The report, called State of Insights and based on the views of 126 research, analytics and insights practitioners mostly at director level or above, said that data quality and the changing role of insights teams were the other two issues that rounded out the top three key priorities.

More than half of respondents said their work was cited in leadership decisions last quarter, but only 17% measured research return on investment consistently. 

AI was used by the vast majority of respondents, but 51% said they did not trust the technology to run any research task without human review.

The biggest threat to insights, however, was identified as being data quality, with 28% of respondents saying they had discarded or re-fielded a study over data quality concerns in the past year.

Fraudulent respondents and AI-generated answers made up 60% of top concerns named by respondents, the report said.

The say-do gap was often being unchecked, the report added, with 21% saying that a stated intent finding was contradicted by actual behaviour, with 16% using no formal process to check for a say-do gap and 33% choosing ‘don’t know’ as a response.

The findings are based on core text-based survey with 100 respondents and two supplementary video-response surveys  with 16 and 10 respondents, respectively. Respondents came primarily from the US, as well as the UK, Canada, Australia and 16 other countries.

Andy Barraclough, founder and chief executive at Voxpopme, said: “This is a profession thinking about its standing as much as its tooling. Influence exists, but the evidence for it is largely not being measured and communicated.

“Insights leaders are right to protect the judgement at the heart of their work. But judgement that cannot be seen is difficult to defend, and harder still to fund. That is where we intend to put our effort.” 

Ed Keller, executive director at MRII, added: “Technology is changing how research gets done, but our ultimate value comes from helping organisations make better decisions. The findings on AI make that point especially well. When a human remains in the loop, trust rises sharply.”