While I’ve faced many challenges in my career, the biggest one I’ve faced overall was successfully navigating our 26,000 Kantar employees through the unprecedented challenge and unknowns of the multidimensional Covid-19 crisis. With no blueprint to draw from, it was our responsibility as leaders to balance saving lives with saving livelihoods. This meant making critical decisions with limited and rapidly changing information, pivoting overnight to remote work, digital services, and new business models, and showing empathy, maintaining morale, and supporting the mental health of our employees while managing our own stress and uncertainty. 

There’s no question that AI and large language models represent a big and growing trend in our industry and, when used as a purpose for good are great productivity tools that can enhance decision making. However, it’s also important to remember that in this AI-dominated landscape, human skills are fast becoming ‘the’ competitive edge for making data more meaningful.

So, I feel we are going to see an increasing trend towards emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and authentic storytelling as these have a critical role to play in connecting deeply with colleagues and clients, leveraging imagination to drive innovative solutions that AI can’t conceive, and building trust and relatability for strategic leadership through genuine narratives that resonate on a personal level.  

Jane Frost [chief executive, MRS] is a true inspiration to me. Her unwavering authenticity, curiosity, empathy, and outward-looking mindset ensure her work consistently demonstrates how deep insight can drive innovation, inspiration, and meaningful transformation. Her focus on listening, collaboration, and staying open to change – qualities that have made her a respected voice in leadership and innovation – has led the market research sector through a period of significant challenge and change, and her leadership on championing ethical data use through initiatives like the Fair Data trust mark and The Campaign for Better Data reinforces the ongoing value of insight and evidence-based decision-making in both government and business. To me, she epitomises the true definition of a ‘role model’. 

• The full MRS Research Heroes list for 2025 can be found here.