting new AI tools.

As traditional in-person qualitative methods remain largely unchanged and AI-driven approaches risk stripping away humanity, McCormick and Finch Brands explored a third path. In this session, you will hear how an AI-enhanced tailgating ethnography helped deepen human immersion and insight in live qualitative research.
Key Takeaways:
1. Use AI to enhance in person qualitative work without losing human connection
2. Create adaptive conversations rooted in deeper context and understanding
3. Preserve nuance and build qualitative insight that compounds over time

Prospects, active members, churned customers — they each have a story to tell. Solidcore VP of Strategy & Insights Gillian Almeida joins Strella COO Priya Krishnan to share how AI-moderated conversations unlocked qualitative understanding across the full customer lifecycle, both digitally and inside the studio, and how those insights drove real business decisions.

Generative AI has made creative execution effortless, but judgment hasn’t kept pace. As asset volumes explode, teams struggle to evaluate and decide effectively. This session introduces the Creative AI Loop, a full-stack approach using predictive, suggestive, and generative AI to move judgment upstream, close the insight–creative gap, and improve campaign performance by up to 50%.
Key Takeaways:
1. Apply the Creative AI Loop to scale creative judgment
2. Validate and optimize ads before launch
3. Turn data into usable creative guidance

You've heard a lot about AI in research. In this fireside chat, Sravanthi Kadali (The Insights Company) and Sharon Xiang (GlossGenius) get specific and honest about what's working, what's not — and where they keep AI out for now. They'll cover a Claude Skill that instantly answers VOC questions; how to ease customers into AI interviews and when to hold back; and how to approach synthetic research.
Key Takeaways:
1. How to ease users into AI interviews with options — and where to hold back
2. Using Claude Skills to pull the right Voice of Customer insights — instantly
3. A practical, honest framework for where AI fits in your research workflow and where it doesn't

What if deeper consumer understanding wasn't AI’s take on open-ended questions — it was a superhero secret lair? Inspired by a grandparent “getting on the carpet” to play with their grandchildren, Immersive Research employs behavioral science, gamification, and storytelling, to build customized research spaces where researchers, consumers, and clients explore objectives as co-participants.
Key Takeaways:
1. Why "show me" outperforms "tell me" in uncovering authentic consumer behavior
2. A practical and inspiring framework for designing immersive research environments at any scale
3. How experiential deliverables and Immersive Research drive insight retention far beyond the deck

Search behaviour has fundamentally shifted...and for a growing number of consumers, the journey now starts with short-form video, not a search bar. We quantified the shift, then dug into the why: what drives trust, what triggers action and when people switch. Join us to explore what this platform-fluid discovery journey means for your brand and research strategy.
Key Takeaways:
1. Why TikTok is winning high-intent search moments for speed, visual clarity and authenticity.
2. How consumers navigate a cross-platform trust loop from discovery to decision.
3. What this means for SEO, content strategy and how we should be studying search today.

AI solved fast, scalable research, but humans bring nuance and judgement that are core to insight. Outset is joined by customer, Material+, to share real case studies on what happens when you stop asking "AI or humans?" and start building systems where both do what they do best.
Key Takeaways:
1. AI vs. humans is the wrong frame. The real question is who does what — and when.
2. Human judgment isn't the last step anymore. It belongs at every stage.
3. AI made insight abundant. The differentiator now is judgment.

Think your skills are keeping up with what employers want? The insights landscape is changing fast—AI, business impact, and ROI are raising the bar. But candidates and promotion-seekers vs. hiring managers often aren’t aligned. This panel cuts through the noise to reveal what actually makes someone valuable today—and where many are falling short.
Key Takeaways:
1. Hear from our panel representing platforms, agencies, independent consultants, and recruiters
2. Learn where candidates and employers are most often misaligned—and why
3. Hear perspectives for what has genuinely changed in the past 12–18 months (and what hasn’t)

What if the next trillion-dollar advantage isn’t AI, but global talent hiding in plain sight? Frontier Innovations reveals how runway conversations, boardrooms, and the Future Ready Innovators Credential are collapsing the walls between education, work, and community by turning inclusion into the ultimate growth and productivity engine.
Key Takeaways:
1. Global post-digital talent is the next competitive advantage; those who activate it first will lead.
2. The walls between education, work, and community are collapsing into a new skills infrastructure.
3. Treat this as seriously as market strategy, not a social program, or risk being left behind.

In a world of increasingly sophisticated fraud, data trust is under pressure. This session pulls back the curtain on how research firms, brands and sample providers can work together to protect data quality. We’ll share results from testing 5 fraud detection platforms across thousands of completes and make the case for a layered defense strategy. The payoff: decisions you can stand behind.
Key Takeaways:
1. Learn how collaborative quality efforts between partners protect your brand
2. See real comparative results across 5 major fraud detection platforms
3. Leave with three questions every insights buyer should ask their providers

In a world of increasingly sophisticated fraud, data trust is under pressure. This session pulls back the curtain on how research firms, brands and sample providers can work together to protect data quality. We’ll share results from testing 5 fraud detection platforms across thousands of completes and make the case for a layered defense strategy. The payoff: decisions you can stand behind.
Key Takeaways:
1. Learn how collaborative quality efforts between partners protect your brand
2. See real comparative results across 5 major fraud detection platforms
3. Leave with three questions every insights buyer should ask their providers

The synthetic research conversation has outpaced the evidence. This session closes the gap. Qualtrics' Kayla Schou and Derrick McLean share raw results from synthetic pilots with three enterprise brands—spanning consumer travel, insurance, and digital banking—across three distinct use cases: rapid concept filtering to eliminate non-starters before human validation, insights-first persona segmentation that compresses weeks of analysis into days, and market signal augmentation that reveals trends beyond your existing customer base. Each pilot maps to a practical pattern for where synthetic stands on its own and where human data belongs alongside it. No theoretical frameworks. Just what worked, what didn't, and the decision logic you can apply to your own research questions.

This session introduces the Insight Multiplier, a practical framework for turning siloed consumer, shopper, retail, and business data into decision‑ready intelligence. Learn how integration—and Generative AI as an amplifier—can accelerate insights, improve alignment, and multiply impact.
Key Takeaways:
1. Insights stall when data stays siloed - connection drives action.
2. Integrating data streams turns information into strategic advantage.
3. GenAI accelerates insight work, but human judgment remains essential.

Synthetic personas are disrupting the insights industry and accelerating decision making.  Toluna, Haleon, and Takasago will reveal how AI-generated quant respondents rapidly screen claims, pressure-test innovation, and fuel faster decisions. Hear candid stories, surprising wins, and the new rules for high confidence research powered by a robust combination of artificial and human intelligence.
Key Takeaways:
1. How synthetic personas supercharge rapid claims screening at scale.
2. Why strong validation builds confidence across insights teams.
3. Where AI speed meets human judgment for smarter decisions.

Insights teams generate extraordinary intelligence, yet critical decisions often happen without it. Why? Because accessibility, speed, and synthesis remain barriers to activation. In this practical brand-and-tech case study, Albertsons and Stravito share how they transformed Albertson’s “Knowledge Hub” into an enterprise-wide solutions engine.
Key Takeaways:
1. Integrate trusted research sources and introduce AI-powered synthesis.
2. Reduce search time by 30% and return 2+ hours per week to more than half of active users.
3. Discover democratizing insights, scaling AI responsibly, and embedding data-informed decision-making

Insights teams generate extraordinary intelligence, yet critical decisions often happen without it. Why? Because accessibility, speed, and synthesis remain barriers to activation. In this practical brand-and-tech case study, Albertsons and Stravito share how they transformed Albertson’s “Knowledge Hub” into an enterprise-wide solutions engine.
Key Takeaways:
1. Integrate trusted research sources and introduce AI-powered synthesis.
2. Reduce search time by 30% and return 2+ hours per week to more than half of active users.
3. Discover democratizing insights, scaling AI responsibly, and embedding data-informed decision-making

After reviewing fifty-seven real-world use cases for Synthetic Data Systems, we developed a clear and practical way to describe how these systems work and how their quality can be evaluated. Too often, synthetic data is discussed in vague terms, relying on broad claims about realism or accuracy. Our taxonomy organizes Synthetic Data Systems into clear layers based on the types of outputs they produce, and the checks used to ensure those outputs are reliable. This structure helps providers, customers, and the wider industry assess synthetic data in consistent, comparable ways that reflect how it is actually used to support decisions.
The Modeled Answers and Insights layer delivers summarized conclusions directly to stakeholders, without requiring access to individual respondent data. The quality of these outputs depends on how well the underlying data is balanced and complete, and on whether the study design assumptions are realistic. When these controls are applied correctly, modeled insights remain credible and transparent, and clearly communicate uncertainty rather than masking it behind precise-looking numbers.
The Optimized Survey and Instrument layer focuses on improving how studies are designed before they go into the field. It produces guidance on feasibility, structure, and configuration to help ensure surveys can be executed as planned. Quality controls at this layer ensure that recommendations reflect real respondent behavior and operational limits, reducing the risk of designs that look good in theory but fail in practice.
The Decision Intelligence Layer brings together analysis-ready synthetic data with modeled trends and projections. This is the main layer used for analysis, reporting, and decision support. Quality controls here focus on making sure the data fairly represents the intended population and is not distorted by gaps or imbalances. By addressing these issues early, this layer helps ensure that downstream analyses and decisions are based on a solid and trustworthy foundation.

When products don’t fit neatly into existing categories, traditional research approaches can fall short. This session walks through a blended study design that combined qual exploration, quant validation, and real-world, in-context testing to evaluate an alternative pasta concept. The case illustrates how adapting methods to the category itself can uncover the right insights for success.
Key Takeaways:
1. Learn how a 3-phase study blended qual, quant, & live cooking to assess Better For You pasta demand
2. Understand how taste, texture, protein, and carbs shape pasta choice and guide product decisions
3. See how in-person cooking events delivered real-time feedback and deeper insight into product use

Insights professionals have long delivered critical intelligence, yet their impact has often ended at the point of delivery. The Decision Engineer represents an evolution in the role, where AI supports execution and researchers focus on connecting insights to strategy, translating consumer understanding into action, and shaping decisions that advance organizations. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Your new job isn't to find the insight — it's to engineer the decision. 

2. Intelligence without activation is just trivia. 

3. The tools changed. The stakes got higher. 

In a world where we have so much data and information at our fingertips, we need to remember that true insight doesn't come from reports or data alone, it comes from empathy and human insights. In this session will talk about how building the empathy muscle is essential for market researchers and their cross-functional partners, and how stepping outside our bubbles leads to deeper consumer connection and better innovation.  

Key Takeaways:
1. Why empathy matters: Understand the limits of reports, presentations, and even AI in capturing real human truths. Remind people of the bubbles we (and our cross-functional partners live in) and why we need to make a conscious effort to bring empathy into decision making.
2. How to build empathy muscles: We will share practical ways for market researchers and their cross functional partners to build their empathy muscles.  We will share examples of ways we have gotten people out of their bubbles (at Campbell's and beyond) and connect with consumers and suggestions for when/how to incorporate empathy into their work.

AI can analyze research faster than any team in history. It can even simulate consumers. But when companies start replacing human research with synthetic insight, something dangerous happens. The strange behaviors, contradictions, and surprises that spark breakthrough ideas disappear. Insights start averaging out and the edges vanish.

The Ready-To-Drink beverage category is a crowded space, and consumers are rewriting the rules for the different functional and emotional roles these beverages play in their daily lives. To truly understand consumers’ RTD beverage habits, preferences, needs, and offer innovative solutions, brands require a research methodology that is as dynamic as the consumers themselves.

Want to replicate this success? This presentation outlines a proven framework for decoding these shifting behaviors. By blending innovation with targeted consumer research including qualitative in-home ethnographies with robust quantitative concept evaluation we provide a blueprint for success. Attendees will walk away with actionable strategies to unlock deep insights and connect with today’s RTD drinker on a meaningful level.

The Lovechild of Empathy and Accessibility, Convenience is the gift of mental space in a crowded world. Brands focused on satisfying experiences bring an ease to customers that is repaid through brand loyalty.
Key Takeaways:
1. Convenience calms the nervous system, helping customers feel seen & valued with every interaction.
2. Brands that prioritize convenience build customer loyalty that can withstand turbulent times.
3. Too much convenience can be a slippery slope i.e. social media, sports betting, and tap to pay.

The synthetic research market has exploded—over $1.5B in venture funding, a dozen platforms with compelling demos, and no shortage of impressive-sounding accuracy stats. But how do you separate research-grade tools from confident noise? In this session, Derrick McLean from Qualtrics cuts through the performance claims and evaluation frameworks that have been flooding the market—breaking down what's worth paying attention to and what's not. You'll learn what questions to ask any synthetic vendor about model training, validation methodology, and being a good AI partner. Derrick opens the hood on how Qualtrics' synthetic model is built: the research-grade data that trains it and the validation that proves it. Come skeptical. Leave equipped.

In our fast-moving, AI-powered industry, the human instincts behind great research are at risk. As speed and automation increase, depth, judgment, and intentionality can erode. This session explores how to recalibrate through a fresh perspective on foundational skills that cut through noise, improve decision-making, and create more thoughtful, future-ready insights.
Key Takeaways:
1. Reevaluate the foundational skills that matter most in modern research.
2. Strengthen judgment and decision-making in high-speed environments.
3. Build a more intentional, future-ready approach to insights.

As budgets tighten and AI accelerates product cycles, the insights industry faces a crisis: evolve or be bypassed.  Digital twins and synthetic audiences offer speed and scale, but they risk automating bias if trained on flawed data. Can we maintain human truth at machine velocity? Join our panel to discuss the ethics, governance, and future of research in an AI-driven world.
Key Takeaways:
1. Research must match AI’s speed to remain relevant in shrinking decision cycles.
2. What a "hybrid future" means for the research industry: the pros and the cons.
3. The new frameworks and guardrails needed to balance machine efficiency with human authenticity.

Protein is everywhere, but winning isn't. Whether you're eating protein, selling protein, or just trying to figure out why everything suddenly has protein in it, this session is for you. Think of it as a behind-the-scenes look at how we're placing our chips, reading the table, and deciding where to go "all in".
Key Takeaways:
1. Understand how the protein category is evolving
2. Take a look at the bets being placed across the portfolio
3. Learn what it takes to stand out and convert in a crowded space.

Faster surveys. Automated analysis. Synthetic respondents. The industry is racing to build a more efficient version of the function that's already losing budget faster than any other marketing category. Efficiency AI doesn't solve the respect problem. It deepens it.

This session makes the case for a different bet — and a different identity. Behavioral AI, built on a validated framework for how humans actually decide.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Why the profession's AI investments are accelerating the decline they're meant to reverse

2. What behavioral designers do that insights professionals don't — and why that distinction determines who survives the next budget cut

3. How behavioral AI makes the right identity finally scalable — and what claiming that identity actually looks like in practice

A practical look at where AI helps in respondent recruitment. And where human expertise still makes all the difference
Key Takeaways:
1. AI is your assistant, not your final answer
2. Respondent phone screen is our superpower
3. The best teams don't choose AI or human. They choose both

Join three of Greenbook’s 2026 Future List Honorees from LATAM for a conversation on the future of insights leadership across the region. As rising voices in the industry, they will share how they are navigating diverse markets, bringing greater cultural and business nuance to their work, and helping redefine the role of insights in fast-changing environments. Attendees will hear firsthand what global audiences often overlook about LATAM — and where these emerging leaders see the greatest opportunities ahead.
Key Takeaways:
1. Better understand the complexity, diversity, and strategic importance of the LATAM market research and insights landscape.
2. Hear how Future List Honorees in the region are shaping the future of insights through leadership, innovation, and influence.
3. Gain fresh perspective on how insights leaders are navigating nuance, opportunity, and change across LATAM.

Advertising has shifted from a few big bets to continuous, high-frequency decision-making across channels—yet insights hasn’t kept pace. This session explores how AI, synthetic data, and hybrid approaches are reshaping how teams validate creative at speed, enabling faster, more confident decisions across the campaign lifecycle.
Key Takeaways:
1. Why high-frequency decisioning breaks traditional insights models
2. How AI + synthetic data enable faster, scalable validation
3. A hybrid model: combining human and synthetic for better decisions

In a market full of AI moderated solutions, foundational research that actually moves businesses forward is still deeply human, and what determines which brands truly understand their consumers and which only think they do.  Studio by buzzback is transforming what teams can achieve by putting depth, diversity, and caliber of expert talent that drives great research right at their fingertips.
Key Takeaways:
1. How a marketplace model removes the friction that has traditionally limited qual
2. How teams go from RFP to insights in days using Studio's end-to-end workflow
3. Agility without sacrifice: what it looks like when speed and rigor aren't in conflict

AI changes everything when prospects search for things to buy. SEO’s impact is waning, as we have entered the age of "zero-click search". Your customers may never come to your website before making a buying choice. Where your brand story gets told in this new world makes all the difference. You must appear in the trusted sources AI systems rely on, to be discovered, evaluated, verified and chosen.
Key Takeaways:
1. Learn how “zero-click search” and the new rules of LLMs should inform your marketing strategies
2. Discover the metrics that no longer matter in the quest to add, influence and convert customers
3. Uncover your hidden assets that “zero-click search” will leverage, IF delivered by a trusted source

It’s never been easier to create, but it's harder to create well. As output grows, quality is slipping, widening the gap between what gets built and what actually resonates with people.

In this fireside chat, Bloomberg’s Arty Rivera brings a perspective shaped by years of applying human-centered design not just to products, but to how organizations make decisions. His work goes beyond usability, digging into the emotional drivers behind everyday behaviors and helping teams connect what they build to what people actually need in the moments that matter.

Together, we’ll explore what it takes to raise the bar: moving past volume and velocity to design experiences grounded in real human context. We will also examine why the ability to think critically about people, not just outputs, is becoming the difference between noise and meaningful impact.

Back, by popular demand! This panel of clients is an unfiltered conversation about what it takes to build partnerships that last. Expect candid views on client challenges, trust, and what you can do differently to show up as genuine strategic partners, not just another outreach in the inbox. 

This session will leave you with practical, honest takeaways straight from the people whose opinion matters most.

Key Takeaways:

1. Hear directly from end-clients on how they find and start relationships with a new partner.

2. Understand client challenges and how you can support them.

3. Leave with strategies to stand out from the competition.

How a 56 year old legacy non-profit balances data and creativity to drive brand reach and relevance with today’s Gen Alpha viewers and Gen Z and Millennial fans and parents.
Key Takeaways:
1. Don't discount the importance of stakeholder buy-in
2. Creating engaging expressions of a brand for multiple audiences is hard but possible
3. Selecting the right data to inform the right questions is key

As budgets and teams get smaller, but the demand for insight grows across the organization, how can you adapt to the changing times?

In this case study, HelloFresh speaks to the challenges many marketing and insights teams face around budget cuts and capacity crunches and highlights practical ways to solve these shared pain points via AI-powered insights. 

Conor will share advice on how to bridge the gap between marketing and insights teams, how to execute custom research with agility and how to improve stakeholder buy-in to inform decision-making across the organization on a daily basis.

Key Takeaways:

1. How to introduce AI-powered insights without increasing cost or impacting quality.

2. How to improve buy-in with clear and meaningful insights from a stakeholder's perspective. 

3. How to bridge the gap between marketing and insights teams to achieve cross-functional clarity and insight-led decision-making across the organization. 

The project-based research model isn't just slow—it's structurally mismatched to how organizations make decisions. Qualtrics market research COE leaders Ellen Houston and Emily Currie show what it takes to operationalize the shift from research-as-service to research-as-infrastructure. They'll introduce a governance model for deciding what your team should own, partner on, enable, and experiment with—then map it to the technology layer making it real: autonomous agents that handle study design and execution, synthetic capabilities that deliver speed and scale without sacrificing rigor, and a unified platform that consolidates quant and qual across MR, UX, product, and brand research under one roof. You'll leave with a framework for redesigning your operating model and a clear view of the tools entering the market to support it.

In today’s crowded “better-for-you” beverage landscape, innovation often outpaces consumer relevance. This session examines how Edelman, in partnership with Remesh, deployed a rapid, AI-powered research program to identify what truly resonates with health-conscious consumers. The session outlines a structured, four-phase approach that delivered both scale and depth within a compressed timeline.
Key Takeaways:
1. How AI-powered research accelerates decision-making while preserving methodological rigor
2. Why consumer language is essential, showing the need for human-led research vs synthetic personas
3.  A framework for generating agile insights—progressing from discovery to validated claims quickly

Join Hormel’s Dave Anderko and Market Logic’s Joseph Rini for a discussion on how Hormel is reshaping their consumer insights’ function. From interacting with synthetic customer personas to identifying demand space opportunities, this session will offer a look at how Hormel is currently implementing AI that adds real value to their innovation processes for marketers, product teams, and more.
Key Takeaways:
1. Current Hormel use cases for synthetic personas, gen-AI powered research, and more
2. The opportunities and risks to consider when leveraging AI in research workflows
3. How to build and scale new AI tools effectively across business units

The oldest problem in market research is the say-do gap. For forty years we have patched it with better survey design, better incentives, and longer diaries. None of it closes. Computer vision models are the first scalable instrument we have that can actually narrow the gap, but only if researchers use them for interpretation and not just detection.
Key Takeaways:
1. Vision closes the say-do gap, but only if you use it for interpretation, not just detection.
2. The next frontier is vision from inside the subject, not just vision of the subject.
3. World models are coming. The quality of inputs will determine the quality of the research.

Dave, Stan & Stephen will explore the important and enduring role human emotions play for brands. They’ll discuss the latest research tools and techniques that generate the most effective insights into human emotions and what you can do with them. And they will look into the future and reveal their predictions of what’s going to change vs stay constant for researchers in a world dominated by AI
Key Takeaways:
1. Deeper understanding of why human emotions matter most for brands
2. Practical research tools and techniques to help uncover insights into human emotions
3. Predictions of changes and constants for researchers of human emotions and so where to focus effort

Key Takeaways:
1. At public institutions, the departments that lead the organization are often not consumer-centric.
2. Biases toward quantitative, historical data direct attention away from current causes and effects.
3. To effect positive change, we must recognize such biases and learn how to tackle them.

Change how you make innovation decisions by scaling your intuition and validating it with behavioral science. Facing pressure to rapidly launch profitable new products, La Brea Bakery worked with a dream team of research partners to overcome the Innovator’s Paradox with human insights grounded in reality instead of the usual polite fictions. Learn how they did it and how you can too.
Key Takeaways:
1. Do away with focus groups + surveys and get real with raw digital truths and actual buying behavior.
2. Use a psychic satellite to detect million-dollar consumer friction points no standard tool can see.
3. De-risk your decisions with behavioral auctions that show you real consumer demand for new products.

We often fix consumer bias but forget our own. This quick, engaging talk reveals how our brains secretly shape what we “see” in the data - from confirmation bias to social proof heuristic - and offers simple ways to catch ourselves before our instincts shape the story.
Key Takeaways:
1. Spot the secret biases shaping your “objective” insights.
2. Learn simple ways to catch your brain in the act.
3. Leave with bias proofing habits for more authentic insights.

As AI becomes the interface to organizational knowledge, research no longer informs one decision; it feeds systems shaping thousands. Yet AI cannot judge nuance, detect bias, or question methodology. This session reframes researchers as the conscience of AI, ensuring data is real, representative, and trustworthy, and that AI learns from the right answers.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Reframe your role from data provider to trust infrastructure in an AI-driven org.

2. Rigor, representativeness, and bias control are what AI lacks. Turn that into influence.

3. Leave with mindset shifts to keep MR relevant, influential, and irreplaceable in AI.

Measurement determines what gets valued, optimized, and scaled. In this session, Jim Ballas from Magellan AI and Brent Lightfoot from iHeartMedia show how new measurement signals are bringing audio into parity with display, CTV, and digital video. Learn how the latest attribution innovations let buyers evaluate podcasts, streaming, and broadcast radio using the same standards across the media mix.
Key Takeaways:
1. Understand how modern attribution puts audio on equal footing with digital
2. Explore how podcasts, streaming, and radio are now measurable side by side
3. Gain insight into how better standards unlock audio's true impact