The AI vs. Human Intelligence Battle: Who's Winning in Market Research?

Check out the full episode below! Enjoy The Exchange? Don't forget to tune in live Friday at 12 pm EST on the Greenbook LinkedIn and Youtube Channel!

AI is fundamentally reshaping market research, but the most successful organizations aren't just adopting technology—they're mastering the delicate balance between artificial intelligence and authentic human insight. From $11 million funding rounds to groundbreaking persuasion research, this episode reveals which AI strategies are actually working and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos.  

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Transcript

Lenny Murphy: There we are. Hi, everybody.

Karen Lynch: Hello. Happy Friday.

Lenny Murphy: We were watching this time. We weren't in mid-conversation.

Karen Lynch: No, I was absolutely just like we took a deep breath from the last five second countdown, so good for us. We did. Absolutely. Prepared. All right, but we got a lot.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, we have a lot to cover.

Karen Lynch: I just said to Lenny, for those of you who weren't here, that this morning when I went to the gym, I was like, Oh, the exchange is now on Spotify. So, um, our, uh, thank you, Karley on the spot. Um, we've launched our green book podcast network, so you can, you can take in this information in another way. If you prefer to listen to us and on any of your podcast platforms, Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever else you listen, you can find us there. Also Lenny's CEO series is in there, so you can have a listen there as well. Um, so it's exciting cause we're here on LinkedIn live YouTube. Pushed out in podcast players and it's officially a network. So good to all of you on the marketing team.

Lenny Murphy: Good job. Yes, absolutely. It is a thing now. And all the historical shows are on there as well. So it's not just the current. We there's a whole history there. So yeah. And we hope to expand that as well. We work on a podcast network. So yeah, we have plans.

Karen Lynch: But anyway, but now it's it's I went in there And I went and I listened to last week's The Exchange this morning. So I was like, oh, you know, do your little little star rating. So if you find any of our shows out there on your podcast player, please, you know, rate, review, like, subscribe, all the things you can do to help us get found to be of use to more people would be appreciated on our end, right, Lenny?

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. Absolutely. And we do appreciate the listenership across all the growth of these channels has been amazing. That's why we keep doing this. Obviously, Lisa. Find value in what we're doing. Hopefully others will as well, but it's very gratifying. So thank you for your support. And wait, one plug, by the way, you want to sponsor the Green Book Podcast Network, reach out, right? I mean, we really have across these shows, we've got a pretty damn big audience now. And if there's not a sponsor, you want to get brand visibility, reach out. It's a pretty cool thing.

Karen Lynch: And there's also ad opportunity opportunities to, to do an ad across our podcasts. Um, you know, like what masterclass gets all of the ad space in the world. Right. So we're audible. I think those are big, you know, all those big companies. Yes. We can be a little more targeted in our niche.

Lenny Murphy: So we can reach out.

Karen Lynch: All right. That'd be fun.

Lenny Murphy: Next plug, but a good one. A fun one.

Karen Lynch: Let's talk about. The GRIT forum next Tuesday. And we gave a little spoiler, which I re-listened to, you know, when the idea came to Lenny and I last Friday, where we talked about, let's gamify this one a little bit. So we are going to give a ticket to IAX to the person who finds the most pop culture references in this coming GRIT report to be released. I think next Tuesday, well, the forum is Tuesday, the report will be released. I think it's Monday. I think Monday at least. And then we'll be back in two weeks to kind of share out who found the most pop culture references. The key is to email it to us at the exchange at greenbook.org. So, and by it, I mean, all of the pop culture references you notice. We're talking, what are we talking about? We're talking about book references.

Lenny Murphy: Movies, books, TV. There are so many Easter eggs baked into the report. I have to give a shout out. He always hates it. But Nelson Whipple does the heavy lift of most of the writing. And Nelson is just one of those. He is a culture encyclopedia. And he has a lot of fun. And he slips those into the report. It is not a dry report. It's a big report. It's hefty. But it's a lot of fun to read, actually. And yes, so there's lots of Easter eggs in there. Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: So we'll be tracking, send us your, send us the ones you found and we'll see who finds the most and we'll be interested.

Lenny Murphy: And then you get a free, free pass to IAX.

Karen Lynch: Absolutely. One of them to be discussed, which one, um, but most likely it'll be one of the ones where that ticket, you know, is, uh, is a value add, right. And we're not going to say come to IAX. Because that's a virtual event, which is, you know, free for many. So what we'll do is it'll be for one of our, probably one of our 2026 events.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. Yes. So have fun guys. It's a, read the report. You're going to get a lot out of it and hopefully you get, find these pop culture references, email us and we'll see who gets the most. Yeah. And hopefully we'll see you at the forum on Tuesday.

Karen Lynch: Lenny and I are both, Lenny and I are both going to be there. He's doing the kind of the intro kickoff, executive summary highlights, and then it'll be followed by four different commentary panels and discussions with, you know, across all of them, you know, nearly a dozen people in the industry kind of chiming in. So good stuff to come.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. Yes. With you moderating too, which is your sweet spot. I like to pretend you are actually the real thing. So, yeah, it'll be great. And then what we got IX Europe here we are.

Karen Lynch: I mean, I know but wait, there's more it's a busy month and then yeah, so Next Friday will be our sort of last hurrah before I head off to Amsterdam with certain people on the team And so the following Friday, not only will we share kind of the winner of the contest But we'll also talk a little bit about Europe because I'll be fresh off the plane Kind of sharing sharing whatever I can that day briefly, of course, but about what what we experienced overseas in terms of content and conversations. So that'll be fun, I'm psyched.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, so no show next Friday, no live show next Friday, but the following Friday.

Karen Lynch: No, there's a live show next Friday.

Lenny Murphy: We are? Okay, nevermind.

Karen Lynch: So remember what I said, next Friday we're live, because I haven't gone yet. And then, it's good.

Lenny Murphy: I get confused. It's Friday, I'm sorry, okay, nevermind.

Karen Lynch: Next Friday is here. And then the following Friday, I'll have just flown home. So we might as well do it live. I'll just be tired. I don't promise glamour. I will be tired and potentially jet lagged, but you know, make some fun conversations.

Lenny Murphy: Okay. All right. I thank you for correcting me. I am, I see you guys, Karen. She's the unsung hero in so many ways. One of them is just keeping me from not doing lots of stupid stuff. I just do a few. All right.

Karen Lynch: On that note, on that note, Let's get into it, right? Because there's a lot going on kind of in the news between kind of an acquisition and like a rebrand and product launches. And then this week, actually, I really want to get to some of the thought leadership pieces. There were a lot. There's a lot of things that people are sharing their thoughts vocally about. So let's get through some of the business stuff so we can get to the good conversation starters, shall we?

Lenny Murphy: Let's do it. Let's do it. You want to talk about Rally and I'll talk about Black Swan? I can tell.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. So, all right. So, yeah. So, up first, Rally UXR raised 11 million Series A funding. So, this is about revolutionizing enterprise user research workflows. Basically, it's just every time we see one of these kinds of where some investment dollars are going, it's just a signal to us to pay attention. And what's happening is this, I think, is mostly going to be about, again, getting those user insights at scale in a place where everybody can access them and there's some value in what they're doing, obviously investors are on board. So take a look at that, see what they're doing that you can maybe learn from, good stuff.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, yeah. Real quick to expand on that, this conversation, we've talked about methodologies a lot, right? But workflows are the other, it probably doesn't get the attention it should get. That's also the massive change that is happening, and so it's important, right? I've had quite a few conversations with clients lately on getting back into my operational days of being like, well, here's how we, you know, we go from the survey to SPSS to Excel to, you know, it's like, there's new tools that can make massive efficiencies in that process and workflows that gives competitive advantage. Yeah, it's important to see these types of things happening as well.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And, and I know one more thing. So this is what happens when we start actually talking about some of these stories a little more. If you think about, you know, kind of the centralization of all of these, all of the inputs from user research, um, and, and then kind of the disruption overall that everyone's in this, of course, it's like, we need everything to be centralized. Uh, we, we need or, or, you know, organized so that everybody can access it. And, and, at the same time, we're so disruptive with AI and some of the tools and new methods and all that. This is the right time actually to go back into your workflows because they are changing and AI is making different things possible. It's a perfect time to evaluate your workflow processes across the board for everybody.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, and there's stand-alone platforms like this for this other client I was talking to. I was actually surprised. I looked at the individual, there's certainly less third-party solutions that do individual things. But there's also just a buttload that Azure and Copilot could do or OpenAI could do. We're seeing that happen now. All of OpenAI is integrated with HubSpot now and blah, blah, blah. All those things are happening to make that happen. Think about this workflow process. We'll talk about perplexity in a few minutes. Just to make all those things so much more efficient than as part of the operating system versus just specific discrete elements of a process. So, interesting times. So, I want to give a shout out to my friends at Black Swan. They were clients for a while, really smart folks. Acquired by Mintel. Perfect sense. This is like, this is the Reese's Cup type of deal. Mintel acquires Black Swan to bring, Black Swan does predictive insights around on a lot of, sorry, I'm not at my best today, guys, for a variety of reasons. And I just had a brain freeze. Black Swan was building tracking solutions to be able to predict trends around product categories, et cetera, et cetera. You combine that with the Mintel that is acquiring data at the store level around you know, purchase behavior, et cetera, et cetera. It just makes perfect sense for those to be combined. So hats off to both of them and congrats to my friends, Hugo and Steve at Black Swan.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, and which we're, it just, you know, to me what this shows is also this kind of marriage convergence or, you know, partnership or whatever, between traditional AI and research technologies, and they are continuing to wed right now. And this is another indicator that that is where we are right now. We are at a place where we need to be linking those two things very closely to stay strategic and also face the current times. I mean, there is a lot of conversation, and we'll get to some of these, somebody else was talking about it, the need to just make sure we're staying and make sure we're staying human, which is translated into strategically thinking, critically thinking, you know, making sure we're checking and double-checking. The need right now, presently, is for that, those two things to come together. So it's a great example of that.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, unlocking new value creation, but foundationally still from the perspective of, you know, what humans do, which is probably a good, good segue into the next one.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, we didn't really, yes, good, good. I like it when that happens. So Simpler has rebranded as Okay, human. Actually, I think this is really interesting because in my head, I'm like, I want to see that play out a little bit. But basically they are making this bold move to center human creativity and emotion in their insights work amidst this time of AI adoption. So again, human-centric insight approaches and some of that emotional Good stuff, we'll see. And some of their tools are super fun and their methods are fun and engaging. As a qualitative researcher, I like what I've seen. So anyway, so yeah, what else do you think about that one?

Lenny Murphy: No, I love it. Is that the dividing line? Are we seeing that really start to emerge? Well, I think it is the dividing line. Technology, which is increasingly commoditized. It's kind of, you get stuck in this arms race and it's just keeping up with the Joneses, right? Type of thing. It is hard to differentiate from a technology perspective now, just this. But what you do with the information, providing that human element, I continue to think that is the high value differentiator. And, you know, people are obviously embracing that as part of their brand and their positioning and, you know, the value that they deliver. So I think we'll see a lot more of that focus as well.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And I think I was reading in there again, um, ethnography. So, you know, ethnography is in their wheelhouse. Um, and, and I think that especially in an era with synthetic data becoming a thing, right. And we can talk more about this later as well, but the need to check, and validate what you might be getting synthetically with what's actually happening. What is actual behavior? I think the need for ethnography has never been stronger. You have to maintain the human connection for your entire brand team so that they don't just start relying on synthetic responses without that checks and balance too, is this accurate? Like, is this what people are really doing? How does this check out? How does this test out? So validate all the synthetic stuff with real humans. I think that's a big deal, right?

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, I'm in violent agreement, right? And this topic is coming up an awful lot. And you know what, it goes back to the grid. We'll see this in the grid as well. Who, what, when, where, and how? That's data. We are in the era of data utility optimization. Across the board, but why? And now what? What's next? So those things, those are still today the realm of humans primarily. And that is the essence of what research does overall. So yeah, I think it's really cool. I want to talk about some of these new products as well that are variations on a theme. I mean, that's what they all have in common.

Karen Lynch: And that's, I think, the starting point. And there were more also. I'm going to hold the list down a little bit, too. But we are seeing all of these AI launches. I actually don't know these two companies. I don't know if you do. The first two, at least. Launching Ignite, kind of an AI native platform, which is all about powering their experience management with embedded AI agents. So it makes sense. Yes, that's what we're talking about, right? This is a very logical feature. Yes. Yes. This is what I would expect to see in the industry, you know, purpose-built AI systems tied to experience management systems for real. And then this is empirical, I've never heard of empirical. Do you know anything about them? I like this. This one's really interesting to me.

Lenny Murphy: I do actually have a lot of history with Kirsten who built this. We were both- All right, so yeah, share what they've done. Yeah, so that there was, there was a company called Dakota, that was around text analytics with emotional context. And it was years ago, right? The principles behind this company were involved in that. Now they've taken it on steroids with AI. So it is motion intelligence AI. And it focuses on digital experiences and understanding emotion, digital experiences with the steroid effect that AI can do to what was fundamentally text analytics, sentiment analysis, right? I mean, we've had those things for a long time and they undergird most LLMs now, they're kind of baked in. So to a great extent, those solutions arrived, they just got absorbed, right? The sexiness of the generative AI kind of replaced it. So we're just seeing now, they're an example of taking that, still keeping that focus on understanding emotion, utilizing these tools from that standpoint.

Karen Lynch: And what I think I read in there, and I could be wrong, but it's that they're also, the models are being trained to not only recognize and kind of interpret those emotions, but potentially act upon, like potentially do the next step in whatever that would be. So that is also interesting. Like, anyway, it is the customer seat, right?

Lenny Murphy: They're pissed off. You know, I'm a frustrated customer. And so going through that, let's deescalate. Let's make them happy. Exactly. Exactly.

Karen Lynch: As opposed to just throwing them here. We'll give you a you know, I'll use the example of bar We get BarkBox because Maggie's a spoiled little baby girl. And the box arrived open, and I wasn't sure whether I had the right number of toys in there. And I send them a little message. I wasn't annoyed at all, but they very quickly solved the problem for me. And I'm like, oh, OK. I don't even know if that's what I wanted, though. I didn't really, and when I said to solve the problem, they confirmed that I had the right number of toys. But then they threw me a bone. They're like, we'll comp you your next box.

Lenny Murphy: Literally.

Karen Lynch: I was like, not my point. My point was I was actually irritated that the box arrived open. That bothered me. So if that great customer support system really took a minute to explain, to think about why she reached out? She reached out because she was, I felt icky. I felt like somebody had been in my dog's toys. It felt weird to me. And sure, they solved the problem, but I didn't really have any gratification in the engagement. So anyway, that's why I'm like, well, this is interesting from a customer SAP point of view, because you have to start with understanding and interpreting before you just solve a problem. Because maybe they didn't need to do that. They just needed to reassure me everything was fine.

Lenny Murphy: You know, like, but then they just were like, here. You know, Karen, it was probably, it was probably built by men. So Oh, what? She's unhappy. Fix it.

Karen Lynch: But in the world of experiences, I didn't really need a fix. I needed reassurance that everything was okay. I needed reassurance that my dog wasn't ingesting a fake toy. Anyway, so I didn't need... But I was... Oh my God. There's nuance.

Lenny Murphy: There's nuance, and that's important. And yes, again, speaking as a man, it's difficult for me. But also, my wife had the same conversation this morning. She was talking about something and I was like, I went into fix it mode. And she was like, I don't need you to fix it.

Karen Lynch: I just need you to listen. And that's so hard. No shade to BarkBox.

Lenny Murphy: Appreciate the free box you're sending me next month or something.

Karen Lynch: No shade. So yeah, yeah. All right.

Lenny Murphy: Let's talk about WPP, right? What? The large marketing model. Surprise, surprise. Open intelligence.

Karen Lynch: And so WPP debuted Open Intelligence, a large marketing model. And if you just do a Google search for that, WPP Open Intelligence, you will get a lot of news stories. It's a big buzz right now. So go ahead and kind of dig in.

Lenny Murphy: Oh, no. I mean, that's it. And we're going to see more of this. So as all of the WPP, Dentsu, Publicis, know, all these companies, they have been data driven for a very long time. Yeah, they're leveraging the data because AI allows it to happen to understand things at a deeper level to, you know, this, this era of data utility, and turning that into a performance component. There are so many companies out there. But these, you know, the big global conglomerates are in a good position to do that Stagwell, Zeta, those kind companies you would think of that will be doing this, but also so, so, so could Google and Amazon and, you know, uh, who own huge ad networks, obviously. Um, that's the same thing. Take that data and make it within the behavioral data that drives them. Uh, uh, and now make that predictive and, and baked into marketing performance. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: And also check your marketing ROI. Against what's in there and track that as well. So it's pretty much a powerhouse. It is a consumer panel data powerhouse of information that can be linked to your marketing performance. And I think that's super interesting to think about the power of it. We've had big data for a long time, but this is now the power to access that data very clearly for this purpose. All right.

Lenny Murphy: Cool. Yep. It just makes it real quick. I, this week for the first time loaded a raw data set, a survey data set. I just want to see what it would do. I loaded it into a few different LLMs and just said, analyze it. It's raw data. Excel. And holy shit it did, right? And now I don't trust it, but the sheer fact, but it's probably right, but the sheer fact that I could load up raw data and say, analyze it and then said, now create personas, create a segmentation model and personas off of this and implications for the end clients that were involved, this is an experiment. And it did. Was it great? Well, I'll compare that when we go through the traditional analysis process. Now, imagine that in this, right? You're absorbing all of this data, not just 2,000 completes on a survey. Or if that was connected, if I was able to connect that to, oh, well, here's, now let's tie this to this marketing data and understand the gap between the, around messaging, the performance of, of ad lift, brand lift, etc. And the disconnect of understanding, well, here's what's missing is that you're not you're not the right message. And this was off the shelf LLM.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, so that's, and that's the key thing right there is if, if it's one thing to imagine what an off the shelf LLM can do, but then those LLM that are customized and trained for this very specific use case in the insights and analytics industry, right? That's where I go. It's like, we have lots of partners who are like, but wait, Lenny, you should be put, I'm sure right now, they're like, you should be putting your data into our platform and let our AI do it. And it would be really interesting, right? To see the comparison between some of our partners' platforms just these, you know, for public use LLM.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, yeah. One of them. This was pro bono NGO work. So that's why I didn't if you are one of our partners, why I didn't I didn't ask you for that, although I was tempted.

Karen Lynch: But yeah. But yeah, no, it's cool.

Lenny Murphy: We gotta get we gotta get to the next one. Right. Right.

Karen Lynch: So I was gonna say before we do that, can we jump to Mary Meeker's latest report? Because it ties into so much of what we're talking about, which is these public LLMs. Thank you for, oh, I guess you haven't gotten it there yet. But Karley, we're skipping a bullet down to Mary Meeker's latest report. There's 10 key AI trends. And it's kind of talking about AI disruptions. And some of the things that are in there are incredibly interesting to me if you read through it. And one of them, it talks a lot about these for public use LLMs, and it's talking about AI user adoption in some of these and how quickly people have gotten on board with just what's publicly available. That to me is like, that's insane. So one of the stats she shared is zero to 800 MM. Is that MM a million? Millions, right? So 800,000 millions, 800 million, whatever weekly users in 17 months. So that's enormous. Um, infrastructure investments are off the charts, which I think is really interesting to think about. And then also she said, and I want to get into the perplexity thing for sure. But as I'm reading this, talking about the next 2.6 billion internet users is going to be AI first. So that's also interesting to think about the people that aren't being disruptive, but haven't even, that this is what their world is going to be. This is all they know. And that is in a, that is a rapidly approaching future. That is not today. That is a tomorrow where these people will not know, they will not know Google search without AI overviews.

Lenny Murphy: What we saw in the mid 2000s with the, with mobile, right. For emerging markets. Yeah. Not necessarily Western markets, but they were mobile first. Their experience of being online was through mobile devices.

Karen Lynch: These are the publicly available LLMs. We love what Perplexity is doing, but that's what's really interesting to me about it is, look at what's happening with those in this Merrimaker data because what does that tell you about all of our fit-to-use insights and analytics platforms?

Lenny Murphy: Well, it's probably useful to just point that out, guys. The big LMs, those are the operating systems. That's Windows and Apple, and that's the level that they did. Now we're at the app. We're building applications off of that. All of the solutions we just talked about, the new product launch, etc., that's now the app layer of building off of this. And that's a whole, and there's gonna be vertically focused and et cetera, et cetera. A whole different arena of growth that we are seeing now with the app layer. And that goes to, so Perplexity, launched Perplexity Labs, which I have not, it is open on my desktop. I have not had a chance to, that project I was talking about earlier, I intend to explore that with Perplexity Labs. The point is, it's a shared space, people can go in, You can collaborate on different solutions. It has documents, presentations, etc, etc, all baked in. That is an LLM now creating a public LLM, creating a very specific use case for users that has business applications as well. I'm a big fan of Perplexity. I like what they're doing. Here's just a more example of the utility. They keep expanding the utility. Not just them, all of them. Uh, you know, if you notice Gemini on everything in Google now, so, well, and it's, it's funny from a user standpoint, the user confusion is real.

Karen Lynch: And what I mean by that is, okay, I need to take this to, you know, I need to take this to AI. And then it's like, all of a sudden I have a decision to make that. Um, I don't really want to have that decision. I don't really want to have to do the thinking right now, because obviously the task I'm putting AI towards. It is to reduce my need to use mental energy around that. But now I have to think, wait, is this a chat GPT? This one of my custom chat GPTs, is this a perplexity? Like, should I go into Claude for this one? No, perplexity kind of handles all of them, but it doesn't do the same as chat GPT in terms of output. So then I'm like, which one am I going to use a notebook for? There are choices in this race that we have to make, and the only way to make them is to keep trying all of them. Don't just look narrow. Keep getting into all of them and see the differences play out in your use cases.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, because they change literally weekly. Weekly.

Karen Lynch: And if you build custom GPTs as I do, literally, I just spent the last 24 hours. It's not working the way it used to. And I'm like, what changed? Because you were working really well two months ago. And now all of a sudden, you're not giving me what I want. So what changed? I can't crack that nut, it's making me crazy. So I'm trying to figure it out. But yeah, when the systems change a little bit, what you've built has to be rebuilt. The disruption is ongoing and continuous, right?

Lenny Murphy: Right, right, there is no, hence why we do this every Friday. All right, let's, there's a whole bunch we wanna share. There's one more piece. I think that research goes into further reading. Yeah, you're right.

Karen Lynch: Everything from here on out is really just for further reading. So take Mary's and keep reading other things, right?

Lenny Murphy: Go ahead and share about this one. Give me a bunch of links. This was academic research. The LLMs outperform humans in persuasive communication. So they ran a test basically where they had a human making an argument and an LLM making an argument. And the people were more responsive and converted their opinions or took action. I forget the details of the experiment, but the LLMs did better and convinced somebody to do something. So that's interesting. And if I recall correctly, it was blind. The people that were being tested didn't know it was an LLM versus a human. So yeah, that gets into the whole, but there we are.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, no, the societal demise.

Lenny Murphy: I wasn't going to say dystopian hellscape this time.

Karen Lynch: But no, it is interesting to think about it, especially when it comes to what's an application of that. If you think about, you know, kind of survey and maybe we share about Lauren Leak next and that SubSec article, but the whole idea about what could that persuasion do in our industry, which is can the LLM get ahead of, or the AI get ahead of having to convince somebody why this ticking would be a great idea.

Lenny Murphy: Or in customer seats, right? The examples we used earlier, right? Yeah, yeah. So for real.

Karen Lynch: So yeah, so there's that, that will come back. Let's do them in order so we don't get too confused. Because we have to just like rifles through some stuff. Launched their global study, their 2025 global study. The key takeaway for me in this is the need to upskill. That's not a big surprise. We've been talking about it. We will continue to talk about it. That's why I think a show like this is so important. People need to, you know, they 100% just need to be versed in all of this and have their usage and open-mindedness to all of these AI features and functions and tools. It's overwhelming, but you got to do the work because...

Lenny Murphy: Massive trend in grit, right? The AI upskilling. That's MRI, falling job satisfaction, and rising demand for AI skills. I'm not sure there's a direct correlation there or not, but they certainly were two data points. So yeah, they do great work. If you're not familiar with MRI, Market Research Institute International, they're connected to the University of Georgia Master's in Market Research Program, which I'm on the board of, so I like them a lot, right? But they do really great work, and here's an example of the type of research they do. So good stuff. Great, thoughtful article by our friends at AYTM, I love Amazon, on data quality, as a driver of innovation. And that was really the piece where I picked this out was, look, these challenges drive us to innovate, not just, oh crap, there's a challenge, but let's fix it. And so a really powerful article.

Karen Lynch: And I love that what we're seeing now with all of the AI features and tools, and which we've said is table stakes, right? It's like, nope, now you have to, now you have to. So what's your, how are you using it? And are you using it just as a basic chatbot or are you going further than that? And that's what starts to get really interesting is how else, how else? In what ways might we leverage this technology that is so readily available? And that's some of the stories that Lenny and I are sharing are kind of like, oh, now that's a cool use case. That's something that's really worth pointing out. So yeah, keep those innovations going, good stuff, right?

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. This had made the rounds all over the place. The AI is reshaping market research, Anderson Horowitz, you know, big, excuse me, venture capital firm. I will say that, so their basic proposition is AI is going to make, you know, just going to gobble the world, the inside world. Okay, I, that that is a possibility. I did analysis, I think I shared with you compared to grid data. And grid data didn't say that. So VCs are always going to be filled with hype, et cetera, et cetera. Is that a five or 10 year future? Hell, maybe even three, maybe. But the current data indicates that humans, and we've talked about this all through this show, humans are still a necessary and vital component of that. And so it's interesting. These guys make their money, obviously, from betting, yeah, I mean, Andrew Horowitz is a legendary venture capital firm. So they've made lots of great bets that are transformative for the world. Interested in paying attention to market research, a very specific thing for our category. But I wouldn't read it and go, you know, oh, you know, don't have a panic attack, because that future that they are envisioning isn't here yet. And I think that there's things they don't factor in.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, for real.

Lenny Murphy: Good to read, good to stay aware of

Karen Lynch: And yeah, that just puts a little pressure on strategic planning to be like, okay, this is what we do now. This is our one-year plan.

Lenny Murphy: And then what's our five-year plan and what's our 10-year plan?

Karen Lynch: So you gotta be looking at all of those timelines because that's where we are right now.

Lenny Murphy: So. And we got some stuff maybe happening later in the year that'll dive into that. It's a secret for now, but we got some thinking about that.

Karen Lynch: Yes, yes.

Lenny Murphy: The need for strategic planning. You're a leader in the insights industry on the supplier side. Where do you go? How do you do that?

Karen Lynch: Anyway, all right.

Lenny Murphy: Look, I'm just throwing out stuff. I didn't like that at all.

Karen Lynch: I didn't like this. All right.

Lenny Murphy: So Lauren Leak had, there's a sub stack kind of on the quiet collapse of surveys, But here's what I do like about this.

Karen Lynch: So we'll share the link to her thought piece. Again, it's on Substack. You don't have to subscribe to her. You just click on the Not Now and read. That's fine, too, or subscribe. But she's pointing out two big problems. So there's the response rates, the problem with response rates, and then there's the increase of sort of AI agents. But what she does point out is there are things that we can do to fight this. Make surveys less boring. For real, like, we got to stop talking about that and just do it. Some people are doing a great job on that. But you know, we got to get into bot detection, you know, detecting these bots like fraud detection, like, yes, we've been talking about that. There are tools to help you with that. Don't waste any more time implementing this.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, it was wonderful. I didn't like it. I was just shocked by the analysis. Not shocked. Like I didn't know but it was very glaring.

Karen Lynch: Like, yeah, wow.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, it was really put in perspective with the analysis that she had conducted comparing.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, so take the action, folks, take the action, because, you know, all of that. And then anyway, let's just talk about the last one. I'm looking at it. We've already had a blog post on AI and judgment. So this kind of wraps up everything we've talking about, we're talking about, right, and how to use human judgment. Our ability to use human judgment has never been more important and more valuable in this, you know, highly digital algorithmic AI world that we're living in. So kind of an interesting read there. I don't know if you had further thoughts on that one, but that's.

Lenny Murphy: I love that they focus on preserving intuition and meaning. There is a term that popped up this week and it wasn't worth sharing. The rise of wisdom work. And that really resonated with me, with this idea that it kind of summarizes intuition, creativity, imagination, kind of these fuzzy concepts that really are fundamentally human. And as the discerning, defining characteristic, and that's what this gets to.

Karen Lynch: Fuzzier for some than others.

Lenny Murphy: Sure, sure, I'm getting, I mean, I'm getting fuzzier by the day, so, yeah.

Karen Lynch: I'm like fuzzy, that's my DNA you're talking about. Yeah, but good stuff.

Lenny Murphy: And guys, let us know if you, I know we go over time, if you find value and we do this, or is it like, can you just keep it to 20 minutes? That was our original intent.

Karen Lynch: I know, man. 20 minutes, we're not good at that, but that's fine. For not only any feedback, but also we will be watching that email for your entries to our competition to see who can find the most pop culture references in the upcoming GRITs Insights Practice Report to be released next week. We'll see some of you at the GRIT Forum, I hope, next Tuesday, and we'll see the rest of you maybe next Friday. Yep, everybody have a wonderful weekend.

Lenny Murphy: For real, for real.

Karen Lynch: Bye, bye everyone. Bye, Lenny.

Lenny Murphy: Bye, Karen.

Links from the episode:

Rally UXR Secures $11M Series A to Transform How Enterprises Conduct User Research 

Mintel acquires AI-native Black Swan Data

Sympler rebrands as Okay Human

SMG launches Ignite®, an AI-native platform

Emtherical introduces Emotion Intelligence AI

WPP debuts the 'Large Marketing Model', Open Intelligence

Perplexity launches Labs

Mary Meeker’s latest report outlines 10 key AI trends

New research finds LLMs outperform humans in persuasive communication

MRII's 2025 global study reveals falling job satisfaction and a rising demand for AI skills

Aytm reframes the data quality challenge as a driver of innovation

AI is reshaping market research

Lauren Leek explores the "quiet collapse of surveys"

"AI and Judgment" blog post explores how human creativity intersects with emerging AI design tools