Insight or Irrelevance: The Opportunities and Threats Facing Today’s Insights Teams

Insights teams face a choice: evolve into strategic partners or face irrelevance. To thrive, they must move beyond data reporting by using storytelling, commercial acumen, and AI to drive C-suite decisions and connect consumer truth to business strategy.

In an era defined by rapid change, strategic complexity, and rising stakeholder expectations, the insights function stands at a crossroads. On one hand, new tools, evolving methodologies, and an intensified focus on customer understanding create fresh opportunities for impact. On the other hand, automation, shifting business priorities, and growing impatience for “research for research’s sake” threaten to push insights down the value chain.

Voices from MRII’s Insights & Innovators podcast suggest a clear reality: there is a strong future for insights if we get this right, but there is also real risk if we don’t. The next chapter will belong to teams that can create true insight that drives decisions the C-Suite cares about, and those that connect consumer truth to business strategy.

1. Opportunity: Storytelling That Makes Insights Stick

If the insights function is going to grow in relevance, it will not be by producing more charts or better dashboards. It will be by ensuring that insights are understood, remembered, and acted upon.

That’s where storytelling plays a central role. As J. Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer at Kantar, notes:

“It’s not really about the numbers… It’s about getting through to the decision maker.”

And:

“A successful presentation is when somebody can remember your big idea.”

This is a crucial distinction for the profession: storytelling is not a “soft skill” add-on. It is often the difference between insights that drive action and insights that disappear into the noise.  I wrote about this in a recent Greenbook piece entitled “Storytelling:  The Super Power Behind Insights Success.”

Storytelling is not the whole game. But it is one powerful component of influence, often the entry point that makes other forms of business impact possible.

Executive takeaway: The ability to make insights memorable is becoming a defining capability of high-performing teams.

2. Threat: Commoditization and the “Just Give Me the Data” Trap

As organizations gain more access to data, the perceived value of insights risks shrinking. Leaders can pull metrics, monitor dashboards, and increasingly turn to automated tools to summarize consumer trends. In that environment, insights teams can easily become defined by outputs rather than outcomes.

When the function is positioned as a reporting engine, it becomes replaceable—either by automation or by adjacent functions that combine analytics with strategy.

This is how insights get pushed down the value chain: not because research is unimportant, but because the organization stops associating insights with decision advantage.

Executive takeaway: If insights is framed as “information delivery,” it will eventually be treated as a commodity.

3. Opportunity: Commercial Integration and Decision Partnership

The clearest growth opportunity for the insights function is deeper commercial integration. The highest-impact insights teams do not merely inform business strategy—they help shape it.

That requires insights leaders to be fluent in the realities executives face: tradeoffs, constraints, feasibility, and profitability. Vijay Raj, EVP of Consumer and Market Insights at Unilever, puts it bluntly:

“What really sets apart a wow insight from a great insight is really commercial acumen… a good insight needs to be both operationally feasible and commercially viable.”

This mindset shifts insights from “interesting research” into a decision-support discipline. It also changes the role of the insights leader—from someone who delivers findings to someone who shapes business choices.

Executive takeaway: Commercial acumen is the bridge between customer truth and business action.

4. Threat: Skills Gaps and Misaligned Talent Models

As the insights role expands, expectations are shifting faster than many teams are evolving. Traditional research capability remains important, but increasingly, organizations expect insights professionals to bring strategic framing, stakeholder leadership, and business judgment—not just methodological excellence.

Yet many insights organizations still hire and develop talent primarily around technical expertise. The result is a widening gap between what leaders want and what insights teams consistently deliver.

This is not just a professional development issue. It is a structural threat to the function’s relevance. If insights cannot produce leaders who can influence decisions, other functions will fill the vacuum.

Executive takeaway: The insights function risks losing influence if it cannot build talent that matches executive expectations.

5. Opportunity and Threat: AI as an Accelerator (Not a Strategy)

AI must be part of the future of insights. Multiple guests on Insights & Innovators have emphasized that AI will reshape workflows—accelerating synthesis, automating routine analysis, and helping teams explore data faster than ever before.

That is the opportunity. Done well, AI frees insights professionals to spend more time on what only humans can do: framing the right questions, interpreting nuance, connecting patterns to business strategy, and influencing decision-making.

But the threat is equally clear. If AI becomes the center of the insights value proposition, the function risks being reduced to “tool management.” Worse, organizations may begin to believe they can bypass insights entirely by going straight to automated answers.

AI will not eliminate the need for insights. But it will raise the bar. The function must evolve from producing analysis to providing clarity, judgment, and decision support.

Executive takeaway: AI will not determine the future of insights, but rather how insights teams define their value in an AI-enabled world will.

6. Threat: Noise Over Signal and the Risk of Lost Trust

As organizations consume more information, the risk isn’t only “not enough data.” It’s too much data, too many competing narratives, and too little clarity. In that environment, insights teams can either become a stabilizing force—or contribute to confusion.

When teams chase speed at the expense of rigor, stakeholders stop trusting the function. And once trust erodes, insights loses its seat at the table.

This may be the most dangerous long-term threat: not automation, but irrelevance driven by weakened credibility. In a world full of dashboards and quick takes, the insights function must stand for disciplined thinking and decision-ready interpretation.

Executive takeaway: In a world of abundant information, trust is scarce and insights must protect it.

Conclusion: A Future of Influence, If We Choose It

There is real hope for the insights function to enjoy a bright future. Done well, insights can become the capability that helps organizations see around corners, anticipate change, and make better decisions.

But there is also real risk. If insights become synonymous with reporting, if teams fail to evolve skills, and if they allow technology to define their role rather than enhance their impact, they will be pushed down the value chain.

The future will belong to insights teams that:

• make insights memorable and actionable
• embed commercially and strategically
• build future-ready talent models
• use AI to amplify judgment, not replace it
• protect evidence quality and stakeholder trust

The insights function is at a precipice: evolve into a decision-shaping partner, or watch leaders look elsewhere for faster, better answers to their most pressing questions and leave insights behind.