Technology is redrawing the lines of who understands the customer best. As AI accelerates, digital tools multiply, and data becomes everyone’s currency, nearly every team in the organization (marketing, customer experience, sales, digital personas and more) is tapping the same streams of information. The important work and outputs insights teams have been creating for years now need to play more than one role in the enterprise. Human data, the kind grounded in what real people think and feel, remains the gold standard, but even that advantage is being tested. 

This report shows that, for now, insights teams still hold the decision-making power: 91% of brand-side researchers say their teams steer or have final say in supplier and methodology decisions. It’s a strong position, but one that feels like borrowed time. As every organizational function becomes more data fluent, the question becomes how the insights function will adapt and evolve. 

The GRIT data also hints at why this balance is shifting. The rise of customer experience as a decision-maker brings new proximity to the customer journey. The move from “analytics” to “analytics/data science” underscores how quantitative rigor is being redefined by automation and speed. Insights now sits at the intersection of both, expected to turn complex data into clear direction for the business. 

This isn’t a pessimistic view, it’s just where we’re headed. Decision-making will no longer be owned by one department and instead be a network powered by interoperable data and faster feedback loops. In my view, there is an opportunity for insights professionals to shape their evolution and set the standards for how human understanding is collected, validated and shared so it drives consistent value across the enterprise. 

I’ve spent 28 years watching this industry reinvent itself, from the birth of online communities to the arrival of AI (and lots of stuff in between). The challenge now is alignment and coherence. When everyone has access to data, leadership belongs to those who can elevate and help drive those insights into many other systems, helping their brands to be more competitive and win business. 

Influence is still anchored in insights, but what matters now is proof. The researchers who can connect learning to measurable outcomes like revenue, retention, growth and new ideas that impact the bottom line, will stay indispensable. The rest risk becoming background noise in an ecosystem that is already drowning in data.