75% Want More AI. Only 23% Trust It.

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!

Salesforce is reportedly paying around $2 billion for Listen Labs, and that's just the start. This week's episode digs into what happens when AI research tools move into the software we already use every day, why shopping agents are rewriting the path to purchase, and what Pew's take on synthetic respondents means for the future of surveys.

Plus, a stat that should make every marketer pause: 75% plan to spend more on AI, but only 23% of consumers trust its recommendations.

Thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

Use code EXCHANGE to get a 15% discount on your general admission IIEX tickets!

IIEX West 

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Transcript

Karen Lynch: Are we close?

Lenny Murphy: Look, we are live. There we go. Happy Friday, everybody. And Karen, how are you?

Karen Lynch: I'm good. I'm good. I'm a little tired. I got back from New York City late last night. But I do want to take a hot second. This is what I said. Did you see that I tagged you in this? That I was like, before we begin today, I need to shout out to our very own Nancy Cardenas, who is a loyal listener. So I hope she's already logged in. And, anyway, she's a loyalist. But last night she put together an amazing panel for the AMA New York chapter. And for those of you who don't know Nancy, she is a senior account manager here at Creambook, where she has worked for over 22 years. But she has also at the same time worked for AMA New York. Where she pretty much is the kind of operational force. I think her official title now is, you chief operating officer. She does the programming, event programming, among a million other things for the chapter. And last night she put together a panel that was held at Fordham University's Gabelli School of Business, and she invited me to moderate the panel. And I was honored. It was on, it was called Inclusive by Design, and where innovation meets marketing. And it was centered on creating better experiences through inclusive thinking. So I was all in. I'm going to read the names of the panelists because they were amazing. Suzette Brooks, Director of Inclusive Marketing at Penguin Random House. Angela Lean, Senior Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft. Fred Maltz, Chief Accessibility Officer at Verizon, and a woman named Lola Becari, award-winning author of the book Responsible Marketing. I mean, Nancy recruited these folks. That's cool. By the way, she's now offered to help me with programming. I'm like, hello. Why have we not done this before? Why now? And yes, absolutely. So anyway, she and I will be talking, but it was an amazing panel. And and so not only honored to do it but I learned so much from this discussion about um about this concept and and I just want to share because there was this concept that um angela lean again senior accessibility program manager at microsoft shared with me which is called solve for one extend to many uh popularized by microsoft's inclusive uh design team um Things I didn't know, for example, like closed captioning, which was, you know, for the hearing impaired. But when you solve for the hearing impaired, for example, like you've made it easier for people to watch videos in public places, like on airplanes, like, you know, that's really cool. Or people who are learning other languages, like they can watch captions in a different language. So you're, you like, solve one problem for people with a disability, and the next thing you know, you've created an innovation for others. And I never thought of it. I've never thought of solving a problem for one, you know, minority group, whether it's hearing impaired or vision impaired or physical handicap or, you know, illness or disability, then becoming an innovation opportunity that benefits the world. You know, it just was sort of this brilliant. This is brilliant for me. Anyway, I'm just so grateful to Nancy. I am, yes, all to one extent to Benny. It was a big aha. I will be bringing this forth into IIEX event planning. I will be kind of, you know, on this bandwagon. Nancy, thank you for the opportunity to moderate this panel. Thank you for opening my eyes. I think that one of the things they said was that every single one of us is touched by some sort of disability.

Lenny Murphy: 100%. You know, it's interesting. Yes, Nancy rocks. Nancy rocks. She rocks hard. She's like scorpions rocking like a hurricane.

Karen Lynch: Amazing.

Lenny Murphy: What? What's interesting about it, and I never thought about it, so for opening my eyes. I've been spending the last week really diving into it. All everything agentic, right? Just for, and there's so much that has changed literally in the last two weeks regarding that. And in just this moment, it's like, what are the implications of having a personal agent from an accessibility and standpoint? Never even thought about that. Like, that could solve problems. Absolutely. Does it create additional issues? To think through. So, yeah, let's table this discussion.

Karen Lynch: Well, even text to speech, one of the things is text to speech was developed to assist vision impaired or low-vision users or blind. And I'm sorry, but what has that done for innovation for drivers or people who are cooking who just want to say things out loud? Voice assistance became a great innovation in the world. And it was designed to eliminate friction for one small user group. So, if you look at eliminating friction for a small user group as an innovation opportunity, what an amazing function of design. So, again, it's just amazing, it was an amazing event. Hats off to Nancy for real. I'm so honored. And and the IIEX community has not heard the end of this um the team has agreed to take the show on the road if you know what I mean all of them have have agreed and I'll leave it at that we will be having conversations and hopefully they will be coming to dc next may for to continue the conversation about what it means for our audience so very cool so thank you nancy and um so many implications and you know a couple that popped in last night that I decided not to, it's like, we already got the I know we had we're full right, the uh, it'll go into next week, but on this idea of.

Lenny Murphy: Avatars, right? They're just so I'd never even thought about it literally, thank you for bringing this up. Cause like, wow, yeah, there's just whole other dimensions to think about the shift of agents and avatars and yada, yada, yada. Uh, yeah, my brain's spinning.

Karen Lynch: Well, and when you think about it, and you think about everyone being touched by a disability, you one or not a disability or being something, somebody that was overlooked. So, you know, the woman at Penguin Random House, she had talked about how she was a soldier. And in book publishing, there weren't a lot of people who considered you a soldier's environment. And you think, oh, that is interesting. I never thought of that. And then the woman at Microsoft, she had had a stroke at a young age, and half of her body was left paralyzed. And you're like, oh, I never thought of that as a market that wasn't included. And the gentleman, a story as well. Like just story after story of what is the thing that happened to you that people don't think about. In their design. I have a story of my own, a story of your own. Like, we all have a thing that people don't think about, right? Um, that you say, Oh, I never thought of myself as that, um, but but the world, the world should be considered. Yeah, there are limitations. I mean, even though limited, we all have a limitation of some sort, and whether it's a learning disability, or again, a physical disability, or a disability, or due to an illness, or gosh, it's almost endless. And anyway, the talk will be on YouTube. Again, this community has not seen the end of it, and we have a lot to cover. So let's get into it. But again, thank you, Nancy.

Lenny Murphy: Events? We'll just give a shout out to our partner.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, we've got a shout out to a partner. You want to read about it?

Lenny Murphy: Sure. Yeah, so we'll try. We still have one more event this year, but SMR North America, November 3rd and 4th, back in Atlanta. That was my first SMR, which was when it was in Atlanta. And there is standard pricing available through October 11th. As an SMR partner, we can offer our community an additional 15% off registration with the code unfiltered 2026 underscore green book. So yeah, go. Events are great events. So they're always interesting. They're different from others in structure and format. Certainly encourage our audience to also go to SMR after you go to IIEX West.

Karen Lynch: I was very glad that these weren't at the exact same time. So I picked it in SMR North America, but I can tell you IIEX West is, it is going to be the place to be this year. And we have been saying that, but certainly this week, Oh, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Right.

Karen Lynch: Certainly this week, and we will use this as our segue. But if you didn't, if you weren't going to attend, I'm telling you, you probably want to attend when we get to the first news story. But yeah, IIEX West, right around the corner, you know, later this month in San Francisco, we have some, you know, we have our, our, our code here to get 15% off this event as well. We have some amazing, amazing brands that are taking to the stage. It's going to be pretty epic. And even our partners, they are starting to tell us the partners that they are bringing. They're co-presenters that they are bringing to join them, including our title sponsor, who is bringing Google to the stage with them. And if you do not know and you have not heard the news, our title sponsor is Listen Labs. So, they will be joined by Google for their title sponsor Spot, which is a morning plenary session on day one. So, if you would like to hear what Listen Labs and Google have to say, you should join us at IIEX West. Yes.

Lenny Murphy: And they will also be on the panel.

Karen Lynch: They will also be, Alfred will be joining us on a panel of previous competition winners. Yes. Alfred is also a past Futuralist honoree, and there is, of course, a track of other Futuralist honorees from this year's cohort, the 2026 cohort. So Alfred was a Futuralist honoree. Alfred's company, Listen Labs, was a previous competition. Winner, and of course, uh, is our number one story of the day. So, shall we get into this? Yeah, because anybody in the industry, if you have not heard this story, I don't know where you've been, right?

Lenny Murphy: So, you know, the rumors were true, and it was confirmed this week that yes, uh, Liz Limps has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Salesforce. Um, yeah, and uh and although I haven't seen the number quoted again salesforce public company will know this no one has said the two billion number is wrong so the assumption is that that is you know the the leak um yeah I did read that the deal will close fourth quarter of salesforce's 2027 fiscal year yes yes read that as well what's really interesting is watching this was this news was not just in the research world um it was on uh axios uh last night the all over the the tech trades etc etc and all with the perspective yeah of exactly what we were saying uh it had whatever that mean it we're arrogant that way but the but the the new play is integrated workflows And the companies that have built themselves, like Listen Labs did, to be integrated into a workflow AI first, because it's the efficiency of doing that.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: You're in a really good spot.

Karen Lynch: Right.

Lenny Murphy: They won the competition with two guys in a truck two years ago.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And have now been a client. I mean, we again, we are thinking of it as like Listen Labs because they're the company we are paying attention to. But yeah, the story is at the enterprise level, what they are doing. The enterprise organizations are looking to have these tools in their software, in their stack. They want to have the ability to conduct. This research directly into their platforms. They don't want to have it externally. They want to have it baked in. And so, you know, our prediction is that this won't be the first one we see like this. That we predict that there will be other purchases like this. So we will be paying attention to, we said this last week, we will be paying attention to Outset. We will be paying attention to Conveyo. Who also, by the way, are sponsoring at IEX West. So, although technically Outset is anyway, technically Outset is, you know, I think they, anyway, haven't signed the contract yet, is what I heard this morning. So I'm like, Outset. You know, I'm like, I don't know what you're waiting for here. Time is now. So anyway, so you know, they have, they have to, they have to make that happen because this is going to be, you're in Silicon Valley. I imagine some attendees will be there because they don't want to miss that opportunity. So the people are going to be paying attention. This is this, there's the, was it the deal room, deal room? Is that the name of the piece that I had found talking about? These systems are looking at these AI startups before their funding gets so high that they are exorbitant. And if these companies don't think 2 billion is exorbitant, then I don't know what to say about that. Right?

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, but think again, it makes perfect sense. Sense. Back of the envelope math, at a company like Salesforce, and this is an upsell, cross-sell module across their, you know, whatever they 10,000 clients, something of that nature. You look at it in the eye, your eyes water, you know, from thinking about the financials, but they'll make that money back in two years.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So the uh, and when you're at that scale, the math just looks different, and yeah, yeah, and there we are. So, yes, and industry as we head into 2027, yeah, there'll be more deals like this, um, and there's whole other conversations to be had on all of that. But we are, we are in a new era, yeah, so and should point out this is what uh uh SAP was trying to do with Qualtrics. It just was too early and it wasn't quite the right fit. They were thinking more around the data. Right. So, this is not a new idea, but now just the tools just make it so much easier, the underlying technology, and that's all going to be unlocked. And we're just going to see more of this.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also want to say one other thing because this, I think, was also in that deal room piece. I think I told you I found this, found this one of those big, hairy, audacious goals that you always hear about. Alfred said, with Salesforce, we can listen to every company in the world much faster.

Lenny Murphy: I mean, he ain't lying. I mean, Salesforce is Salesforce. They are the dominant players.

Karen Lynch: But even just putting it out there, we want to listen to every company in the world. And you think that is a bold statement, right? And it's true. And I don't know that other research companies would set their sights on that, right? But yeah, Alfred sure as heck would. Yeah, we want our product in every company in the world. And Diamond. So, like, so good for him and his team. You know, we give him so much of the credit because we know him personally. But, but I think that is what that is the entrepreneurial spirit that he shows and has shown since he, you know, since he, you know, kind of came onto the scene. And I think that that's. The example. I think I read somebody on LinkedIn saying, this will be a case that is studied in grad school. You know, the story will be studied because it is a great example of entrepreneurship and startups. So just take a lesson for that kind of goal and achievement. So yeah, we cannot wait for IIEX West to see these. See the energy that they bring, to see, like I said, Outset and Conveyor and everybody else in this AI moderated qual space. We can't wait to watch the demos. We can't wait to see them on stage in their signature spots and really just applaud them for the innovation in the space because it's really fantastic.

Lenny Murphy: And they're pushing. We probably haven't said this before, we should.

Karen Lynch: A rising tide floats all boats.

Lenny Murphy: And these guys, when these types of things happen, they elevate the opportunity across the entire industry. Is it challenging? Is it scary? Does it mean change for uh incumbents? Yes, all those things are true 100%. But the reality is to create, I mean, think of his team, how many millionaires he just made on his team, and they're young.

Karen Lynch: They're young. I know. I mean, so he's right.

Lenny Murphy: He just created probably 100 millionaires, though. And now, what are they going to do? Right. I know. They go and do other things and fund more innovation.

Karen Lynch: Well, he already has a foundation. He is already bringing more startups and entrepreneurs from Sweden over to do more of the same. He is already giving back. And he's in his 20s. I mean, he is an example of what we want in the startup ecosystem. So, you know, his brother, I don't know if you knew, you know, his brother is the founder of SoundCloud. So, you know, he also had somebody doing this for him and, you know, reaching down and lifting him up as well. So, I think. You know, people help beget other people doing this, and he's doing the same. So, I think that he's doing the same, and hopefully, others will do the same.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, right, absolutely. And yeah, all that for Alfred, I want everybody to take away this: isn't like, oh, Alfred, we love you. You're a billionaire now. Were you, that's not it. It's but the example, it's the example, it's the example of what can happen.

Karen Lynch: That's important, that's a huge takeaway and the uh and things are going to continue to change and evolve. By the way, we've also found out the electric twin who won our competition in Europe is coming as well to the event. Not the founder, the CEO, but the VP is coming. So we're really excited about that. We didn't think they'd come all the way. So we're very excited about that. So we pay attention to all of the winners. You know, the panel that we're having, it's Dana Kim, Andy Govindia, it's Rashad Chab, it's Ange from Ad Maple. So we are excited for all of our winners of the competition and we're excited for the next round at West too. So we're excited when they make it big. We still follow what Zappy's doing and how many years ago was that? I think that's the real message is that right now it seems like we're very, very proud of Listen, but we are kind of proud of all of our children, right?

Lenny Murphy: From Zappy days, we really do pay attention to all um and and they all sort of have a place place on the in the in the in the honorable in the trophy case in the virtual trophy case that is our competition winners you know they're all say out of everything that I may have contributed to in my career in the industry the competition is the thing that I'm most proud of if there's a legacy that I leave um in this industry it will be the success of the competition and and that makes me feel good.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Well, you should feel about the Grit Report also, because let me tell you. I think that yesterday we published an article on LinkedIn that Nelson wrote about the heritage of how it all began to go live yesterday. I got to make sure that link gets out there and you see it. I should have shared it here, but yeah, that was published on LinkedIn yesterday. I had never read it when it was written.

Lenny Murphy: Report, it was the writ when it really was. Lenny's working for a tele for an IVR provider, here comes online. And I'm thinking shit, I need to find out what people are doing with this. How do I do it? Oh, I'll conduct a survey. Oh, how do I get people to take it? I'll give you the data. Totally self-serving.

Karen Lynch: Cool too. I had never read. I was like, all right, I've never read that story. That was kind of cool. So, yeah, so that story's out there. So we published it on LinkedIn. We'll publish it on our own website next month too, but it's out there on LinkedIn too. So we'll make sure. We'll make sure that gets socialized as well. So a pretty cool story. So yeah, your legacy. Good stuff. Anyway, oh my gosh. This cool stuff. All right. Yeah. We got to keep going. It's 20 after already. We've only covered one story.

Lenny Murphy: Let's run through these real quick. I think we can.

Karen Lynch: The data bricks, which data bricks, you go. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Infrastructure for, you know, for data.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. We can probably just say that. So, folks.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. They bought a humble spreadsheet company, Rose Zero, to govern spreadsheets. So that's still, right, we think about all data, being able to pull things into a spreadsheet and do the things that you can do in spreadsheets is still incredibly useful. So they bought that company. So you can actually still go in and manipulate data the old-fashioned way in columns. So just a reminder, right? That's still important.

Karen Lynch: Come on. You know, three guesses who we're going to talk about next. The first two don't count. NIQ. NIQ. I mean. Their strategy is unbelievable to me.

Lenny Murphy: And their execution is unbelievable.

Karen Lynch: It's their execution. And again, their PR machine. Like, I don't know. I don't know what to give credit to. So NIQ integrated Google's Meridian marketing mix modeling framework into their NIQ Cadence AI native marketing effectiveness. Kind of operating system. So they're turning their measurement into kind of an operational engine into a workflow.

Lenny Murphy: They're expanding the workflow.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. So I mean this is an operational improvement that they've integrated and yet everything they're doing, they are also communicating. So they're making these incremental changes every week. But they are communicating them to the world. So they are showing the world how much they're changing and improving every week. Every week.

Lenny Murphy: It's crazy. I don't know how they must have their team from the innovation and technical roadmap standpoint, whoever's managing that and managing that pace.

Karen Lynch: Change management.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, good lord. Yes.

Karen Lynch: Hats off. Yeah. To you. I think that's why we, we, first we keep talking about it because they're doing so much. But also, if you are not, if you are not doing things at all, I don't, I don't know that anybody can do things at the pace that they're doing things, but but try halfway there. If they're doing something every single week to the point where Lenny and I are talking about something new that they have done every single week, are you doing them every other week? Are you doing them once a month? Have you done something new this quarter? Set a goal and do something and socialize it so that we find out about it. They're not even emailing us press releases. It's coming into our feeds. We are learning about it because they are widely socializing it. Now it's a large company. They can afford the press. Some things come into us at The Exchange at greenbook.org. Some things come up to us just based on our various news feeds.

Lenny Murphy: And then if you're so sitting there thinking well yeah they're you know they're an iq they're you know public company multi-billion dollar they could do all of that well stravito yes exactly was this third time in almost as many weeks now mentioning uh stravito fourth time and they do send it to us at The Exchange at greenbook.

Karen Lynch: They do. They made sure that they were fairly relentless the last few weeks, weren't they? I was like, we hear you. Yes. We are seeing these press releases. Stravito. So, in case the team at Stravito is saying, did they hear us? We heard you. We've gotten this one. We did.

Lenny Murphy: So the relatively small company. I'm not sure about their size. They're certainly not NIQ size, right? Yeah. Yeah. Stravito and Langston partnered to turn Langston's life lenses segmentation into an interactive AI personas. And then, you know, Stravito. It is effectively a knowledge management system, right? Grew into an analytical platform, now growing into their powering personas and synthetic. And now they're putting in a proprietary solution that makes those personas come more alive, right? With behavioral data augmenting the systems that already exist within their platform, the data.

Karen Lynch: To bring these personas to life, to give them. And when I looked at the life lenses segmentation and I was like, oh, these are, you know, they, yeah, I don't know how they would map to. Any proprietary segmentation that a brand may have already. You know, they seem very psychographic to me. But, if you don't have that kind of segmentation in place and you want to take a look at this segmentation, it could be very interesting, could be very directional for your organization.  So, incredibly interesting, worth checking out.

Lenny Murphy: Yep. Thor is bringing the thunder. Sorry, I just had to say that. So the CEO of Steveno.

Karen Lynch: Two weather analogies. Thor is bringing thunder. Nancy rocked you like a hurricane.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, well, we're supposed to be getting all this rain. Have you guys seen that? Like this cross-country river of rain coming.

Karen Lynch: So I guess I'm just. I don't know. Our turn week. So we're just hoping to. Uh we're just hoping to not have that for a while so yeah well yeah I think we had that nor'easter last weekend so I'm hoping that it doesn't rain so I think we're anyway so yeah so um so yeah we'll we'll come back to the idea of personas and synthetics and all that later in the show but let's talk about some launches because um because here we go here we go mcps well yeah, well, you're talking about user testing.

Lenny Murphy: I mean, I think that was more than that. So user testing, user interviews are bought combined with Tom Bravo. But that was really interesting, I thought.

Karen Lynch: Well, it's bringing, yeah, so user testing is bringing. It's launching these MCPs to allow developers to write inside platforms like ChatGPT or Claude or Figma and trigger user tests mid-design. Yep. Which is very interesting. And you look at it with this big picture of platforms. Having the ability to conduct research right there on the spot. And you think about the big picture of Salesforce being able to have moderated calls right there in the middle of what they're doing. Think about these platforms being able to do user testing right there in the middle of what they're doing. And you look at this big picture of software environments, might be at a small level, you might be at an enterprise level. What's happening here is that marketing research is coming out of the marketing research application and it's becoming embedded into the enterprise workflow. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: And the other thing, and we don't throw this enough, I still don't know the details on this, but Listen Labs built a panel, or at least has access to a panel. So there is a human data element outside of your Salesforce customer base. Same thing with user testing and user interviews. There's within this workflow, go to your existing customers and bring them in and test something. But they also, I'm pretty sure , own some panel assets as well as being combined or external. So there's a human data infrastructure element to this. It's like the decision. Infrastructure element, obviously, but then the human data element. And in user testing, that announcement, they weren't shy about talking about that, right? That they were becoming human data infrastructure within the enterprise workflow. So that's, you know, emphasis on infrastructure. What do all those things have in common, right? Is that idea of infrastructure?

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So.

Karen Lynch: Uh is it a conflict for me to talk about rewe since I'm chairman of the board um the uh well I don't know these keep finding their way into the briefs and I they're not in my feeds so it's a conflict for sharing in our slack channel oh I don't know as long as you disclose it right so um I I just think it's really interesting because you know every now and then we have to return to the you know to trust to trusting and verifying. Um, so I think it's, I think it's, I think it's legit. So, yeah, explain what Riwe's Verify Human is all about because you, as long as you're disclosing what your role is, you can talk about it, right?

Lenny Murphy: Yes, I'm the board of Ri Public Company on Acada, um, a former comp winner of the inside information competition. Um, uh, years ago, they bought Cool Tool, another company that you know, known for a long time, worked with. A cool tool was behavioral measurement, and they had facial scanning, their own proprietary algorithm. Verify Human is a new product because we fundamentally sell samples, right? They do other stuff, but a lot of the business is sample provisioning, building their own proprietary tech off facial coding and a couple other metrics as well to verify humans. Interestingly, right before this call, I was. A pitch from a startup, and I won't name them, but their co-founder was the CTO at Reddit. Also, focused on trust and using facial and biometrics on a variety of use cases. So, this concept of trust, not only is needed in the industry, and there's lots of ways to do that. Increasingly, it's becoming more significant. And I'll throw this out because it's relevant. As we move into the world agentic, back to our first part of the conversation, what does trust mean when you have an agent functioning on your behalf? So verifying that the human has permission is the human and has permission for things to occur is a great big existential problem. And here's just one more example of trying to tackle that.

Karen Lynch: Uh in a very specific way to prove it's around trust and proving that you are indeed who you are who you say you are and that you are a human yeah so yeah interesting well the next story is also about trust basically because because lumivero who I didn't know launched something called nvivo ai cloud um ai assisted qualitative analysis but it has source-linked suggestions and it requires researcher approval and before changes enter the analytical record. So it's making sure that the synthesis is fully defensible for qualitative, right? So researchers have to explicitly review, sign off on, or reject. Every codebook update. And I think what was really interesting about this is again, it's making the analysis auditable, defensible, and making sure that the researcher is accountable for that analysis. So we are shoring up the trust in the output, which I think is going to help with the trust issue that we have in some of this AI hallucination. Is it, you know, accurate? Is it making stuff up? Like all of that stuff that happens when AI is involved in qualitative synthesis. And so I'm like, all right, they tackled that problem, or they, you know, they're working to tackle that problem with this. So I really like it. And, you know, we talked a lot last week, this idea that it needs the researchers' approval. We talked a lot last week. On the heels of our AI event about what was it? The cognitive offload being okay, but cognitive surrender not being okay. Like you can't just say, yeah, AI does the work, and then, yeah, this AI output is just fine. Like, no, you can't do that. You can't just say, yes, let it go. You have to. You have to stay and verify what it's doing and so and stay accountable for what it's doing. You can't offload accountability. So I think that that's what this particular new product is. And I'm like, all right, cool. I've not heard of Lumivero, but I like that they've solved it. I like that they're tackling that particular problem. Trust in the qualitative output. I liked it.

Lenny Murphy: This whole thing, you step back and think on the broader level, right? As we move into agentic decision making and you know, that's the next generation of all of the big AI. Okay, well, where's how you evaluate that the data, the evidence is fit for purpose for the decision being made? That's a whole other thing that I've been playing with as well. Because it's a big deal, yeah. You know, it's not just a hallucination, it is to verify that it's real, verify that it's true, and then verify that it's fit for purpose.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: And that we are just in that world now because that's the way the systems work. So that's what Lou Vera did. I think it has bigger implications than just research quality. It's systemic quality.  

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: And we get into that as we get into stuff to read.

Karen Lynch: Oh my gosh. We are. This is the long mic.

Lenny Murphy: All right. Well, let's get into the campaign measurement.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Quick, quick, quick. We got to, yeah. We do this really fast.

Lenny Murphy: Sent MCP Centric. Now get it into combined brand and sales lift into self-service studies. So they're, you know, it's, they're not just a sample marketplace anymore. They're, they're, you know, they're accurate data and they're making that accessible across lots of different things. Um, speaking of which, that's our segue. Shopify. Um, yeah, yeah, I didn't realize there was a battle on this. Amazon will accept bots. Shopify is like, hell yeah, bring them on. So, yeah, in this broader world of AI discoverability and now path to purchase, et cetera, et cetera. Shopify is lean into, yes, we want your agents shopping here.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So watch it. That's a big deal. It's going to be a great big deal. And researchers need to pay attention because the shopper journey, path to purchase, all of that is just being turned on its head.

Karen Lynch: So instead of just you know tracking human click, kind of the click streams where all the humans are clicking, you're going to be analyzing and testing that agentic. Journey, and you're going to have to figure out, you're going to have to figure that out. 100%. And good luck. That's not going to be an easy task. Yes.

Lenny Murphy: And with the launch of Muse from Meta, this is not an academic thing anymore. That huge adoption. And I'll put this out there. We talked about it 18 months ago that brands wanted agentic procurement and they wanted it in 18 months. Yeah. Multiple suppliers right now. They are losing business now, right now, because they did not enable agentic procurement in their systems. So this is it, this whole thing, it's, it's real and true and it's happening right this minute.

Karen Lynch: Oh, last night. So as we walked from Grants, we walked. It's not a good idea, walk from, from Grand Central up to the Fordham School Business. There was something that I wanted to buy in a stationary store. And I don't know if we're passing the stationary store. Tim went into Muse because Tim's whatever. And he asked if we were going to find this particular product at a stationary store between here and there. Muse told us where a stationary I was like, that is not on the way. I was thoroughly annoyed because, like, that stationary store is not on the way. So Muse did not help me out there. I was completely annoyed. It was not, that was not going to be a part of me. My walk, my literal journey. So, it was not very helpful. And then at the end of the night, Tim, well, maybe we can walk back. No, we were not going to. We took an Uber. But anyway, but by the end of the night, Tim, well, here, you know, you can order it online here. And I'm like, Muse told you to do that. So now I'm annoyed because I don't like Muse. But like, I'm like, Muse is not going to dictate my user journey, you know? Anyway, so, but if there are going to be plenty of people, Muse will start to dictate a whole new user journey. And I'm like, no, if I'm not, if it's, if it's, if it's not the journey that I want anyway, tension, tension between the journey I want and the journey that AI is telling me that I want to have. No, it's going to be an interesting ride for all of us.

Lenny Murphy: On that note, quick confession. I said before that I wasn't into having conversations with my AI. I did a one-hour huddle with my chief of staff this week. And it was easier to have a conversation. So we talked, and I still don't know how I feel about it, other than it was just efficient. But there we are, guys. I had to just be transparent with it.

Karen Lynch: It's all good. It's all good.

Lenny Murphy: On that note, right?

Karen Lynch: Yeah, we got to move fast. Big tech, big tech. So Microsoft switched their models up here, their subscription plus usage model.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. So here's the deal. So Microsoft subscription plus co-pilots explaining, expanding their usage charges, putting additional charges on advanced agentic work. The reason why this is even something that I think people should be paying attention to, some of us it's not even relevant for, right? But for some of you researchers, if traditional SaaS software was budgeted like per user per month, blah, blah, your market research cost, tech stack costs might have been predictable. But now if you're running down credits, you're going to have to start tracking. Costs differently than you used to in the past. I'm assuming, again, this is not necessarily when I was a researcher, anything I ever had to do. So I'm hypothesizing. So if you're running a department, this is a new metric you have to be tracking and a new ROI you're going to have to be tracking. You have to be looking at consumption. You're going to have to be looking at tracking usage, tracking consumption, tracking costs, trying to avoid runaway costs. If you're a supplier, you have to be tracking your internal costs to see if you're. Billing properly. Because remember, we all thought that AI helped keep costs down. But now, if our costs, if our computing costs are going up, are our costs, anyway, there's a whole new cost analysis happening when our usage charges are in flux here. So that's my take on all of this: is just what is this doing to the cost-value equation of AI? In our research flows. And I don't know what the net outcome is. And I think if you're on the brand side, you've got to just have some grace for agencies as they are figuring this out.

Lenny Murphy: Agreed. I don't think the cost of computers is decreasing. That's not the issue.

Karen Lynch: It's a reallocation of the spend in my mind.

Lenny Murphy: I spent $600 on Perplexity last month. It was like, what the, anyway, I didn't realize it. To your point. Overage. No, I stopped about it, thought, okay, but I was able to deal with three new clients that I would not have been able to do without that. So it was just a rethinking of the cost allocation.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. But you're not running the scope of the research studies that we're talking about here. But you're running it for your professional use. Sure.

Lenny Murphy: And for Copilot, especially if you're automation, the agents for populating spreadsheets or for creating decks, which are absolutely reasonable things to do in Microsoft, that's what I mean: we don't know the cost implications for a company.

Karen Lynch: We don't know, right? We, we, we, if that's it's just a new cost that we're not used to, right? I certainly know internally here at Greenbook, like, these are not costs that have ever been on the table before for Lukash. He is now assessing, like, now, so now we have a new, it's like, all right, we now have an enterprise package. Like, where he's now, like, all right. Everybody stops with your, you know, $20 a month or whatever. Now we've got an enterprise package. So it's like, I'm only going to be paying for this at the enterprise level. Stop with your individual subscriptions. We're going this way for one platform that I'll pay for for everybody. Like all of this cost analysis is new. And that's for small business usage for our daily operations. I'm talking about big research computing. That's got to be more than $600 a month. Yeah. Oh, big computing.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So anyway, a new world. Speaking of that, you know, we're talking about the whole, you know, the AI AI is destroying us all type of, you know, mentality, whatever's been going on. The NVIDIA, which powers basically everybody.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: It's your own. Kind of independent agenda control system. I think that's great. So, a harness basically for agents. So, you know, the market is rising to address some of these issues. It's important to recognize where these things fit and who's doing what. And, you know, NVIDIA doing it at the foundational kind of hard tech level. Yeah. You know, all right.

Karen Lynch: All right. We're going to wrap. So we're going to give you some, we're going to give you some homework, friends, for further reading. Pew Research Center published a report on a test of synthetic survey research. So, you know, basically, spoiler alert. It's basically saying that it's not a good stand-in for human survey takers. So, you know, they're , their results were, you know, digital twins, not so great. Okay, so that's their argument, right? But what I liked about this was also, we will share a link to Finn Rabbin's LinkedIn post where he's like, let's debate this here because Finn decided to like, let's debate this here on LinkedIn. And, he. Anyway, so he has a take. And of course, like Ray Pointer, he has a take. And some other, you know, some other industry voices are chiming in there. So I think that it's worth you digging into, have a look at it. There's so many different voices chiming in on it. There's a lot of it that depends on the type of thinking going on here. There's a lot of debating happening. We're not getting an answer to this debate, right? Because synthetic is not a one-to-one replacement for anything specifically. That is not what we're dealing with here. There are some great use cases. There are some, don't use it for this. Let's keep it real, you know, and keep going. It's not going anywhere, but keep debating it. That's my take on those two things. Like, check out those stories, good for future reading. Great.

Lenny Murphy: Well, and the next one, Artificial Society.

Karen Lynch: Exactly. Read them in the context of this report. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yep. And there's been a lot of this past few weeks of different external validation and analysis on synthetic. And none of this is dissing on. Synthetic. I think it's absolutely appropriate to have this debate. It is a tool, it has its use cases. You want to make it better, we need to understand where it doesn't work so well. Yeah, and that's where we are. And I'm grateful for that. I'm glad that we're seeing true, honest, independent assessments. Um, speaking of that, Kantar Media, um, and we'll wrap with this: uh, 75% of marketers plan to increase investment in AI assistance. While only 23% of consumers trust the recommendations. So we go back to the idea around discovery, path to purchase, all this.

Karen Lynch: There's a lot.

Lenny Murphy: Adoption is growing, but there's still a big old gap between the businesses. Oh, yes, we should do this because it's more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. Consumer adoption is still lagging.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. And there's also, there's another data point in here that kind of goes back to the measurement. That we've been talking about in this whole show today, too. 57% of advertisers feel confident that their organization has the right media mix. Um, and it talks about kind of you know what that mix is and you know why that number is not higher. Um, because you know, meet the media, media options are changing for consumers right now. So, um, anyway, so check out that report. I'm glad it's published, and um, yeah, the world's a little different than it was. You know, then it was even, even 10 years ago, right? So, um, the world's different than it was 10 months ago.

Lenny Murphy: Seriously, seriously, 10 weeks, yeah. So, let's check the news, it may be different now from just the last.

Karen Lynch: Oh my gosh, I know it was better than it was 50 minutes ago. So, um, anyway, but it was good talking to you today. So, everybody, have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.

Lenny Murphy: Yep, everybody is well. Tell me soon.

Karen Lynch: Bye. Bye.

Links from the episode:

Register for ESOMAR North America 2026 and use code UNFILTERED2026_GREENBOOK for an additional 15% off your registration 

Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Listen Labs 

Databricks Acquires Row Zero, Bringing Live, Governed Spreadsheets to Genie 

NIQ Expands Google Relationship with Meridian Integration into NIQ Cadence™ 

Stravito and Langston Partner to Bring Research-Grounded AI Personas to Consumer Brands 

UserTesting Brings Human Insight Directly into AI Workflows with New MCP Servers 

RIWI Corp. Launches Verify Human, A Browser-Based Human Verification Platform 

Lumivero Launches NVivo AI Cloud 

Cint Brings Self-Service Outcomes to Lucid Measurement 

Ipsos Rolls Out Creative|Impact Solution 

Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents 

Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached 

NVIDIA Launches Open Agent Safety Platform to Secure Agents From Testing to Deployment 

Can AI Stand In for Human Survey-Takers? Not Really 

Finn Raben 

Artificial Societies Benchmark: A Validation Framework for Synthetic Research 

Net 75% of marketers plan to increase investment in AI visibility, including ads