Earlier this year, I had the privilege of sitting down with 18 senior client-side insight professionals who had directly experienced the outcome of corporate transformation and efficiency drives. Redundancy, restructure, the indignity of being asked to interview again for the exact role you have held for five years, or to train the offshore replacement who is about to make yours redundant. The stories were, at times, genuinely difficult to hear.

Insights in Transition, commissioned jointly by Aura, The Insight Management Academy and MRS, was conceived as an act of professional solidarity: a serious qualitative study in follow-up to 2025’s client-side quant survey, that sought to do what the three bodies do at their best, which is to give the profession’s own community a meaningful, evidence-based voice.

Respondents included junior practitioners, directors and heads of insight at household-name organisations across financial services, consumer goods, retail, technology and beyond – professionals with the kind of accumulated intelligence that, once removed, tends not to be easily replaced.

Which is, as it turns out, rather the point.

What struck me most forcefully was the combination of professional dedication and personal diminishment that so many described. These were people who had given enormous amounts of themselves, their expertise, their institutional memory, their careers, and who yet found that when the decision came, it arrived not through considered strategic conversation but through cold and impersonal HR processes that bore no relationship to the contribution being ended.

Several had seen it coming. Several had not. What they shared was a period of feeling professionally irrelevant – discarded not because their work had failed, but because the decisions were being made at a level where their value had never been properly understood in the first place.

The most important outtake this research established is that displacement at this level is overwhelmingly structural in origin:

• Cost-cutting rebranded as ‘sharper focus’ and ‘greater efficiency’
• Centralisation-decentralisation cycles stranding global insight teams mid-journey
• New C-suite arrivals reshaping the talent landscape around their own people and preferred operating models. 

More than a few respondents noted, with some frustration, that insight was far from the only commercial function cut – strategy, marketing and planning all took hits – but that insight tends to be an easier target, precisely because its value is harder to quantify and rarely translated into the language of those making the decisions. And underpinning many of these cuts, the respondents were largely agreed, was a leadership belief that data, dashboards, AI outputs and automated analytics would fill the gap left by human intelligence.

Almost universally, they believe that bet will not pay off. One put it with admirable directness: "We're in this very interesting shift in leadership. It’s the leadership of sound bites. It’s the leadership of not going deep. It’s the leadership of just needing something quickly. And right now, people feel they can hack it, and they don't need us."

What the evidence also supports is that how insight functions positioned themselves left them vulnerable in ways that respondents all said could and should have been addressed much earlier.

The research surfaced a consistent pattern: functions operating as service desks, waiting for briefs, producing work that spoke fluently to methodology while saying relatively little to a chief financial officer focused on EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes).

The study’s five key guidelines for peers emerged directly from respondents themselves:

1. Cultivate hard commercial acumen
2. Stop operating as an order taker and demand presence in strategy-level debates
3. Master executive brevity, because methodological rigour should be assumed, not presented
4. Build the hybrid skillset that bridges data science, commercial strategy and human insight…
5. …and, the one that generated the most vigorous agreement: aggressively advocate your own value. One participant said: "We need to make sure that market researchers convince more than market researchers that market research is worthwhile."

We should be clear about one thing, because the temptation in research of this kind is to reach for catastrophism: this study is a diagnosis, not designed to dramatise a crisis. The majority of people I interviewed were not defeated. Many had pivoted into portfolio careers and fractional leadership, motivated by an autonomy that corporate life had often denied them. Others were back in new roles, sharper and more commercially purposeful than before. The picture that emerged is of a profession at an inflection point and one with a clear, respondent-led roadmap for what to do next.

There is also a direct mandate here for the professional bodies themselves: advocacy that reaches outward to CEOs and CFOs rather than inward to researchers; practical transition support that addresses AI-driven screening and fractional career frameworks; and training that genuinely bridges data science, hard commercials and business strategy.

The conversation continues. ‘Insights in Transition: Phase 3’, is underway, and turns the lens towards organisations actually investing in and expanding their insight capability. The contrasts, I suspect, will be highly instructive.

Nick Rich FMRS is founder of Growth Constructors

• Read further perspectives on the research here.