Why AI Is Forcing Market Research to Reinvent Itself

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!

Market research is undergoing its most dramatic transformation in decades—and the changes are accelerating. Major consultancies are pouring money into AI-powered research platforms that blend synthetic personas with real user data. Startups are racing to solve problems that didn't exist a year ago, like preventing AI agents from contaminating survey samples.

Traditional surveys are giving way to behavioral analytics that predict consumer decisions with unprecedented accuracy. And as barriers to entry collapse with each new AI advancement, companies face a critical question: Can their teams adapt fast enough?

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos.  

Use code EXCHANGE30 to get a 30% discount on your general admission IIEX tickets!

IIEX North America

IIEX APAC 

Stay Ahead of the Curve! Subscribe to The Exchange Newsletter on LinkedIn Today! 

Transcript

Lenny Murphy: And we're live. If only you could hear some of our pre-show banter.

Karen Lynch: My goodness, my goodness. So hi, everybody. Happy Friday. Happy Friday in December. We're coming up on both Hanukkah and Christmas. And it is such a festive time of year. Lenny and I both celebrate Christmas. Therefore, you get that vibe. We'll do it again next week. Thinking ahead, we won't be here. Our office closes, um, between Christmas and New Year's, uh, as a, as a midway reset. Um, and we're very lucky and grateful and appreciative of that, but, um, that means we won't be live recording The exchange.

Lenny Murphy: Uh, The ultimate 2025 edition of The exchange.

Karen Lynch: So like we just recapped, um, this morning, The top 10 articles published this year. She's working on top 10, 10 podcasts. Like she does her own little, you know, her own little exploration of The year. So we should, we should have some, you know, we should have some of that. We should try to get some of that for next week, Lenny. Like what's our, what's our 2025 recap of The show? Cause here we are, you know, like what Episode are we up to?

Lenny Murphy: Uh, yeah. Uh, what one 13, it says over The top.

Karen Lynch: Oh, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: I lose track. If it weren't. Thank you, Karley.

Karen Lynch: Good stuff. Good stuff. And I mean, as usual, we have a lot to talk about. And, um, I, you know, we missed you last week. Uh, Rick though, you know, held down, held down The fort pretty successfully. And we, we do want to shout out and say, thank you for your sponsorship again. Do we have that Karley? Are we, do we pop that pop up? The little thing sponsored by. I don't remember how we do this.

Lenny Murphy: There we go. He did. I listened. I was not live, but I listened on Saturday or Sunday, I think, when I was working. And yes, you guys did have a great conversation. Rick was fantastic. So I felt a little jealous.

Karen Lynch: Oh, I'm sorry. Well, no, he was a great guest and we're grateful for the sponsorship. Thank you so very much. So for those of you who are listening , you are like, hey, I want to do that. You can reach out either directly to Dana, who you always reach out to, or to Lenny or I, or to the exchange at greenbook.org, and you can talk about it. But, you know, these next few episodes are sponsored by Talena.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. And one quick, just shout out on that too, that Karley was doing some analysis on growth. And we won't get in all the numbers, but it really, thank you. We see it. The show is growing and it's growing really well, and we really appreciate it. And you like us, you really like us. So very cool.

Karen Lynch: I don't know that everybody is old enough to understand that you like us, you really, really like us.

Lenny Murphy: Probably not.

Karen Lynch: You can Google it. There was an Academy Awards speech by Sally Fields at one point. And she was like, you like me, you really like me, when she won an award. And it was iconic for those of us who watched that back in The day.

Lenny Murphy: I remember watching it live.

Karen Lynch: I know, I know. Anyway, Yeah. So thank you. So we have stuff to talk about a lot. Very, very, um, it's no other way to say, I keep looking at it and saying, show me the money. Like there's so much money. So we're starting with the money. Um, you know, capital, capital investments. Why don't you go ahead and let's start with what Accenture is up to. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So Accenture didn't specify the number. Um, but Accenture made an investment in Wevo which is my take on a combination of synthetic and Primary research enabling a platform AI driven synthetic personas all of that good stuff without getting too far into the weeds. I think it's incredibly interesting you see a consultancy that is owning. Yeah process go is changing and making investments into platforms that totally change The process, reduce costs, increase speed. That's fundamentally what it is. So I think that that's really indicative of where things are going or understanding. The process of insight generation is changing pretty significantly. And I think that's the theme. Yes, there's a theme.

Karen Lynch: But no, you're right, so you remember when Accenture, and I think it was probably Deloitte, and they were first showing up on grit lists, and we were like, hold up, this is our space, what are these consultancies doing?

Lenny Murphy: Right, you're a client, you're not a supplier, right?

Karen Lynch: But of course they start bringing research in-house, and they start doing their own research, and they start partnering with other players in the field, so it makes sense that now they're going to go and do AI-powered research. Of course they are, because they are also paying attention to some of the things we'll talk about later, which is AI at the enterprise level. Can I just say one other thing? This combo is going to be a recurring theme also, this synthetic personas plus real user testing. Right now, I'm in the midst of finalizing, I shouldn't say even curating, our AIX APAC agenda. The AI theme is how we are pairing AI with humans in our current wave of research. So now in AI and research is The, is that combination, The both, it's all about The both.

Lenny Murphy: Yep, 100%. And then, yeah, well, there's gonna be a lot more talk. There's so much. But I mean, not even in The show, just going forward, right? Is that all taking shape, but The, yeah, well, so let's go to, Outset, congrats to them, 30 million series B. So I forget how much they raised on their A, but it was a pretty good chunk too. So.

Karen Lynch: We have, you know what, Karley, I didn't pull up this, but Outset was on, we had them on our podcast with their client, which is Away, one of their clients is Away Luggage. And so, I mean, this was going back, anyway, I don't remember what year we put you in, when this was even published, it was, you know, anyway. Anyway, they were talking at that time about some of their UX work in the world of usability of luggage. That was the context here. So I think it's interesting, like we're talking about all experience management now, right? Like this is not just UX, but now we're potentially just doing the customer experience in general. We're moving into that space and AI is helping us do it faster. So.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, AI native. They point it out there. Yes, as an operating system, really. Really interesting. Well, let's go to the next one, because this one sent some shockwaves through the industry.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, so we'll do that dramatic pause. Why shockwaves? Was it The, we'll tell you who in a minute, but was it The $1 billion valuation in their Series A Synthetic research startup Aru, A-A-R-U, Aru, raised series A at one billion headline valuation to scale simulated population market research. So synthetic data, right? A synthetic AI startup, a billion.

Lenny Murphy: And let's put low context here, guys. Reports were less than 10 million. In ARR, a $50 million raise, and a billion dollar valuation. Does that give you a sense of The multiples? A lot of money. A lot of money. Give you a sense of The multiples.

Karen Lynch: I feel like we talk a lot about millions, you know, in The millions. We're seeing a lot of, you know, in The millions investments here, but this one is among The biggest we've seen, certainly for a platform that I don't know much about.

Lenny Murphy: No, no, no, no. None of these are young guys like, I mean, you know, I could be their father. They're all young. None of them from The research space. Yeah. And having to disrupt it, you know, with a purely synthetic solution, I think their special sauce is prediction.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So more than just, you know, kind of modeling, you know, let's test a concept of, you know, that they're using. Uh, they're using synthetic samples with a prediction model to predict future events and outcomes. Uh, um, I mean, that's kind of The Holy grail, right. To an extent that we have, we have attribution and accurate prediction.

Karen Lynch: That's worth a lot. Right. So prediction is always, that's not The name of The game. We're trying to figure out what those consumers are going to do. If you really think about it at a very basic level, what we are trying to do is understand consumer behavior and wouldn't it be great if we can predict consumer behavior. So it makes perfect sense because it gets us closer to that end goal of everything we're trying to do for the brands that we act in service to. What I think is interesting about this is, you know, not unlike our friends at Listen, who we refer to periodically, competition winners and big sponsors at our IEX West event now, they are also kind of coming at it with a different, with a different lens, right? With this kind of, this youthful startup entrepreneurial excitement of, wait, we can do this now. Like, it's so cool to see, because the enthusiasm is obviously paying off in whatever they're pitching.

Lenny Murphy: I think that's a hugely important point, right? We built methodologies to address business issues because we had to be, that process was, you know, we had to figure out how to do it, right? Make process There's nothing, there is no, it could just be duplicated like that. So these guys are backing into, oh, here's The business issue. What's The Business Problem? How much is that worth to solve? And reverse engineer, and then you just build a series of agentic connections and overlays and prompts and data assets. To address the business issue. So it's a very, yeah, it's an interesting time and we are just gonna see.

Karen Lynch: More, more. So like Crisp, I don't know anything about Crisp. Crisp closed a series B1 that's 26 million, adding features, expanding data partnerships and investing in their AI agent product. What did you glean from this one? I didn't even get a chance to look at it.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So they're trying to, uh, it's just a, a retail solution where basically they want to inventory every digital product, um, across The board and make that available within an AI dashboard to analyze. Oh, you know, The, uh, AL eight Kentucky original. Um, this is ginger ale, by the way, LA, uh, LA selling at Kroger for, you know, whatever, two nine, nine, uh, uh, back, but it's public for $1.99, whatever. The bad example would be doing that digitally. But that's what they're building is an AI database of retail products. That's incredibly valuable. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: So The last money shot that we're sharing today is our friends at Bolt Insight raising 7 euros to expand globally. So continue what you're doing. They like what they're seeing. But also what I love in this press release is that it's also to develop an assistant AI chief insights officer. Kind of that feels important and worth talking about in context, right? So for real, it's kind of The blurb that we got was for real-time decision support. But basically, so congratulations. Let me take a pause. I mean, really, it's just good stuff to see these companies getting money. I love the money that's flowing into our industry. And I love the work that we've seen these partners do. It's really cool. And they've been on The podcast recently. I don't know if you've had them on the CEO Series. He's a really great guy. But putting some pieces together for you all listening, in this relationship, part of this money is earmarked for a position in The organization that is, you know, assistant AI chief insights officer. There's already an AI chief insights officer, right? These positions, so I just had, here's The context, I just had on our podcast, Joanna Beyerly, she, I discovered her, she came to our IAX AI event and she was incredibly engaged in The back room, really enthused, excited. I was like, okay, I have to find out more about her. Had her on The podcast. Episode launched this week. Carla can share The Episode. But one of the things we discussed is the new roles that are popping up throughout our industry. Companies are hiring AI experts, not just to help with their product development, but to help with their internal processes and operations. So AI experts from outside of Insights are coming in, learning about The industry, and then getting to work. Because this is the world now. It is a changed world with new positions. So anyway, I just kind of wanted to point that out. And have a listen to that episode, because she rattled off a few different types of positions that companies with money right now and that are scaling up or in growth are hiring positions that we wouldn't have dreamt about when we were starting our position. We wouldn't even have thought that that would be a position for us. It's opening up brand new work opportunities. Really interesting.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, yeah. Forward transitions. To sum up, I was just thinking this morning, 2025 was the year that we saw the signals, right? Acceleration and solidification. Yeah, right. The direction of travel is clear. 2026 is the year of scaling all of that. So we've been telling you to get The horse around, right?

Karen Lynch: The horse, The horse is in the baby's crib, The horse in the baby's crib.

Lenny Murphy: All right. So this transformational wave, right? It has not peaked yet, but it is clear now that it's not a, you know, it's not a ripple. It's a wave. Next year is the year that that wave will, uh, will really just kind of subsume everything and become a tsunami. And, um, The, uh, so adapt, adapt, adapt now guys.

Karen Lynch: Um, if you haven't, if you haven't, if you haven't wrangled this beast, uh, you know, use The next two weeks. Use your year-end time and hit the ground running. Get your Q1 goals in place. And we can talk ad nauseum about how that's probably, let's go quarter by quarter. Gone are the five-year plans at the moment for everybody. I would say universally, let's not worry about some five-year plans right now. Let's worry about Q1 plans.

Lenny Murphy: I agree. And for what it's worth, The last thing, all these for this. I mean, the barrier to entry to the lift to do these things is only decreasing. I read a thing yesterday that with the advent of GPT 5.2, is that the new one? Anyway, the computer cost has just plummeted. So not only are computer costs plummeting, so therefore, that impacts overall cost. It takes time. And yes, you need to have some people who know what the hell they're doing. But this is not a monumental shift from a technological standpoint, from an investment perspective. It's not as hard as it used to be. We're not talking about six months, we're talking about 60 days. We still have time to really adapt and shift and utilize your assets to be competitive in this market.

Karen Lynch: Let's just stay with that. Karley, we're bopping down just if you want to pull up. The link to OpenAI introduced GPT 5.2, just yesterday or something, The day before yesterday. I just want to stay with it for a minute because when I'm thinking about this and I'm looking at what it can do and I'm like, yeah, yeah, right, greater spreadsheet analysis or whatever, faster, whatever, cheap, faster, cheaper.

Lenny Murphy: I've heard marginal improvements, but marginal is still pretty significant in this case.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, and I think that for me, I was thinking like, why does that matter? Like, why would this be something, you know, I'm trying to discern, is this something really worth sharing? It's just a tech development, is this nominal lift, a big one. But the reality is, the people on your teams, The ones we just talked about you're going to be hiring for and looking for, have to be able to then adapt all processes, check all systems. You know how you can open up your phone and you're like, shoot, there was a software update, and now everything looks different, or my phone's behaving differently? All of these little updates come with changes. And you need someone who can react quickly to the changes and what they mean for your organization. Does this change our methodological approach? Does this change our software? Does this change our operating systems? That's why these roles are so critical because someone's got to track all this stuff. If I've built a system based on this, I know I'm lecturing, I don't mean to, but if I've built something, a product based on an LLM that's kind already existing and The tech changes, I've got to know what those changes are going to do to my active projects.

Lenny Murphy: 100% I mean, I mean, we try and do something comparable here, but even this week, so a week ago, a friend of mine sent me, they had uploaded The entire group report in The Notebook LM and use The Beta version to create a presentation off of that. It's like, Oh, well, that's really cool. What, you know? So this week, I've been using Notebook LM, which I had not used before. All right. Yeah. I haven't really paid attention to all of The Google stuff and But oh my god, right and notebook LM is freaking amazing from a workflow standpoint and what it does It's amazing. So to your point like that I absolutely see if you're not experimenting with those tools they have it has so many applications for The research production process Right. I mean, fundamentally, you could do so much with notebook LM that makes our jobs so much easier and faster. Um, I, I, I wasn't paying any attention until he had sent me an output and said, that's what this is from a shout out to Shane skilling. Uh, right. It was Shane who did that. And I was just like, damn. Okay. So we have to stay abreast because there's too many things.

Karen Lynch: And that's interesting because, and I think I might've talked about this about this, I don't know if it was last week or The week before or whatever, when The new Gemini came out, and all of a sudden I'm like, well, I'll let Gemini help me out and some of some Google Docs, because we're in The early days. So the next thing you know, I had just kind of invested all of this mental space getting to know ChatGPT's browser, Atlas, because I liked the integration into my work. But now I'm like, I'm not even going over there, because Gemini is doing pretty good right now. And so, yeah, you bring up a notebook, and I'm like, yeah, of course I should be looking at it.

Karen Lynch: Notebook and you know and and yeah like let's not forget how much we like perplexity for heaven's sakes we just have to go to it we're doing is they're making it easy for us to not go to The other places by building it into like exactly right exactly and so it's in that battle still you know still being fought right The but it part that The you know we're seeing The pace of change at like these you know, we're talking about these underlying technologies that are driving broad base change.

Lenny Murphy: And we're seeing what we talked about every week of these companies that are taking those things and applying them within their business and doing that. But we're not done. Next week, it's gonna be something else.

Karen Lynch: I know, I know. So let's talk about some of these new products. Because my thought was interesting about the kind of new product launches that rose to the top of the list this week. They're also like, remember when all the new product launches were like, everybody was talking about conversational AI, conversational AI, chatbots, blah, blah, blah. And this week, all of a sudden, it's like, we've got agent blockers, we've got digital twins, we've got something called alternative data analytics, which I'm like, well, let's take a look at that. So let's just, let's start with The Repdata lift because, you know, Repdata, I'll just share it, Repdata added agent blockers. To its research desk, right? So it's to detect and stop LLM agents and scripted survey automation. So like, of course, they have to do it, this is their business, right? And they're not the only ones in this space that are working on quality. But if your business is quality, do you know how important staying ahead of what AI is capable of from a data quality standpoint? So point in case, right? Like glad they have agent blockers. Um, the agents all get smarter, those blockers are going to have to be improved all the time. Yeah. Job security right there.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. Although I was still brought up, we didn't get it. I don't think we got into this, but it's, it's a whole other conversation for another time. We can have a little show about it in The era of agentic buying. Like we are seeing right during The holiday season and argument. We are at some point in time. Going to have to grapple with. There may be an appropriate scenario where an agent participating in a survey on your behalf is not fraud.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I put those aside because Rick and I really dug into those last week, talking about The Agentic Help and leaning into it. Whether it's me using ChetCPT or whether it's me on Amazon or whatever, I'm using them right now. They may not be The end all, but those are getting better also, especially as they get more comprehensive, right? As more companies allow them in, they become more useful. Competition over there is going to be stiff.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. I used Rufus this week. I've been using Perplexity. That's The Amazon. That's Rufus. The Amazon. I used it this week. Anyway, yes, hats off, Repdata. That should tell everybody something. If Repdata is investing to block agents, how much do you think that's in The stream sample? We still probably need to step back and think, but when are agents okay? Because that's looming. Acutis AI?

Karen Lynch: Acute AI, something called Z-coded.

Lenny Murphy: Yep. Digital twin, synthetic data and simulation. Go back to the billion dollar valuation.

Karen Lynch: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So what are we trying to do? We're trying to, you know, again, like analyze, analyze the risk of launching something with some, you know, pre-launch, pre-go-to-market decision making. It's The name of The game here.

Lenny Murphy: So I'm going to make a controversial statement here. I know this. If you go to an APOR conference, right? The association, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. The ivory tower, academic researchers, public opinion, you know, etc, etc. There are still active debates on RDD dialing on telephone sampling. Okay. Great. Keep on having that conversation guys. Um, there are lots of conversations happening on LinkedIn every day about synthetic.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Great. Keep on having that conversation guys. Um, the world has moved on already. The world moved on from RDD a long time ago. Um, The world has moved on already on the debate around synthetic.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So, um, And all of us, we talk about quality and all those things are important, you know, help shape those products. But if you think that's a defense for The existing methodologies in your existing business, The ship sailed and followed The money. Uh, so it's just, yeah, it's something from mobile to, from telephone to online, online to you know, and you know, we keep, but wait, wait, wait.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Reality says, this is now The thing. And it's not, it's, it's a big thing. This is not a small thing. So this is a big thing. I questioned when Qualtrics released their report last year, they had something like 72% would be using synthetic data in two years. I was like, Oh no, no, no. Way, way, way.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I know, I know. Yeah, super interesting. And, you know, we can talk more about, you know, that, but, you know, there's, as this becomes more and more The way of doing business, The quality of The data sets becomes even more important. So, you know, these things go, Yeah, hand in hand, right? So, let's talk about this Behavix thing, because I don't know much about Behavix, and I don't know anything about Maiden Century, but these two have now partnered to pipe behavioral signals into alternative data analytics for finance professionals.

Lenny Murphy: Behavix is a SDK for behavioral, to capture behavioral data. So The, so RealityMind, Curious, LootCQ Intelligence, of behavior, but variations on a theme, you download an app, it's capturing passively metering a buttload of your activity. And making that useful. In this case, the use case appears to be, I think made in the century , in financial services. So it's using these types of data sources as part of a predictive model. Basically to assess, oh, maybe I need to invest in whatever. Stock XYZ because we see this behavioral data, people are ordering this off of their phones, so we should invest in that, whatever. I'm making a bad analogy, but my prediction is that behavioral data, and this is slightly informed, by some insider knowledge. Behavioral data is about to eclipse almost every other data source in our industry, because AI makes it usable, and it makes it actionable, and it's better to make predictions off of people's behavior than off of their attitudes.

Karen Lynch: Absolutely. I mean, attitudinal stuff might be great for communications, and let's go back to fit for purpose, because there is a place for all of that type of work. But when it comes to issues of supply chain and how you're making decisions about that, yes, really helpful to see shopper data, shopper frequency, credit card swipes, who's purchasing what, when, from where, where'd they come from, were they on social first, were they reading The reviews, all of The existing behavioral stuff. And the smarter the systems can get at, I don't know, it's not even triangulating the data, it's pretty clustering it all in. 100%. And then letting the machines take a look and say, yes, here are some trends that are super important. I welcome those smart machines.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. And talking about data quality, I mean, those things are, assuming that there's not anything funky happening, happening, that should be by its definition, observational data, behavioral data, passive measurement should be The highest quality data that you can get in terms of describing somebody's actual behavior, consumer path purchase, consumer journey, any attribution, click through, ad lift, blah, blah, all those things. And so they're scaling that. And that's what that's about. So let's talk about these two enterprise apps.

Karen Lynch: Here we go. Yeah, we're running late. It's just what's gonna happen. The two enterprise AI reports because there's two of them. So it's kind of neat to like to check up on all of them and see what they're doing. So open AI had an enterprise report, which was their own internal data plus 9000 9000 survey 9000 9000 person survey. Nice little survey sample size. You know, and then and then Menlo ventures all Who is Menlo Ventures? Because I don't know who they are.

Lenny Murphy: A big-ass VC fund. One of The big VC funds.

Karen Lynch: One of The Bigs. Look at these in tandem and say, all right, what's happening with AI at the enterprise level? And day-to-day work? What else was in these? Faster cycles?

Lenny Murphy: Yes. Stronger governance?

Karen Lynch: Yes.

Lenny Murphy: I did like that Menlo Ventures actually called out research, although nobody will like how they call that research. So basically, it was in The category of, yeah, I was replacing this function in this process to a great extent. The, but two different two different views of The same, you know, validating, yeah, you know, The kind of that debate of our arena bubble. Well, no, we're in adoption mode now.

Karen Lynch: So scaling at And I mean, I think like, you know, it may be, it may be a bubble, but, but it's pretty rock solid one. You did it. You did it. We finally had an inadvertent The inadvertent. That was it. That was a good one. Mark The date folks.

Lenny Murphy: Friday, December 12, everybody was betting money that I was going to be The first one to drop The F bomb. And it was Karen.

Karen Lynch: All right, then let's move on quickly. Cause I don't know that I can recover. I'm sorry. If your children were listening, it is not home from school because jazz listens. I really don't travel home.

Lenny Murphy: It was subtle. It was really quick. All right. Last week we talked about The Anthropic interviewer platform. Just an interesting point from Adrienne Vermeersch, who has been focusing on a data quality platform, that LLM providers could become The most reliable sources of research participants. And he took that a little further in Claude. I mean, the discussion was interesting. I tend to agree that from a just a process standpoint and scalability and technology.

Karen Lynch: How open AI was able to get 9000 server, you know, user responses. It feels like it's and they'd say, hey, can I ask you a quick question? And then they ask you a question, you get it. Like, we're there, we're using it, we're engaging with it all of the time. We're already conversational with these platforms. You know, if I'm in Perplexity and Claude pops up and says, hey, can I ask you a question? I'd probably say, sure. Like, you get the conversation going that way. Like, it's so easy.

Lenny Murphy: Which is how we recruit now. I mean, now, but it's like, oh, you're playing a game. I mean, the vast majority of samples come from publisher networks where somebody, you know, here's your Guinness in store in game currency, you know, earn five gold coins. If you ask a few questions, that's The vast majority of all samples. Why The hell wouldn't we have that integrated directly into, uh, I, I agree 100%. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. So, you know, I'm not saying that they're going to, um, you know, I'm not saying they're coming for people, but they are, they are definitely going to represent some competition. So usability. Get on that. Right. If you have a tool, get your survey highly usable because, uh, you know, The competition is, is highly usable.

Lenny Murphy: 100%. I'll make one more. When Google surveys launched. Right. I think I was the first one out of The gate to say, Oh crap, here's what this could mean. Now I'd never quite materialized that way, but I was privileged to be on their advisory board during those early days. And The thinking was they had access to The world's largest panel as Chrome users. Lots of reasons why that never actually fulfilled its potential. But the concept remains exactly the same. So you have a user base with an audience and you have technology that makes it really easy to engage with people. Why would we not do that?

Karen Lynch: Why would we not? Well, the fact may point out why we would not. So for future reading folks, because we are over, we've got some future reading here, but this Fast Company article highlights this kind of growing paradox in AI, right? So these smarter models, yes, but is the data quality in these models deteriorating a little bit, potentially? So what's going to happen if you have a bigger model with more information, but the quality is poor, then you're not getting the right insights. Garbage in, garbage out. So this is just another article kind of parroting what Lenny and I have said first. So they should have quoted us as sources.

Lenny Murphy: They should have. Yeah. They should. Interesting, this IDR, I'd never heard of them before. Their 2026 research trends, human first insight, quality data, hybrid methodologies. I thought it was interesting. Nothing groundbreaking, more validation. You know, people kind of arrive at the same conclusions. So it's not just Karen and I, maybe they're drinking a Kool-Aid, but they didn't credit us. So I don't think they are. I think they just looked at the data.

Karen Lynch: Or ginger ale.

Lenny Murphy: It's green. It's, it's, it's festive. Anyway, it was interesting. And then our friends at HumanAid released their Matters 2026 trend report. And that's consumer trends. Interesting is it was a little more empathetic, I guess, right? I mean, there really was a lens of human empathy and behavioral drivers more so than just- Makes sense.

Karen Lynch: It's kind of baked into their brand. It is. It is. That's the name. But yeah, no, I think both of these kinds of trend pieces, whether it's research trends or consumer trends, I think, you know, what's central in both of them is, you know, human connection, right? Human plus tech, that's been a theme throughout the day, right? So, you know, yes, automation, but human behavior, or yes, AI, but human eyes, right? So it's this partnership working in tandem. And I think that's kind of, that is the biggest trend is partnership with technology right now.

Lenny Murphy: 100%, On that note.

Karen Lynch: On that note, I will go wash my mouth. How about you? Let me know.

Lenny Murphy: Did you see the tip? Tim commented. He noted the bomb.

Karen Lynch: So Tim Lynch noted The bomb. Yes, you know, there's that, like, whenever we did Sawyer jars in The house, like when our kids were at that age, like a mine always filled up first. And so it was like, Oh, there you go. Somebody else gets to buy coffee or something. I don't know. But like I am The one that's The problem in The household. I will admit But, um, but here's a fun fact. If you all did your Spotify wraps, let us know if green book, The green book podcast or The exchange or The CEO series were in your Spotify wrapped because shout out to Tim Lynch. He is in The 0.1% of listeners to The exchange. He may be, that may be, I don't know that anybody's got him beat. He may be our most loyal listener. So most of our super fans, he, I think are super fans. He, he, you know, he listens all the time, point listeners. 1% I'm like, yeah, that that might otherwise, you know, be you. So anyway, let us know if we showed up in your Spotify rap, because that would be a lot of fun. That would be that and we'll thank and thank you, Tim, that so.

Lenny Murphy: All right. That's loyalty. When you look up kind of loyalty in The dictionary, you know, I don't think Danielle doesn't listen.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. The dictionary.

Lenny Murphy: I guess. Oh, right. So, you know, Tim, I'm gonna have to tell my wife, I'm like, Tim Lynch, come on.

Karen Lynch: He knows we cover AI all the time. He's been in The insights industry as well. And he is, you know, an AI enterprise architect. So often what we discuss is relevant to him, I suppose.

Lenny Murphy: So Danielle's like anti AI. So she's like, she doesn't want to listen to me talk about it.

Karen Lynch: So yeah.

Lenny Murphy: All right.

Karen Lynch: Oh, this is YouTube wrapped. I'm sorry. I stand corrected. He just shared that was his YouTube wrap I didn't even know you to wrap wrapped did a thing, but yes Like don't worry Spotify has other shows because he does do more in Spotify, but his YouTube wrapped showed this one So he's showing up there live which by The way fun fact Most of our audience is now on YouTube That's fair to say right that that our YouTube subscriber base is growing faster than our LinkedIn live base It is. It is. Shout out to all you YouTube folks.

Lenny Murphy: Not what we would have predicted early on. So.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: All right. Everybody have a wonderful weekend. Stay warm.

Karen Lynch: Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.

Lenny Murphy: Yep. Enjoy the festivities if you have them planned. Talk soon.

Karen Lynch: Bye.

Lenny Murphy: Bye everyone.

Links from the episode:

Accenture invests in AI-powered customer research platform WEVO 

Outset Secures $30 Million Series B to Launch the World’s First AI-Native Customer Experience Management Platform 

Sources: AI synthetic research startup Aaru raised a Series A at a $1B ‘headline’ valuation 

Crisp Closes Series B1 of $26M to Expand Vertical AI Solutions for Retail 

Bolt Insight Receives £7M In Funding 

Greenbook Podcast - How AI Is Changing Hiring in Insights & ResTech 

OpenAI introduced GPT-5.2 

RepData added agent blockers to its Research Desk platform 

Acutus AI unveiled “Zcoded” 

Behavix partnered with Maiden Century 

OpenAI’s enterprise AI report 

2025: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise 

Adrien Vermeirsch 

The new AI paradox: smarter models, worse data 

Top 5 Research & Insights Trends 2026: AI, Human Connection, and Quality Data 

Human8 released its 2026 “What Matters” trend report