The study, a follow-up to last year’s quantitative research by the organisations, interviewed 18 senior UK client-side insight professionals with domestic and global remits who had recently been displaced – made redundant or had their role changed as a result of a restructure, for example.

The study, conducted by Growth Constructors, found that professional disruption was down to structural factors rather than an appraisal of the insight function’s performance – with macroeconomic factors, cost-cutting, mergers and acquisitions, and C-level leadership churn largely to blame for displacement rather than AI.  

There was also a concern expressed by some participants over an increasing executive belief that data and dashboards are of equal importance to strategic insight, and professionals were concerned that this view risked eroding human-centric intelligence within organisations.

Another observation of the study was that roles which were once separate are now merging, with professionals expected to wear more hats and have a combination of skills. One participant described this as businesses looking for a ‘holographic unicorn’.

Respondents of the research also called on industry peers to expand insight’s mandate, reassert its value proposition and shift it away from a ‘service-desk’ mentality.

During a webinar on the study’s results yesterday ( 7^th July), Nick Rich, partner at Growth Constructors, said: “Our fellow professionals have faced disruption before, and for every new challenge there’s a belief that we will adapt. There is real positivity, there is a desire to pivot if we need to, but there is an ask of the profession to reconsider its value proposition and get ahead of this before the next disruption appears.”

Speaking in a panel to discuss the results, chaired by Zappi’s Sinead Jefferies, James Wycherley, chief executive at the Insight Management Academy, said there had been a trend of organisations becoming more customer-centric over the last few decades, coupled with progressive insight leaders seeing the need to become ‘insight activists’ – acting as consultants, knowledge stewards and insight influencers internally.

However, progress in these areas had been countered by economic uncertainty leading to businesses restructuring, and now AI, he added. Wycherley said: “Relatively few changes have been directly driven by the adoption of generative AI as such, however it is providing the context for everything at the moment. So many of our big organisations will not exist in a few years’ time in their present form, and that is changing the whole mood music for organisations.”

Debrah Harding, managing director at MRS, said the study’s findings on the misunderstanding of what insight could bring to a business was “concerning” but said the sector was in a transitional phase currently. “We will come out the other end with a new profession, in effect,” she said.

“The profession has always evolved and changed. The issue with AI is that the speed of change has been very marked, and it has felt a little bit like falling off a cliff.”

Harding said the skills needed for insight are always evolving. “The need for a hybrid combination of skills is the really important thing; if you look at what it was like to be a market researcher in the 1990s, it was a very different skillset from what was needed last year and what is going to be needed next year and in five years.”

This hybrid nature will characterise the new profession, said Harding. “From the green shoots we’re seeing, it is going evolve into something new, along the transition that the profession has always had – but it is going to be something that is much more hybrid in nature and will share a lot of other similarities with the complementary professions that sit next to the core insight function.”

Ruth Hinton, director at Aura, said industry organisations could help the profession develop the confidence needed. Referring to the participants in the study, she said: “In some cases, these were very successful teams, it’s just that their bosses and their bosses’ bosses had to make some very tough calls and we’ve got to place ourselves on the right side of that line.”

She added: “So, the human side of that is to have a bit more confidence to do those ‘insight-plus’ roles and step into some of that before we’re even asked.”

Consultant Keith Sleight, also speaking on the panel, said: “We’ve really got to figure out how to position ourselves. A lot of the businesses I’m talking to are saying: ‘I don’t need market research’, but they are saying ‘I need you to help me to figure out how to unlock growth because of the skills you’ve got’. The skills are needed, but not necessarily the job title.”

Sleight shared the example of Amazon having an empty chair at meetings, supposedly to represent the customer, and said: “Why is the chair empty and not filled by a market researcher?”

One of the findings of the study was the need for insight leaders to adopt more commercial language. While not a new issue, Wycherley said had now become more pressing. “There’s nothing new in that but times have changed and it has become more apparent and stark the extent to which for too many insight teams, those skills are seen as the icing on the cake rather than the essence of insight.”

While skills such as storytelling are important, Wycherley said it goes beyond this: “I think that it’s a mistake purely to think about this from a promotion perspective – we can undoubtedly get better at that – but there is some reality in accepting that where insight has not been valued in organisations as we would have liked it to have been, we have probably not been delivering that value that was required by senior people in the organisations, and so the question is about thinking hard about the role of insight and positioning ourselves as activists within our organisations.”

• In an opinion article for Research Live, Nick Rich shares key findings from the research and his perspective on next steps.