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I'm obsessed with AI at the moment. Luckily, the rest of the world seems to be, also. One area that will feel the influence of AI keenly is customer market research. I thought we could discuss this here today since it likely affects many of you readers, too.
A recent article by Qualtrics, “AI Will Reinvent the Market Research Industry,” had a couple of stats I wanted to share with you today, which include:
- 83% of researchers see AI as an industry opportunity, and 7% see it as a threat.
- 26% say AI will create more market research jobs than there are today, 35% believe it will reduce the overall number, and 39% don't believe it will change the overall job market.
To summarize, most people think AI will be a great enhancement to the market research industry, and no one group has a majority opinion on what that means for customer insight or market research jobs.
So, does anyone know where the area of customer insights going? Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic ([email protected]) in Auckland, New Zealand submitted a video for our None of Us Are as Clever as All of Us program, to tell us what she thinks.
Watch the Video.
Some of the key points from Medelyan’s video include:
- Current customer insight is largely high-level metrics and categories in dashboards, and allows for reading verbatims in real-time, but it doesn’t provide in-depth understanding of customer needs or identify trends. Moreover, getting any customer insight usually involves a lot of manual analysis.
- AI will enhance these tasks, can discover themes, and improve efficiency with the current process with things like how customer insight teams prepare monthly reports (by doing things like writing a summary of what’s working and what’s not that the team can cut and paste into the report).
- AI provides more access to insights than were available previously, making it easier for people outside of the customer insight team to leverage the findings and create a more customer-centric culture.
I've listened to a lot of people talk about AI over the last year. That was one of the most intelligent, coherent, insightful analysis I've heard. I thought Medelyan raised strong points and didn't overstate things the way I sometimes hear from people in AI.
It surprises me that people don't look at trends. I believe in looking at trends, rather than the snapshot of what the data is telling us today, and comparing it with last quarter.
It could be that organizations don’t look at trends because they don’t really respect what the customer insights teams contribute. They are often treated like second-class citizens and usually lack the power of their colleagues at the same level in the company. Therefore, the interpretation of their trends might not have agreement from others in the firm, which could lead dismissing the area entirely.