For years, public affairs teams treated research as something to be rationed. You commissioned it when the stakes felt high enough, when the budget could stretch, or when a board or minister demanded numbers that could not be deferred. The rest of the time you ran on media monitoring, stakeholder conversations, and a healthy dose of professional judgement.

That arrangement is no longer holding.

Demand for evidence has risen sharply. In my experience working with public affairs and corporate teams, the change has been unmistakable. Issues are moving faster, narratives hardening in days. Governments and regulators increasingly expect organisations to demonstrate that they understand public sentiment, not merely that they have spoken to the right people.

The warning signs are plastered all over front pages. Boards and chief executives now ask for proof before they commit reputation or capital. At the same time, research budgets have not kept pace. In many of the teams I have worked with, they have tightened. That trend is likely to continue.

Something had to give. It seems for many, it is the standard of evidence itself.

The practical result is that gut instinct is fast becoming the default operating system for a growing share of public affairs decisions. Research is still valued, of course. It is simply reserved for the moments that feel existential. Everything else is handled with experience, confidence, and the hope that the ground has not shifted since the last proper study.

It’s understandable. But the cost of this shift is rising. Lower-visibility issues (social licence questions, emerging regulatory signals, slow changes in community attitudes) rarely present themselves as board-level crises until the damage is already visible. By the time instinct says “we need research”, the window for useful influence has often narrowed, vanished even.

Confidence is a poor substitute for current public evidence when the environment is moving against you.

Into this gap have stepped vendors offering synthetic audiences and AI-generated “public opinion”. The pitch is frictionless: instant answers, no fieldwork, elegant dashboards. The reality is pretty disturbing. Black box methodology. No real respondents to audit, and no credible defence when the numbers are challenged under pressure. In high-stakes environments, that should give the industry pause for thought.

AI clearly has a place in research. It can increase the speed of analysis, improve quality control, and help practitioners work more efficiently. What it should not do is replace the underlying requirement for transparency and human response data when the output is used to inform public affairs or policy decisions. Standards exist for a reason. Lowering them to match novel, reaffirming, but opaque alternatives may win a short-term commercial skirmish. But it risks longer-term damage to the credibility of the profession.

In that sense, the current synthetic data wave feels a lot like the Segway of the research industry. Remember Segways?

The Segway arrived with enormous expectations. It was meant to transform cities, replace short car trips, and change how people moved. Media coverage and investor excitement was intense. But in reality, the use cases that survived were narrow. Gimmicky tourism, security patrols, warehouses etc. Most of the grand vision never materialised. It was solving a problem that wasn’t the actual priority of most buyers.

Synthetic data is following a similar pattern – heavy marketing language talks about replacing traditional research, instant audiences and the end of fieldwork. The actual durable demand is likely to be far more limited than the current narrative suggests.

Yes, research needs to be faster, but not at the expense of trust and transparency, which is where our industry’s true value lies.

The better response from the insights business is not to compete by stooping. It is to raise the bar. We have the tools already. Continuous access to verified opinion from actual people, combined with the ability to run rapid, defensible insights, is now realistic for many organisations. This keeps the customer’s baseline current and supplies the everyday evidence that was previously rationed out of existence. It also allows specialist consultancies and agencies to spend less time on process and more time on the higher value work they do best; applying their judgement and context where it changes outcomes for clients.

Public affairs teams that continue to run primarily on confidence will not notice the cost every day. They will notice it on the days that matter most, when the evidence they need is either too old, too thin, or most likely, too late.

Ultimately the Segway didn’t take off – but battery-assisted bicycles and scooters, adaptations of existing technology, did.

The insights industry does not need more bot-fuelled confidence. It needs to adapt what we already do best – providing trusted and transparent insights.

Michael Turner is co-founder and chief executive of PollStream, and co-founder and director of Freshwater Strategy