From Efficiency to Empathy: Reclaiming What Makes Insights Strategic

The latest GRIT Report paints a familiar picture of the pressures facing brand-side insights teams: shrinking budgets, rising expectations, and a relentless push for speed and efficiency. Researchers report the fewest budget increases since 2017 — yet nearly 40% also say they must do more to prove their value. In other words, efficiency alone isn’t enough anymore. 

The risk is that, in chasing speed, we strip research of what makes it strategic. Efficiency can help us scale, but empathy — the ability to see consumers as people, not datapoints — is what helps brands stay relevant when everything else changes. The GRIT data makes clear that insights leaders are at a crossroads: they can lean further into automation to keep up, or they can use technology to listen better and rebuild connection at scale. 

That’s where the next generation of insights work begins. AI, when guided by researchers rather than replacing them, can help uncover meaning faster and amplify the human side of data. It can make listening continuous, not episodic — allowing brands to feel what their audiences feel, in real time. And in the case of Knit, it can bring your literal customers’ voices to the table to drive impact and inspire change. 

We believe in what we call researcher-driven AI: a model where technology amplifies, rather than replaces, human judgment. AI can synthesize millions of signals in seconds, but it’s the researcher who knows which questions to ask, how to frame meaning, and when to push for deeper empathy. Together, human expertise and machine efficiency can create a new rhythm of learning — one where insights are both instant and inspired. That’s what we’re building Knit around. And our hope is that the industry follows suit. 

The future of insights isn’t about “doing more with less.” It’s about creating systems that help us understand more deeply while moving faster. The organizations that succeed won’t be the ones that automate everything — they’ll be the ones that know when and where not to automate. 

As the lines between analytics and research continue to blur, the brands that rise above the pressure will be those that treat empathy as a metric of success — and build the tools, teams, and cultures to sustain it.