Explore the IIEX West 2026 Agenda

AI adoption introduces two risks to insights organizations: the Productivity Alibi, which lets output quality erode while dashboards look fine, and cognitive foreclosure, which erodes judgment before it fully develops. This talk introduces a five-category framework for operationalizing judgment without sacrificing quality of intelligence — mapped directly onto research work.

Key Takeaways:

1. The two risks of AI adoption that impact the insights organization.

2. How cognitive foreclosure erodes judgment even as intelligence seems sound.

3. A five-category framework for mapping AI delegation across research work.

How can AI help research shape business strategy? This session explores how leaders can focus research on consequential decisions and make existing insights more accessible through AI. Attendees will learn actionable approaches to AI adoption, trustworthy evidence systems, and preserving human judgment, while assessing whether easier access to research translates into stronger business decisions. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Focus on decisions where uncertainty is high and better evidence can materially change outcomes. 

2. Give researchers time to experiment with AI and share successes and failures. 

3. Make research more accessible while preserving context, human judgment, and accountability. 

AI adoption is exploding and is already reshaping how we shop, eat, travel, and work. But trust is cratering, and here's the twist: the people adopting fastest, like Gen Z, trust it least. This isn't a say-do gap; it's the reverse. We'll explore why the dissonance between AI behavior and belief is the real signal researchers should measure and why ignoring it invites backlash.

Key Takeaways:

1. Stop reading AI adoption as approval. Behavior and belief have split.

2. Track the "icky feeling". Unease is a leading indicator of backlash.

3. Insight's real mandate: find the struggle so brands can relieve it.

MaxDiff reliably shows what people prioritize, but stops short of explaining the choices behind the ranking. At Conveo we run MaxDiff through AI-moderated interviews, so participants make the same forced trade-offs and then talk through them in their own words. A ranking you can trust with the reasoning attached, at quant scale. We'll close on pricing, with Gabor-Granger and Van Westendorp.

Key Takeaways:

1. How MaxDiff works inside an AI-moderated interview, and why people made each trade-off

2. Why a method filed under quant can deliver qual depth without losing its rigor

3. How the same approach applies to pricing, with Gabor-Granger and Van Westendorp

Winning the Insight Innovation Competition is a moment; building what comes next is a much longer journey. Bringing together five consecutive IIEX North America winners offers a rare look at companies at very different stages, from a recent winner still in the scrappy growth phase to businesses navigating organic growth, leadership transitions, significant outside investment, and potential acquisition. Karen Lynch asks what changed after the winning pitch, what the market validated or challenged, and how each leader now defines progress and impact.
Key takeaways:
1. How the opportunities and challenges facing an innovation change as the company matures
2. What different paths to growth, including outside investment, organic expansion, and leadership transition, can mean for a company and its founders
3. What startups should understand about the journey from entering an innovation competition and pitching investors to building and scaling a viable business

DIY screening tools have earned their place in packaging research. But as insight teams look for more

convenient, service-based alternatives, a key question remains: how do you build trust in a new AI-

enabled approach? This session shares Clorox real-world journey through five proof points collected

over a year, showing how confidence was built step by step, from back-testing against known results to

live screening decisions and full category shelf evaluation. Attendees will gain a practical understanding

of where predictive AI screening adds value, where it fits within the testing continuum, and why human

validation still plays a critical role.

Don’t miss the 2026 Greenbook Insight Innovation Competition at West, where five finalists—Enlightn, Datacy, Priceagent, TestCart AI and EXPLNERS—will take the stage to present their pitches live. 

Vote in the app for the Audience Favorite award! Voting will close at 5pm PT. Winners will be announced on Day Two of IIEX, Wednesday, October 28 at 10:10 AM PT on the Blue Stage, with three awards presented: Experts’ Choice, Audience Favorite, and Industry Impact.

What makes a digital experience feel magical—and how can teams measure it at scale? Franklyn Graham, Ph.D., will share how Uber developed MagUX, a research-backed framework that turns people’s stories about great app experiences into eight measurable elements, from ease of use and personalization to emotionality and discovery. Tested with nearly 10,000 people across Uber’s user groups, MagUX gives teams both an overall score and specific signals they can use to guide product decisions. The session will also explore how research teams can use platforms like Outset to gather rich customer feedback, uncover meaningful themes, and turn those insights into questions they can measure and act on.

Key Takeaways: 

1. A practical way to define “magical” experiences: Start with people’s stories, identify the themes that matter, and translate them into clear survey questions.
2. A model for measuring experience at scale: See how Uber’s eight MagUX elements combine into domain scores and an overall score.
3. Ways to put experience insights to work: Learn how teams can track sentiment over time and use research findings alongside conversion metrics to make better product decisions.

How do you predict what a trend will mean, and for whom, before the group holding it even exists? We tracked one signifier, 'raw', through 278 Nextatlas outcomes and a hand-kept archive since 2012 — from food, to wellness, to libertarian raw milk, to brutalist design, to today's anti-algorithmic posting. LLMs guess the next word. Foresight has to guess the next world.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Extensional and intensional signal move independently, track both

2. Antonym velocity moves faster than the term itself, Pay attention to what a signifier refuses.

3. Meaning is carried by actants: humans, microbiomes, algorithms, regulators, all at once.

AI has made data abundant and accessible to everyone. But data isn't insight. This talk explores the researcher's evolving role in an AI-enabled world; taking data and applying concepts from fields like anthropology, psychology, and behavioral economics to move beyond 'what happened' to 'what does this actually mean for us?' When everyone has access to data, true insights are what you do with it.

Key Takeaways:

1. AI gives everyone data access, insight still requires human judgment and context

2. Shift from 'what happened' to 'what does this mean for us' to stay indispensable

3. AI tools are only as good as what you use them for

Most insights teams have a repository full of answers people forget and a queue full of questions nobody has time for. NETGEAR built an AI research librarian that carries our segments, frameworks, and past studies into the rooms where decisions get made. See how it works, where it fails, and how to build your own.

Key Takeaways:

1. How to use AI to answer the 10 questions you answer most and repeat often.

2. Encoding your team's frameworks, not just its findings to make impact and lasting adoption.

3. Teaching AI when to say "I don't know" and routing those no-answers back to your intake queue.

Organizations have invested years in research, yet new questions still often start from scratch. In this fireside chat, Lev Mazin and Glenn Fleischman explore the shift from DIY to AIY, or AI Yourself, how to unlock answers from past studies, where AI can help, and what researchers need to put in place to lead the move toward always on insights without sacrificing rigor.

Key Takeaways:

1. Learn the things to have in place before always-on starts paying off.

2. Find where your current research process is adding time, cost, and unnecessary tradeoffs.

3. How your past studies can provide the answers before you field anything.

Following the fireside chat with Netflix, we’ll run the methods live in Conveo. See MaxDiff, Gabor-Granger and Van Westendorp inside AI-moderated video interviews: participants make the same forced trade-offs and price judgments, then explain them in their own words. We’ll go from study setup to live interviews to results, showing rankings and price thresholds with the reasoning attached.

Key Takeaways:

1. How to set up MaxDiff and pricing methods inside an AI-moderated video interview

2. What the output looks like: rankings and price thresholds with the reasoning attached

3. How AI follow-ups probe each trade-off without breaking the method’s rigor

Consumer behavior is the output. Culture is the operating system. This session explores the invisible forces that shape our decisions every day and how trends reveal deeper shifts already underway. By understanding behavior through a cultural lens, organizations can spot change earlier, uncover opportunities others miss, and anticipate what’s next before it becomes obvious.

Key Takeaways:

1. Consumer behavior is visible. The forces shaping it are not.

2. Trends are clues, not conclusions.

3. The advantage goes to those who can spot cultural shifts—and decode their meaning—early.

Faster research was meant to make insights more strategic. For a lot of teams, it's done the opposite: more studies, less thinking, fewer seats at the table. An insights leader who's pushed back on that shares what's working: where to spend the thinking time you have, how to pair every result with a recommendation, and how to get into the room where strategy gets set.

Key Takeaways:

1. Protect strategic thinking time when fast turnarounds keep eating it

2. Deliver the result and the strategic recommendation in the same readout

3. Earn a seat in the meetings where strategy gets set, not just the results review

Most researchers receive “clean” datasets but rarely examine how they were built or the ecosystem behind them. Drawing on experience from both the sample supplier and brand sides, Natasha Gay explores how sourcing, cleaning, and AI involvement can remain opaque to buyers. Learn practical questions to evaluate data quality, strengthen vendor partnerships, and make more confident decisions.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Ask smarter questions to uncover what’s behind your data

2. Spot hidden risks in sample, cleaning, and respondent quality

3. Understand where AI shapes results—and who’s accountable

Two of three people who start a survey get terminated, and the pay is often around $2.50 an hour. Most people quit. Yet many who stay are exactly who we need. With new participant data (n=300) and firsthand fraud investigation, we'll map who really answers surveys, from the genuinely engaged to the professional fraudster, and one practical move for every role in the chain to expand the pool.

Key Takeaways:

1. Panels aren't the population: they're the survivors of a journey most people abandon.

2. The typologies of today's survey takers: who's genuinely engaged, who adapts, who fakes it.

3. One practical move each for buyers, suppliers, and researchers, to expand the pool together.

Explore the powerful intersection of behavioral science and UX design. This session unpacks key psychological mechanisms—choice architecture, anchoring, loss aversion, and defaults. Through a practical walkthrough of a fictional product interface, you will learn how to behavioral design patterns are applied to shape user decisions, elevate research insights, and drive meaningful outcomes.

Key Takeaways:

1. Identify and apply core behavioral mechanisms like anchoring and loss aversion in UX.

2. How behavioral science can guide user decisions

3. Translate psychological theories into practical design patterns using interface walkthroughs.

Research leaders see an opportunity to extend customer insights across domains, teams, and modalities—and begin simulating the future. But synthetic data deserves scrutiny. The Outset team will explain how Digital Twins are created, grounded, evaluated, and refreshed, and share innovative ways customers are using them. 

Key Takeaways:

1. The difference between synthetic data, simulated personas, and digital twins 

2. How to create digital twins, grounded in 1:1 humans 

3. When to run research with humans vs. with digital twins 

This session introduces a rigorous mixed-method approach that pairs analysis of existing surveillance footage with in-depth qualitative interviews. Drawing on urban transit systems and retail environments, we'll show how connecting observed behavior with human motivation closes the say-do gap and reveals friction points, unmet needs, and the full customer journey.

Key Takeaways:

1. Learn a proven approach for closing the say–do gap with behavioral evidence.

2. Connect behavioral observation with customer motivations and decision-making.

3. Leave with a practical framework that can turn existing video data into strategic customer insight.

Great research doesn’t automatically lead to great decisions. The real challenge—and opportunity—for insights leaders is turning what we know about consumers into action inside the business.

In this fireside chat, Jinghuan Liu, Head of Consumer Insights at Applebee’s, will draw on her experience across Coca-Cola, Dollar Shave Club and Applebee’s to explore what it really takes for insights to influence decisions. We’ll discuss why strong research sometimes fails to gain traction, how insights leaders build trust and influence across an organization, and what separates an interesting finding from an insight that actually changes what a business does.

The transition to motherhood marks the creation of the apex consumer: mom is driving household purchase decisions across every major consumer category, but with a new lens. Leveraging BabyCenter’s multi-modal research, this session explores how becoming a mom rewires her information ecosystem, decision framework, and purchase habits, and how brands can effectively reach her.

Key Takeaways:

1. How the transition to primary household buyer creates far-reaching brand opportunities

2. The role of emotion in driving consideration, trust, and purchase conversion

3. How information sources evolve across the funnel, and how to align brand messaging at each stage

AI development benefits from real users' feedback captured via natural experiences.  Human Evals are delivering quantitative and qualitative rigor, at the speed of product, with real people. This continuous learning from the users’ perspective is now integral to Meta's Superintelligence Labs. Join us to learn how it works and insights gained.

Key Takeaways:

1. Human Evals provide a complete, honest perspective of the AI UX at a personal level.

2. Direct competitive comparison uncovers unforeseen strengths & gaps via custom, concrete benchmarks.

3. People’s expectations of AI are evolving at the pace of development; Evals catch early shifts.

No insights team, no tracking data, no big budget. One year later: insights sat at the board table, reshaping portfolio, value-based pricing and channel strategy—and the company doubled its growth rate. Hear the client and consultant tell how one fieldwork powered U&A, segmentation, volumetrics and conjoint, and how three winning decisions cascaded through every level of the organization.

Key Takeaways:

1. Run U&A, segmentation, volumetrics and pricing conjoint on one fieldwork, and one budget

2. Turn consumer knowledge into portfolio, value-based pricing and channel growth drivers

3. How insights co-built across every level of the company rose to shape decisions in the boardroom

The best consumer insight has always come from real people, not the profiles we build around them. But knowing what people think only matters if you find out in time to act. Sam Killip and Rob Gaige explore how Reddit stays close to humans at scale, how Attest helps bridge the gap between consumers on paper and how they behave, and how to build an insight program that keeps people at the center.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why real human behavior keeps outrunning our models of it

2. How Reddit stays close to its communities beyond demographics

3. What it looks like to put people, not proxies, at the heart of insight

AI moderation is evolving rapidly, but not all approaches are designed to achieve the same outcomes. Based on an independent research-on-research initiative, this session introduces a practical framework to help insights leaders evaluate AI moderation solutions, align them with specific research objectives, and make more confident, strategic adoption decisions.

Key Takeaways:

1. Learn how different AI moderation approaches are designed to solve different research needs.

2. Apply a practical framework for evaluating AI moderation solutions.

3. Identify where AI, human expertise, or a hybrid approach creates the greatest value.

Most research AI makes you faster at producing insights brand will misread anyway. Behavioral AI does something different: it learns how your customers actually decide, then works with your team to turn that into the message, offer, and ask. Will Leach shows why the next leap in insights isn't speed. It's translation.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why insights that land in the readout still get lost before they reach the campaign

2. How to turn one study into behavioral rules brand can run without calling you

3. How Behavioral AI differs from efficiency AI, and why it gets insights acted on

Most enterprise AI projects end up trapped in pilot purgatory. Turning bold concepts into scalable ROI demands a repeatable innovation engine. This talk unpacks a practical model for structuring an internal incubator, exposing why sustainable machine learning success actually depends on elevating your organization's core data management practices.

Key Takeaways:

1. A 5-stage blueprint to transform isolated AI pilots into a repeatable ROI engine

2. How strengthening your data management practices unlocks long-term AI performance

3. Strategies to target high-impact business pain points instead of chasing a check mark on AI

The report remains essential, but stakeholders may not return to it when a decision needs to be made. Increasingly, they will converse with research through AI. This session introduces three levels of Evidence Assurance for governing these new workflows, determining how much generative uncertainty each can tolerate, and knowing when synthesis must give way to traceable evidence and human review.
Key Takeaways:
1. Distinguish useful AI synthesis from a hallucination that can distort a business decision.
2. Match the level of AI assurance to how the research answer will be used.
3. Know when AI answers require sources, context, and non-negotiable human review.

While the focus of genAI in the past few years has been in efficiencies 'behind-the-scenes' for researchers, there are many opportunities to expand AI to the consumer/respondent research experience. AI unlocks capabilities not possible before - generating high-quality stimuli at scale and speed. These capabilities greatly improve respondent experience, data quality, and validity.

Key Takeaways:

1. Inspire ways to leverage AI to improve respondent experience

2. Leverage AI to narrow the say-do gap

3. AI can be tools for consumers to express/generate their needs and preferences

How do insights teams credibly research climate and sustainability without measuring their own carbon footprint? Learn a practical framework for auditing research emissions, reducing carbon 50-80% without sacrificing quality, and offsetting unavoidable impact. Includes 15-minute audit tool, strategic reduction roadmap, and high-quality offset guidance—with cumulative impact analysis.

Key Takeaways:

1. Measurement reveals priorities: office presence and commuting drive 40-60% of emissions.

2. Cut emissions 50-80% by shifting exploratory work remote while preserving in-person research depth.

3. Use high-quality offsets to address unavoidable emissions and achieve carbon neutrality.

Pet parents reveal needs in social videos that traditional research may not always surface. Cargill combined social video intelligence with consumer research to uncover a deeper need connecting seemingly unrelated conversations. See how this insight reframed research questions and helped shape new opportunities across innovation, communication and strategy.

Key Takeaways:

1. Use social video intelligence to uncover needs consumers may not state directly.

2. Turn social video patterns into stronger hypotheses for deeper research.

3. Pressure-test claims with social video intelligence and translate them into comms strategy.

Synthetic research is one of the most consequential shifts in market research, and one of the most misunderstood. Not all methods are equal, and using the wrong one carries real risk. This session maps the landscape, shows where synthetic personas fit, shares guardrails to use them with confidence, and offers a look at where the category is heading, including self-serve flows in NewtonX Hub.

Key Takaways: 

1. Four types of synthetic research, best uses, and limitations for each

2. How Synthetic Personas fit into the synthetic research landscape and alongside primary research

3. The guardrails needed to build a Synthetic Persona you can trust

Researchers have always known that social videos & images hold valuable human stories. Afterall, every post is the kind of short, unvarnished interview we love. But until recently, we lacked the tools to effectively decode emotions & nuanced behaviors at scale. Learn how leading insights teams use vision AI to uncover emerging behaviors, spot trends early, & complement traditional insights.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Move beyond text-only social “listening” to solve complex insights challenges

2. Identify meaningful category, culture, and audience signals before they become mainstream trends

3. Diagnose and track the modern consumer journey as it weaves through social media

As companies scale and products evolve quickly, you need timely insights to support that growth. Having the right team and setting them up for success makes all the difference.

Key Takeaways:

1. Build the right team.

2. Give them the tools they need.

3. Choose the right vendors.

Your frontline holds the most current intelligence on your market, competitors, and customers. Most organizations never tap into this source of insights. This session shows how AI-driven interviews turn internal knowledge into a continuous market signal that updates faster than any research cycle at a fraction of the cost. Looking to maximize budget and still find new insight, join us.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why your frontline is your most underutilized intelligence source

2. How internal AI interviews remove bias, scale across the org, and compound over time

3. How to build a living market model without spending hundreds of thousands on external research

In this live two-person session, Viewpoints CEO Leo Yeykelis and Stanford professor Byron Reeves will run synthetic persona studies and ask the audience whether they would trust the results for real decisions. They will debate speed versus scientific rigor and share the checks that turn a convincing simulation into defensible research.

Key Takeaways:

1. How to set up and run synthetic studies you can trust

2. Where synthetic research fits right now: a practical map of the use cases that perform well

3. How to conduct super-human research with synthetic respondents"

Segmentation doesn't usually fail in the research - it fails in the activation. In this session, I'll introduce my FAR Framework (Familiar, Applicable, Real) - a practical approach to turning segmentation from a one time deliverable into a scalable, decision-ready asset. You'll learn how to drive adoption across teams, systems and everyday business decisions.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Familiar : Socialize segmentation so it becomes shared language across the organization

2. Applicable : Turn segments into decision-ready guidance for every stakeholder

3. Real : Embed segmentation into systems and workflows to drive everyday decisions

Stakeholder buy-in drives research impact, as AI reshapes how we earn it. This session shows how tools like Miro and Figma enable async collaboration during fielding and analysis—inviting co-creation and diverse perspectives. Learn how pairing these methods with emerging AI analysis techniques deepens human understanding of customers, turning insight generation into a shared, actionable journey.

Key Takeaways:

1. Stakeholder buy-in remains essential — AI has not changed that collaboration is still critical.

2. Fielding & analysis: prime zones for stakeholder co-creation via interactive boards.

3. Pairing AI + human collaboration yields more meaningful customer understanding.

Join us to learn more about the ICN and the research being done on learning what skills are needed now and in the future in this super interactive session led by our Head of Learning and Research. 

Key Takeaways:

1. What is the ICN? 

2. What are early learnings from the job skills research? 

3. What comes next for the job skills research?

Impact Mining in action. Start with a business question, connect your research and let multiple analytical approaches uncover key drivers, audience differences, meaningful segments, and the links between them, across quant and coded qual. Each discovery guides the next. The result? Ranked growth opportunities. An AI agent triggers the analysis; a statistical engine does the maths. 

Key Takeaways: 

1. Find the drivers, differences and segments across data types 

2. A system where each discovery guides the next analysis, across quant and coded qual. 

3. An AI agent triggers the work. AddMaple’s statistical engine does the maths. Distinct but in sync. 

While the industry races to simulate consumers with synthetic data, Julie Davitz made the opposite bet: AI that captures what real humans think, feel, and do in the 60 seconds after content ends — when motivation peaks and evaporates. The proof: 155,000+ documented behaviors at 10x industry norms. Three questions, one unclaimed moment, and the end of the say–do gap.

Key Takeaways:

1. Three questions before any campaign: What do you want? How will you get there? How will you know?

2. AI's best use in insights is activating real humans, not simulating them & behavior is the insight

3. The 60 seconds after content ends converts motivation into measurable action at 10x industry norms

You don't need a leader title to get stakeholders to act on research, bring a team along on a new process, or nudge leadership to rethink a direction. Behavioral economist Melina Palmer shares why our brains resist change (even when we say we want it), common mistakes we make when asking others to change, and simple shifts to improve clarity, confidence, and follow-through.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why asking people to give up habits and defaults sparks resistance, and how to make it easier

2. How framing, timing, and priming shape whether people hear your message the way you intended

3. Why less is more when asking for change, and how to make the one thing that matters stand out

Inside Cisco, AI is reshaping how decisions are made for Events, Sales Enablement, and Learning. Discover how Radius Tech created a purpose-built AI insights and decision engine for Cisco, with validated synthetic personas grounded in 25+ years of data, then activating them to shape strategy, validate concepts, and move from signal to decision faster than ever.

Key Takeaways:

1. See how synthetic personas power faster strategic decisions.

2. Explore how 10+ concepts were tested in days, with insights activated for teams in hours.

3. Learn how early activation helps teams avoid costly, late-stage strategic pivots

Learn how to get real insights out of your synthetic personas. Are you using synthetic personas but wondering how to extract real, reliable value from them? Join Katie Macdonald and Jonas Fuerle, to bridge the gap between AI-generated personas and actionable market research. During our session, we will show you exactly how to interact with synthetic personas to extract the best, most accurate data.

Key Takeaways:

1. Learn how to extract real, reliable value from synthetic personas and we will show use cases

2. Learn how to how to interact properly with synthetic personas to extract the most accurate data.

3. How to start with the right setup, how to choose the right persona and how to practically use it.

Gen Z doesn’t distrust institutions by accident, they learned to. Raised through financial crises, misinformation, and broken promises, they trust peers and independent research over traditional authority. Gary Rudman explores how they seek truth in comments, Reddit, reviews, and personal (not always vetted) research instead of official narratives.

Key Takeaways:

1. Gen Z trust must be earned, not assumed

2. Gen Z finds their own truth via social media triangulation

3. Transparency builds credibility

What happens when the research subject and the audience for the insight are the same person? Building AI for self-understanding forces a shift from designing for segments to designing for one. Drawing on research leadership at Headspace and building Nirva from zero, this talk explores the design and product choices behind personal insight, and what it takes to help people understand themselves.

Key Takeaways: 

1. Designing for one changes everything: n=1 demands different research and product choices.

2. Building AI that finds insights for people makes us rethink our own craft as researchers.

3. Helping people understand themselves means designing for curiosity, not just accuracy.

Gone are the days of sequential processes skipping between platforms. Parallel workflows, integrated steps, and AI and agentic enhancements to the tools you use daily are here. Accelerate insights, eliminate inefficiencies, and redefine your excellence across the research process with Research HX, built on decades of research experience and enhanced with agents and intelligent automation.

Key Takeaways:

1. Discover what working with Research HX can do to your workflow

2. Explore the power of automation and integrated research steps

3. See how research agents can enhance your expertise