#NoBullshitCX
“Market research is about making sense of data – with or without AI.“
If what I have seen at the Succeet25 conference last week is true, AI has come not just for Customer Experience, but for market research too. And depending on who you listen to, it’s either the dawn of a golden age of efficiency or the beginning of the end for human insight. One side is preaching AI’s boundless potential, the other sounding the alarm about lost jobs, biased data, “inflatable doll” type synthetic respondents, and the death of expertise.
I am pretty sure that it’s the same story at any conference these days. So, for all my market research people who follow me or just added me, I would like to say the same I usually say to my CX people: stop fighting with an inanimate object. AI is neither the messiah nor the devil. It’s a tool. And like any tool, its impact depends on how well we learn to use it. So please don’t spar with that screwdriver. Stop punching your pliers. Enough with the calculator confrontation.
Market research has always been about making sense of data. AI doesn’t change that fundamental need; it just changes how we do it. We’ve spent decades refining survey methodologies and analysing human behaviour. AI won’t replace that; it will augment it. Automating repetitive tasks, uncovering patterns faster, and giving us more time to think – that’s what AI should be for.
The battle is ultimately within us: what and how we choose to integrate into our work, where we draw the lines, and what level of critical oversight we apply. The real risk isn’t AI taking over, but researchers either blindly trusting its outputs or refusing to engage with it at all. In both cases, we lose. We need to treat it for what it is: a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can make market research more insightful, not less. But that depends on us actually learning how to wield it, not just talking about it.
#CX #CustomerExperience #Futurelab #NoBullshitCX #StefanKolle #KollesColumn
