With insight under more pressure to maintain its place within organisations, client-side professionals are working harder than ever to extend their impact, working more closely with stakeholders and winning more relevance in the process.

With AI offering apparent simplicity in a complex world, one of the challenges for client-side insight professionals is cutting through the noise with confidence. There are also budget pressures and existential worries over the future of insight roles, so like their agency counterparts, there is a greater need for clients to prove strategic value and impact with their stakeholders.

What has worked well for clients?

Over the past year, Virgin Media O2’s insight function has set itself up differently, explains head of insight Claire Rainey. “We are now working more broadly across the company, but this has meant we need to be operating at a more strategic level because of the breadth, which inevitably means there has to be a compromise,” she says. “We cannot always get into the details and depth.”

The advantage of this broader view, says Rainey, is that “everything is taken into consideration, and it has more relevance, especially with senior leaders”.

The change in dynamic has also given the team permission to review its ways of working, including more experimentation in its use of emerging techniques and technologies. Rainey adds: “It feels like a pivotal time in our industry for methodology change. It has been really exciting and refreshing to start with a blank piece of paper, in some cases. We have been able to experiment and trial and therefore find new best, more optimal, ways of working.”

With tighter budgets and rapid technological advancements, Eddie O’Brien, senior director of global customer insight at Sage, argues 2025 has been a year when insight “really had to earn its place”, meaning that “insight teams everywhere have had to step up”.

At Sage, this has meant a move away from siloed, one-off projects towards systemic insight. O’Brien explains: “We’ve built an insight ecosystem that everyone across the business can tap into, so every piece of work delivers value far beyond its original brief. Every team member now thinks about the impact they create.”

For example, the team has launched a series sharing an ‘insight of the week’ with the wider organisation, while colleagues use an interactive insight agent, ‘Lumi’, to access and activate insight in their day-to-day work.

O’Brien says the company has also invested in training, upskilling and creating opportunities for growth, and has brought together research, analytics and customer experience into “communities of best practice”, as well as blending new technologies including synthetic data with more established methods.

The past year has involved some very complex research for the BBC, and the quality of work delivered by its research roster has been “really exceptional” at times, according to Nick North, the organisation’s director of audiences.

The broadcaster also conducted one of its largest public engagement exercises with the ‘Our BBC Our Future’ survey. “It provided much greater insight than we could have reasonably expected about some key issues facing the BBC,” says North. “But what’s also very clear is the importance of compelling storytelling to drive change, across all the work we do.”

Strong partnerships are helping clients to have more impact. Ruth Hinton, group head of customer experience and insight at Vue, and chair at client-side insight network Aura, says following Aura’s ‘working well together’ principles has “taken the brand’s research agency partnerships up a gear from good towards great”.

The principles include respecting agencies’ time and committing to open and honest conversations. Hinton says: “Sharing more context, simplifying our pitches while still getting a range of ideas and costs, and trusting our agencies to do their best work, while I take care of my side of things, has given me more capacity to focus on other aspects of my role, and helped ensure lots of talented people want to work on Vue projects.”

Wish list

Discussing what he looks for in an insight supplier, North says: “Beyond the quality of the work, it’s [about] how well our partners can identify the strategic implications of the work, and help us tell great stories, working with us to drive change.”

To do this requires subject matter expertise, says North, as well as “a real understanding of the dynamics of the market” and the BBC’s place within it.

The right supplier is “critical”, says Rainey. “It must be a combination of amazing skills or capability that we don’t have within our team, at the right price, with the right ‘working with you’ partnership attitude. You have to trust that you are getting a quality deliverable.”

Listening skills are crucial for Hinton, who says: “We value partners who really listen to our brief, so they can recommend and deliver the appropriate solution and help make things easy for us. As an insight team of one, I need our agency partners to be full service and low maintenance – but I appreciate in order to do that, we need to invest a bit more time up front to ensure they have the context and inputs they need.”

O’Brien looks for curiosity and “a genuine appetite to innovate”, as he wants to partner with those who are open-minded and excited about trying new approaches rather than sticking with the status quo.

O’Brien’s biggest requirement, however, is blended methodology – agencies that combine methods and tell compelling stories. “The old, siloed approach [of] running a standalone qual project here and a separate quant project there just doesn’t cut it anymore,” he says. “With today’s technology, there’s no reason not to integrate methods to create a richer, more rounded view of the customer. That’s what makes insight powerful and that’s what I look for in a great partner.”

Challenges ahead

Looking ahead, the key challenge for insight at the BBC is “solving for the future in a media landscape that’s changing faster than we’ve ever seen before,” says North. “We need to offer guidance in an uncertain environment, which can be hard for an evidence-based team; and we need to support the business to turn insights into action faster.”

Giving North confidence is the quality of his team, as well as “the confidence and trust they’ve earned” among their stakeholders, which he says “ensures insight flows into action”.

As we approach 2026, Hinton feels the biggest challenge for insight teams is making sure they are devoting themselves to the right things – so that they are “continuing to allocate sufficient energy on doing the right research, not just doing the research right”, as well as ensuring research has impact.

Hinton adds: “For some teams, this is getting harder when there are potentially a lot of conflicting requests and priorities, sometimes cuts, in challenged businesses figuring out tough economics.”

Rainey feels that it is about “cutting through the noise with credibility”. She explains that with AI making it so easy for people to search for information, there is a lot of trust – “some of it no doubt misplaced” – on what AI produces.

“The challenge is how to position ourselves in this context,” says Rainey. “There are so many sources of insight and information to read, it seems this continues to expand exponentially. But what AI does is give access to tools to synthesise this.

“So, the challenge is giving broader access and democratising the insight, but with a tool that you are confident serves up the right insight, that an insight manager would have drawn upon.”

2025 felt like a “turning point” for the profession, according to O’Brien. Looking ahead, he sees two potential futures emerging – in one, traditional insight roles shrink under budget pressure and the rise of AI-led platforms. However, he adds: “The future I believe in, and the one we’re building, is far brighter. The demand for insight has never been greater. Yes, budgets are tight and expectations keep rising, but there is more data than ever, and it needs to be clean, compliant and meaningful. AI is exciting, but it’s not a silver bullet. The real challenge, and opportunity for insight professionals, is blending technology with human understanding, so insight stays relevant, trusted and actionable.”

The teams to succeed, he argues, will be those who shift from being data providers to data advisers – partners in decision-making, aided by AI but “powered by human judgement”.

O’Brien adds: “2026 is not about doing less; it’s about doing smarter. If we embrace innovation while holding on to what makes insight human, the next chapter will be our most impactful yet.”

• This article was first published as part of the Research Live Industry Report 2026. Download the full report, including MRS League Tables, here.
  
  
• Agencies have also shared their perspective on the sector’s challenges and opportunities.