When Fraud Shatters Research Foundations and AI Blurs Reality

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!

Trust in flames? The market research world reels from the SliceMR fraud bombshell while battling an alarming new frontier: apps designed specifically to help people cheat in interviews and relationships. As AI avatars become indistinguishable from humans and verification systems struggle to keep pace, industry leaders gather at IIEX North America to confront an existential crisis.

Meanwhile, tech giants wage silent wars for your behavioral data, and "agent bosses" loom on the horizon. Can collaborative innovation rebuild credibility, or is this the beginning of research's dark age?

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

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Transcript

Lenny Murphy: There we are. We're live.

Karen Lynch: We are live. We are live. And we're totally calm and zen, for real.

Lenny Murphy: That's right. We were just doing zen. Breathing exercises. Karen, especially, for those who don't know, well, of course you know, IEX North America is next week. I cannot go because I have dance dad duties. But Karen is in the thick of it. You are in the...

Karen Lynch: The front of the storm. Everybody on the team is. So I ask for grace. If you were looking for anything from the Green Book team today, I ask for grace. Because I leave tomorrow. I'm heading out tomorrow morning to get down to DC, where much of the team will be coming on Sunday, or the core team, I should say. And then the rest of the team will come on Monday to start helping us with setup. But I leave in less than 24 hours. Level, and there's so much to do. But it's not just you know, so it's not just me, of course, it's our event, kind of production team, Karen, Bridget, but Jasmine, and Karley and Kat, like we're all you know, Dana, I mean, Mariah, we're Aaron, Nancy, we're all you know, simmering at a pretty high level today. So we just have to be gracious with one another. And all of you. It's exciting.

Lenny Murphy: And for those who don't know, you know what it takes to put on an event? Any but especially one of this scale and scope, it is a massive undertaking.

Karen Lynch: Which small team I throw out there. Yes, absolutely. The ratio of event size and the size of the Green Book team, you think about these larger events, they have teams. Qualtrics team, they have teams, hundreds of staff. We don't. We have always been, we've always punched far above our weight.

Lenny Murphy: One day, we don't have time to get into it today, but tell you the story of when I would bring my children the weekend before to stuff bags, right? We're putting everybody to work and we're working till like midnight, just stuffing bags, moving furniture. I mean, we have always, so I know exactly what you're dealing with. Been there, done that. God bless you, you know, the whole team. I mean, I get it. You know, we are dreaming about it at night.

Karen Lynch: We are waking up in the morning, not sure what's real or what was imagined overnight. I mean, it's kind of hilarious. And, you know, this year more so than the last several years that certainly that I've been here because we've switched venues. You know, we are all like, all right then. And we are, you know, over 1100 registrants now. So that's exciting news because, you know, we beat last year's registration goal.

Lenny Murphy: Um, it's going to be great. I was going through the attendee list. It's massive. It's fantastic. Really cool stuff. And last I will say is I remember, I know the feeling of once, as long as that first session comes off on time, for me, it was always like, okay, the train has left the station, right? So that was the first big hurdle. Does everything start on time without any problems? Once that happens, then it's like, Now we're just triaging, you know, as we go.

Karen Lynch: But it was a- See, mine is pretty much, you know, like go time for me is typically like, you know, 7.30 a.m. Coffee. I am on site. I am having my cup of coffee at 7.30 in the morning and I'm there. Everything else then becomes somewhat out of my control. So as long as I get myself there and I'm on stage, then all of the work, you know, to greet all of the other things it's like, okay, we did all the watching so yeah, I have FOMO something to wear.

Lenny Murphy: It's just a little bit more because I really was planning on going. I was looking forward to it and then mother nature and dad dad stands dad duty into whatever Anyway, it's the way it is. But man, what a kick-ass event. This is gonna be I think it's gonna be the best IX ever The buzz online is amazing Everybody is so engaged There's so much cool stuff going on. There's still time to register if you have not registered. I'm telling you, this is the can't miss event of the year, truly. So register. There's code. You still get 30% off using Exchange 30.

Karen Lynch: Be there or be square. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know who that LinkedIn link is. 10 years or it is, but like, you know, yes, it's all right.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, LFG, let's go. Yeah. Anyway, so, so yes.

Karen Lynch: So, you know, so that's, that's one, one bit of, you know, the mental energy that's happening here and with so many other members of our team. And then there's the other, then there's the other reality that we are navigating as an industry, which will, you know, probably be one of the most talked about topics over coffee, side conversations, roundtable discussions on stage, you know, the hot topic, of course, is the is the fraud case against a few parties in the industry. And, you know, I think we have links. This LinkedIn user, you don't know who I am, I'm feeling a little bit like, I don't know who you are.

Lenny Murphy: Users. You're not showing up.

Karen Lynch: So anyway, but I don't want to get too distracted by that. Um, the, uh, we have links to the official statements from both SMR and the insights association. So, um, if you weren't, if you've been under a rock and you weren't with us last week, you know, again, $10 million market research fraud case involving, um, SliceMR opinions for good. Um, I think they are those, and there was a list of, I forget how many people now in the original indictments that are personally, you know, kind of named in the case. You can look up the case. It is public information. I'm not going to share the case statement with you or anything like that. You could also look up, you know, a list of, I think what might be a growing list of people that are affected by it. So it is, it is. Anyway, we have official statements from the Associated and we are appreciative that they've done that. We also have a sample con statement. Did you look at this one, Lenny?

Lenny Murphy: I didn't see the sample con statement.

Karen Lynch: Nope. It's interesting. So, you know, both the Insights Association and SMR, as you probably are very aware, because I know you read those, are saying, you know, we don't condone this activity. I forget which one of them called out that it is alleged right now there is an active case, but, you know, there hasn't been a ruling in but they're condoning fraud, of course. And Samplicon went a little more quickly, and they're not an association, obviously, but they went a little more quickly to what we were talking about, which is solutions and what can we do about this and the call to action for let's move on this. Anyway, that's one of the takeaways from the three major statements. And then we can keep talking.

Lenny Murphy: There are more takeaways. Lots of takeaways. Think of humans and of course, you know, Carrie and her, Carrie and Jay, have been on this for a long time. And certainly last year, was it just last year? Anyway, the Moss interviews.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, the Moss interviews.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, so understanding just how big that is, but also exploring things around qualitatively. Rick Kelly from Fuel Cycle, didn't know that they were a victim they saw the victim, oh, oh.

Karen Lynch: Somebody said, you're on the list. So, first of all, I think what was really brave about Rick Kelly's post is he's, he, he kind of, he certainly made me take a moment. And he has said sort of like, there are real implications to many of us who are, who, who bought some sample from these companies at one point in time. And the consequences are pretty great. We unpacked a bit of that last week or the potential consequences. And he kind of stepped out a little bit in vulnerability, like, look, my me and my company are victims in this. And it's disrupting us like you can't comprehend. So, you know, and then there was another post, Emily Richardson, who's a researcher at Ibada, who's also on that victim list, uh, also wrote kind of a heartfelt post about, look, they didn't ask to be here. They, they, they just fell victim to fraudulent samples. And, and so they're coming out honestly and talking about that, which is part of what we asked for. We were like, this is going to be a time for honesty and transparency. And here we are. Yeah.

 Lenny Murphy: Well, and I think I may have talked about this before, but if not, what, what, I'm going to say it again, rock hopper, we're doing this big multi-country study, uh, with Alcatel Lucent, right? Multi-million dollar project, right? It was fantastic. B2B consumer sample, like as big as you get. And we were the victims of fraud in two Latin American countries. The data was fraudulent. We didn't know that until the client pointed out that the data was fraudulent because they had some expertise in specific things. You know, we made that, we had to, it's the right thing to do. And we never got to the project, Alcatel-Lucent. And the debt that we incurred in making that right, from the timing standpoint, when the Great Recession hit, it was the death blow that we did not know for the entire company. So to Rick's point, and your point, these things, they have massive implications. Point, you know, I've got, and I'll just say this. I mean, the company had to file bankruptcy. I had to file bankruptcy. We had 20 employees that, you know, all had to be let go as a downstream effect of that one compound where we acted in good faith with the vendor that passed all the stiff tests, et cetera, et cetera. They were subbing out to another vendor. The ecosystem was being developed. At that point, there was no transparency in that process. So that's why I get passionate about this issue, because I experienced the very negative consequences of fraudulent data personally, myself. And every negative consequence you can imagine, other than legal. So it does have a bit. Emily's point Rick's point. Yeah, but I have to tell you I've talked to a lot of folks this week and to our listeners This case is getting bigger There are other it is spurring other Investigations.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, and that is happening Yeah, so while I appreciate the position of this is an isolated incident. And I would agree with that in the specific thing that opinions for good is, uh, is, uh, uh, being indicted for the problem of a tainted supply is significant. Yeah. And, uh, and it is widespread. And anybody who says that it isn't is being Pollyanna-ish at best. And we know this, this is not anything new. If you've listened to the case for quality presentations, presentations at IAX, other places, right? None of this should be new information. So all these conversations happened for years about the quality issues. The opinion for good things was very, very small, and we need to keep that in mind. So it is great to say, those are just a couple bad actors. Yes, it's a couple bad actors. But now that the federal government is looking at that, it's widespread.

Karen Lynch: So now- I can tell, again, this growing list of victims. Yes. And what's interesting about the, you know, Karley, we also have the Emily Richardson post, as I was mentioning, what I thought was poignant when I was reading kind of both of them is, you know, you know, Rick Kelly, he's, he's the chief strategy officer, right? Like he, this is him earning his paycheck this week, you know, like this was, this is all right, now it's up to you. And they have done something proactive with it, right? So we'll get to that in a minute. But, Emily's a lead researcher, right? Like, and that's where, again, I want us to kind of about how we talk about this in the industry, because, you know, yes, we can get mad at decision makers at companies and C-level executives, and we can debate whether they, you know, knowingly did this, whether they turned a blind eye, whether they were completely ignorant, whatever. But Emily's a researcher, right? So she's a researcher who's just trying to do her job, and she's disrupted too. And that's where the parties trickle down. Not to mention all the legal consequences and the financial implications and all of that, but just imagine if you are working for these companies. There's a few of these companies on the victim list that are sponsoring, gonna be at IIX, and I feel like we can say hello to them and check in and see how they're doing with some sort of I don't know, just a little bit of empathy and human understanding as we proceed down this path, because it would be very easy for us to start to name names and point fingers and- Right, and we're not going to do that. Yeah. And also, cautionary tale, I don't know which of these posts talked about it, but cautionary tale about maybe this isn't a great time for self-promotion. Maybe IIX is next week, go ahead and talk about it, but maybe this week- is interesting, the difference. Maybe this isn't the week to be like, not us, we're doing okay.

Lenny Murphy: Right, right, right. Someone, nah, I'm not gonna go there. Here, I'm just gonna say what we've been saying forever. We are in a period of pivotal change. So across the industry, this is another example of that. We have a supply problem. I understand everybody talking about, no, we have a, we have a quality problem and we want to, uh, many of the solutions in my humble opinion, um, that are being discussed are necessary, but insufficient. This is a time to be bold and to think about how we build a new ecosystem of supply. I've been breaking records about this for years and years and years. So many others, there are solutions emerging that are trying to address the topic by re-engineering the entire supply chain, the value proposition, and how we think about this. I encourage everybody to think about those solutions. And if you are a large supplier in this industry, you're in an ideal position to support a new way to think about doing things. Transformation is not easy. It is painful. It has economic implications. It has human implications. It is necessary. And we are at that point where to be proactive, it is necessary to rethink these things. And here's an example. Do we want to move into other stuff?

Karen Lynch: Yeah, let's do it. I want to come back maybe to the, anyway, yeah, let's just go there. Because it's so related.

Lenny Murphy: It is. So this week, this is whack-a-mole, guys.

Karen Lynch: That we're going into.

Lenny Murphy: I mean, so the Columbia student raises $ 5.3 million for the cheating app for everything, right? That's what they call it. This is a consumer focused app, AI, to allow you to cheat on a job interview, to cheat on a date. For example, they have a commercial using it on a date, trying to impress somebody. And you think for a second, that's not also already being deployed for people to pass screeners, to engage in research, because it's a small cost to acquire the app. You get a couple incentives because you bullshit your way through using it in a research study that, oh, I'm a doctor. I know.

Karen Lynch: What's interesting about this, though, is that it's built around cheating detection. So the very things that, the very things that if we, if we say, okay, get, get, you know, connect some dots for us, friends, why are we talking about this AI detection cheating? If, if, if there are, if there are, you know, fraud detection tools being turned into fraud tools. Yes. Academically, there will be fraud detection tools that are turned into fraud tools in our industry. Let's just call it what it is. So we may- Because there's money to be made. Right. We may have just lifted up a rock and saw all the bugs and now we're like, oh look, proof that there were bugs living under this rock. It doesn't mean the bugs go away. They just scatter a little bit. They're still there and more will come. So we have to, this is not just just a cautionary tale, this is a significant call to action for many people to do even more. Nancy, right, this call is coming from inside the house, inside the house that is on fire. This 100%, you know. And the market is speaking, right?

Lenny Murphy: So let's go into the next two things. L&E partnering with AdRich, great, congrats. I work with both of them. Love them. Average captures behavioral data of users of products. Yeah, right. Now that's very hard to fake. So that's going to enhance the ability to target effectively as well as all the actual methodological applications. But the point is that it is in our interconnected world to defeat these things. So one thing is we need to lean into capturing real behavioral data, not just as a better screening process, which obviously it can, but also as a validation component. To understand, oh, you say that you're a doctor. We don't see you at the hospital because we see your data. You're not doing that. So there's so many solutions. And then the next one, the Listen Labs won the competition last year. 27 million from Sequoia, great. There's video and AI, right? Video is increasingly going to become a hugely important validation tool. It's still probably insufficient because people can fake avatars now too. But these types of solutions are emerging, which maybe they weren't driven by trying to deal with the quality issues, but collectively, they reinforce the quality of supply and therefore the quality of the research. The market is speaking, so.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, and let's dig into some of these, again, these tech developments that are highly related. And I think the reason why they're all, again, unsettling, and it's not just because I'm simmering up here because of North America, these are unsettling because the rate of advancement is outpacing our brain's ability to grasp these, right? So when I'm looking at these next to things which are linked, right? So Google's genie developed by DeepMind pushes generative AI towards building these interactive virtual worlds. From static images, they can create virtual worlds. So, okay, and you think, all right, well, we've been talking about virtual realities and, you know, there are companies out there that are using them for research purposes or for ad testing, you know, like there's lots of potential there. They are getting better. They are getting easier for other people to do. And photorealistic.

Lenny Murphy: And very realistic.

Karen Lynch: So these don't look like your cartoon kind of virtual reality.

Lenny Murphy: The VR stuff from the night.

Karen Lynch: It does not look like that. This looks like this is a real immersive world. And at the same time that that's happening and that ability is getting uncannily real, AI avatars are also becoming very, very real. This article that we're sharing here is talking about, it's a very interesting one. It's talking about, well, they're all interesting, but anyway, I digress. Expressive full body digital characters, right? So, and these avatars are going to be capable of, the one thing I saw here in this article was joining meetings on your behalf.

Lenny Murphy: I wish! The Lenny Bot.

Karen Lynch: Our bots send our bots to the next leadership team.

Lenny Murphy: We already do like the AI note taker.

Karen Lynch: I mean, that's that, you know, so imagine if the note taker has an avatar. And instead of just saying, you know, Lenny's note taker, Karen's note taker, whatever. The avatar shows up and actually asks a question based on what it's hearing based on what it thinks you would ask in that situation. Aaron would want to know what this means for their content strategy. You know, Lenny might want to know what this means for, you know, Gen 2 clients. Like what?

Lenny Murphy: Like our avatars- That cheating app, right? Real time. It's feeding the, you know, those solutions in.

Karen Lynch: I just don't want people to think that we share all of these things because we're like, oh, this is interesting and cool. But this is happening so fast that, you know, there are companies that are already taking this new tech and designing these immersive environments that can be leveraged for research purposes. How will these avatars show up in our conversation bots that are already being executed to, you know, ask surveys or ask questions. And it is happening. It's like it's kind of amazing, right? You just have to recognize your brain might not be there yet, but the technology isn't waiting for us.

Lenny Murphy: And, you know, you know, the reality is that the shadier side of the world are early adopters of all technologies. That, you know, porn was always first with exploring new stuff, right? And, and so are fraudsters, etc, etc. So recognize that we already have an existing, well thought out ecosystem of digital ad fraud, which is far bigger than research fraud. But research fraud is big, too, right? They generate revenue. And these things happen well, but that's it. They don't happen overseas. Obviously, opinion for good shows. That is not the case. Yeah. But there is, there are well, there are well developed, uh, kind of black markets, um, ecosystems that do exist in other countries, um, that take advantage of these things because they generate money. Not anything individually or what 25 cents, 50 cents. You're right. That's nothing. But when you could do that at scale and you've got a million or even a thousand of these solutions deployed, played it once, that's real money. But remember the Moss interview saying his boss drove a frickin' Lamborghini, right? For just having set up a network for taking surveys fraudulently. So to echo your point, and that's maybe where I get frustrated about, if we're putting Band-Aids on solutions that are based on the past, they are insufficient to deal with these types of things. We have to rethink the front end. All of it.

Karen Lynch: And you know, one of the takeaways from that, that, um, the Mossgate, the, the pay for your say kind of expo say that, you know, Mickey Hill and, um, doesn't carry it. 10 K humans, uh, collaborated on laughing.

Lenny Murphy: Nancy's the new Megan movie sequel. Sorry. That's even scarier. Go ahead. Sorry. Um, sorry for YouTube viewers.

Karen Lynch: Nancy's comment on LinkedIn about the shader side of the world is an early adopter of technology, the conversation feels like a lead up to the Megan movie sequel. So that's what Lenny is laughing at. Anyway, let me bring you back to the point that I was just going to make before I forget it.

Lenny Murphy: Because I have.

Karen Lynch: Sorry. Yeah. No, it was a good point, too, though. It was. Oh, shoot. It was. Oh, well, tell me you have to bring me back.

Lenny Murphy: What were you talking about just before that, that we're applying band aids to solutions that were yesterday's problems when we have all these new things that are rapidly. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: So the idea is, when it comes to this, this paid for your same model, there was a commute and you know, there was a community.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, that was all fraudsters.

Karen Lynch: They were being trained to answer the video in the proper way, to do a video upload in the proper way. So you have to look at your, look at, and you're like, but I have fail-safes. I have a video. Not enough because certain fraudsters will train other people to fake their videos. This problem is a side hustle. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: It's a side hustle.

Karen Lynch: And you have to, we have to work on this with a much bigger lens of really what can we do because we have to change it systemically and not just say, I'll start having them upload videos to prove that they're people. No, that doesn't really prove anything because people are committing fraud.

Lenny Murphy: And that can be institutionalized. Yes. Sorry, Karen. Yeah. Now, that could segue into kind of the other, well, let's talk about the perplexity, because that is a piece of, so perplexity is developing its own browser, and they want to track user activity, and so hyper-personalize ads. Data, so think about when I was an advisor to Google Surveys, when they first launched, right? One of my questions was like, why are you guys not using this down in the world? Because they have so much data on users. They have behavioral data. And if you remember, in that day, Google surveys, when they sampled, it was imputed demographics. Because they could determine, oh, this is a middle-aged white male who lives in Atlanta at that point, whatever, right? They could do that based on my browsing behavior. Now I have perplexity, which is going in the same direction, building the ecosystem for hyper-personalized ads, But it's not just that behavioral data. They're also gonna have all of your conversational data in terms of utilizing AI and perplexity and their various tools. So we have the emergence, and back in Veriglyph, we took a stab at trying to build a browser, right? And with the same type of idea. So I know these types of things can work. If perplexity decided they wanted to engage in the research process to connect that data to deliver hyper-personalized ads. And if they buy Chrome, which is the other piece that they're out there with open AI and perplexity or wanting or hoping that Google has broken it up and that they buy Chrome. That is a world that I would argue would be demonstrably better than our current ecosystem because they have more points of validation, richer profile information, et cetera, et cetera. So we need to start thinking like they are and get in front of these things because they're simply They're in a good position if they do those things. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, so And then we have tableau Before you get to that I'll bet we can bounce back up to that but one of the things that stuck out to me is this perplexity thing is that they're also looking, if Google's forced to divest, they're looking at potentially buying Chrome, but OpenAI is also looking to buy Chrome. And I just, not connecting dots for y'all on that yet, but this will be interesting watching the Google case and how the generative AI platforms and these language models potentially get into the, you know, into the Chrome game. Right, because they want data. So just put all of those things together. I'm sure at some point, that will become a hot topic probably once we get further along in that space.

Lenny Murphy: But that's all interesting.

Karen Lynch: Well, let's say I'm gonna make a prediction.

Lenny Murphy: One of the AI companies is going to acquire a company in our space for the data. They're going to either buy a panel or they're going to buy a data company. Imagine if OpenAI owned Numerator, which is for sale. Now, I don't know anything. I'm not saying I didn't know anything. What I do know is that the hunger for data assets and connection to consumers to build those data assets by these companies is immense. I'll point out again, Elon Musk did not buy Twitter because he was a free speech advocate. He bought it because he wanted the data to train his AI, to train Grok, right? It's the same exact thing. And what and how is he monetizing that through subscriptions and advertising? No, it's the same thing guys. It's the same thing so we have to get smarter in thinking about what the world is developing into and it is one where we can be low quality, you know Operational option or we can be fully integrated because we drive quality into much bigger applications. I know the future I would like to see us participate in, but if we don't change how we engage with consumers, we're gonna wind up in the other one.

Karen Lynch: The systemic problem is literally let's change that, let's start there and reward honesty and integrity and people who are showing up you know, one of the podcast episodes that's going to launch in a couple weeks, I think it was, I don't remember, I was telling you this last week, but you know, they have this internal community, and it is not incentivized, and it is transparent about who's behind it. And that's their model. And millions of, you know, people have participated in research with them in this, in this panel, because it's all internal, and it's all sourced from their internal data. And it's working for them. And these are not the issues that they are wrangling, right? They're not playing whack-a-mole with it because they have their own.

Lenny Murphy: Yep, yep. So we have a lot on, you've got a lot to do. We will not be live next week.

Karen Lynch: Oh yeah, we're not gonna be alive. We're not gonna be at all. Yeah, full disclosure, next Friday is our team's day to regroup and everybody kind of takes the morning and many of us will be working, but not necessarily doing this kind of work. And some of us might be taking a walk. Some of us might be walking the National Mall. Some of us might be going to get massages. We do whatever we need to do next Friday morning, and then our team does some fun team activities together, because it's our one chance to really get all together. Sorry, Lenny, not to go back to your FOMO.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, you're not helping. So we will not be here next week, but we will the following week, maybe a longer episode as we recap IEX.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, we may have to, we may have to. I mean, didn't we say at one point we wanted these to be like 15 minutes?

Lenny Murphy: We did, originally that was the goal. Yeah, we've settled on 30, we're at 34 right now. There were, let's just run through.

Karen Lynch: Let's just stop, we never really talked about the Tableau thing, but we said, let's talk about the Tableau thing.

Lenny Murphy: So let's just, if we're going to just throw a few things out there. Tableau, agentic analytics. So Tableau has never really been very much something that research organizations used because just their approach to data was a little bit different, but it sounds like they're actually building out the capabilities of the agents where it may become a very viable solution for researchers to replace some of the other tools we've always used. So pay attention to that. There are a couple other stories. We're not going to run through all of them, but...

Karen Lynch: It's good future reading, right? I think some of these, these all could fall into the, here's an article to read or a report to download. Yeah. So let's just kind of, Karley can list them there, but one of them is Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend, a report on work trends. And this one's interesting. One of the things in here it talks about is they're talking about the rise of frontier firms, but what they're really talking about is workers having, kind of being agent bosses. And really that is the worker in the future. What we're headed to is people that are, I got my agents, I know what I'm doing, I'm in charge of my own workflows, and it's just cool stuff.

Lenny Murphy: Shoot, we didn't get the Fuel Cycle announcement, did we?

Karen Lynch: Speaking of, we mentioned it way up at the top. Oh, and we were going to come back to it. It's way up at the top.

Lenny Murphy: Fuel Cycle opening their Autonomous Insights AI. Oh, yes, we did pass over that. So an example, right? Fuel Cycle, their autonomous agent-based Yes. So effectively, the researcher is managing agents built within the FuelCycle platform to conduct the research process. So there we go, we see this now in our industry, same idea. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Karen Lynch: So good, good call out, because that's another thing we mentioned, but we didn't circle back because you know, that's what's happening. Harvard Business Review article on how people are using generative AI. You know, there's some things that aren't really surprising: chat GPT going mainstream, kind of being one of those points, but also, you know, some of the other competitors are in there. You know, anyway, it's, it's just kind of, it's just kind of a good, a good read, a longer read, but credible stuff. Did you say you want to talk about that one date? This is probably one of your better, better, favorite, favorite subjects in the longs. Did you say exploring the future of data collaboration programs?

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, well, when you have You know, the big ad agency, mega holding companies buying up data synthesis platforms. Lotomy, Lotomy, I never know exactly how to pronounce it, but they're owning those because they're synthesizing data from multiple data sources to drive better advertising, equal perplexity, you know, is going to aim for. There's these external components as well, where they're leveraging that, and we're seeing those companies, these big billion dollar holding companies making plays to buy the foundational connective tissue platforms for data collaboration.

Karen Lynch: So- Real quick, there's a phrase in there that, you know, this is for all the real nerds out there, or the real geeks, or the real tech aficionados, but they talk And I had to do a little sidebar to say, what the hell is a clean room? And as I'm reading, understanding what clean, and spoiler alert, if you're interested in this level of technology, go Google, what are clean rooms? But the reality is there might be something to how data is handled in that regard that is translatable to us. What is our equivalent of that?

Lenny Murphy: Yes, because they're trying to clear out the fraud, the click fraud. That's right.

Karen Lynch: So maybe there's something to the clean room concept that we can start to dissect and apply to our industry as well. So that's my two cents on that one.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. There are some others, just Karley, just go and put the links in around a chain of thought reasoning, how AI are developing synthetic responses from our friends at Pure Profile, you know, some thought leadership on how they're synthesizing those things. And then still how a lot of people are still freaked out by AI to begin with. Actively resisting, because they don't want to be the boss of the agent, right? Because they're afraid one day their agents can become their boss, right?

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Well, and I think there's, there's a, um, if you look at the chart in this last one, uh, that Karley just shared the new research, um, the interesting stat is that these companies or the people that are, that are resisting their company's directive and man, you know, like suggestion to start to use AI is they feel that it might diminish their value or their creativity. When in fact, you know, certainly from my experience, obviously in for yours as well, but you know, we know it is greatly enhancing what we do and can accomplish and how we think what what our, you know, Tim, if you all are paying attention to the LinkedIn chat, and you see what my husband just shared, I have no idea what that is.

Lenny Murphy: But oh, it is gifts and a secure government. We're going to get into the secret, secret data.

Karen Lynch: Oh my heavens. Between the two of you, between you here, you know, on this call and between him and my regular life, you're all going to make me crazy. Make me crazy. Anyway,

Lenny Murphy: Make, make you crazy. We used to say, what we used to say was, you know, you're driving me crazy. And then the joke was, it's a short drive.

Karen Lynch: So, you know.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, no, I get it, Tim. I'm a big UFO buff, so I'm paying a lot of attention to this whole idea. You know what people are talking about in the skiff anyway. The guys there's a lot going on. IIEX is next week so go have a good time and also engage on these topics because that's the magic that happens at those events. It's not just not cool . We're all there. We're selling each other, but there is a certain magic that occurs at IIEX specifically if I've seen it happen.

Karen Lynch: New companies are created, new solutions are there, innovation happens because you have smart people talking about cool stuff, getting together and trying to create new ideas. It's happened a lot, it's gonna happen next week. So that's the good news. All of this may sound scary, but there's really brilliant people that are working on solutions.

Lenny Murphy: Be aware that the market is speaking, they'll emerge, you know, we'll see in the news as people announce things. There's the reason why we, you know, we, you know, have not only created, but live up to the tagline of the future of insights, because we are co-creating it at these events together, everybody.

Karen Lynch: We are, we are actively having these conversations at our events together with everybody in the community, we'll be ready for what's coming, no matter how fast it's coming at us. And, and keep tuning because we're the, we're the conduit for all of that. Everybody have a fantastic weekend.

Lenny Murphy: Enjoy IIEX. I'm going to avoid LinkedIn. Uh, so I'm not missing.

Karen Lynch: Uh, you're like, I'm missing things. I'm going to try hashtag IIEXNA all the way. There we go.

Lenny Murphy: Thanks for tuning in.

Karen Lynch: Take care, everyone. Bye.

Links from the episode:

Insights Association 

ESOMAR 

Samplecon 

Rick Kelly, Fuel Cycle 

Emily Richardson, Lead Researcher at Ibotta 

Columbia student raises $5.3M for controversial AI startup built around cheating detection tools 

10K Humans Newsletter Article 

L&E Research partners with Adrich to deliver real-time behavioral insights for CPG brands 

AI-powered startup, Competition Winner, Listen Labs, raises $27M to analyze customer conversations and generate actionable business recommendations 

Google’s Genie, developed by DeepMind, pushes generative AI toward building interactive virtual worlds 

AI avatars are moving beyond the uncanny valley 

Perplexity is developing its own browser to track user activity and sell hyper-personalized ads 

Tableau Next introduces “agentic analytics” 

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend 

Autonomous Insights AI following industry turmoil 

HBR reviews how people are using generative AI in 2025 

Digiday explores the future of data collaboration platforms 

Synthetic responses are gaining traction in modern survey research 

New research finds a third of U.S. employees resist AI strategies at work due to fears it diminishes their creativity  and value 

OpenAI is reportedly interested in buying Google Chrome