As 2025 draws to a close, the insights industry is taking a moment to breathe—reflecting not only on the whirlwind that AI has unleashed but also on the unprecedented opportunities it has delivered. In the Insights Association’s feature “AI Opportunities to be Thankful for and to Feast on This Coming Year,” Crispin Beale, CEO of the Insight250, asked leaders across the world a deceptively simple question: What early-stage aspects of AI are you thankful for as 2025 closes?
Across continents and disciplines, the responses formed a rich global tapestry of gratitude, optimism, and realism. Many, like Danny Russell, celebrated the “better and faster” foundations—survey design, drafting stimulus, and localizing questionnaires that once took weeks now take hours. Others echoed similar efficiency gains: Sharmila Das noted 2025 as a reconciliation year where clients embraced digital-first agencies, and agencies, in turn, leaned confidently into AI. Sir Martin Sorrell praised AI’s impact on visualization, copywriting, and hyper-personalization—shrinking production timelines from months and millions to days and thousands, enabling “Netflix on steroids” levels of content customization. Mark Langsfeld pointed to the integration of fragmented data—surveys, social, telemetry—unlocking predictive and prescriptive insights that help brands act with unprecedented speed and clarity.
Many leaders saw AI as deepening—not flattening—human understanding. Justine Clements highlighted conversational AI that makes surveys feel like meaningful dialogue. Mary Ann Packo emphasized AI’s power to reveal nuance across massive datasets, paired with fraud-detection tools that safeguard truth in an era where “what is real?” is constantly questioned. ESOMAR’s Herbert Höckel reminded us that AI works best alongside human judgment, creativity, and empathy—our role is to inject real human insight into the machine. Fiona Blades praised AI as an honest, sometimes delightfully blunt thinking partner. Marco Baldocchi celebrated the rise of “emotional decoding”—AI beginning to detect not just logic, but feeling. Researchers like Wim Hamaekers and Urpi Torrado pointed to AI copilots that enrich qualitative depth, elevate coding accuracy, and return early-career researchers to storytelling, curiosity, and interpretation. Others like Prof. Paul Baines, Jean-Marc Léger, Isabelle Fabry-Frémaux, and Dr. Roland Abold reflected on generative AI’s strength in desk research, the rise of young AI-native innovators, and the importance of researchers becoming ethical interpreters and AI auditors as their roles evolve.
Executives such as Alex Hunt spotlighted the cultural transformation inside organizations—the learning mindset required to adopt AI successfully—while leaders like Pavi Gupta emphasized keeping humans at the center of AI-enabled progress. From data synthesis (Dan Quirk’s “Quirk’s GPT”) to sentiment analysis (Victoria Usher), from automation of coding and scripting (Mark Ursell) to smarter workflows and predictive modelling (Melanie Courtright), the message was clear: AI is now a collaborator, a productivity engine, and increasingly, a creative partner.
Amid these global reflections, Arundati Dandapani, Founder & CEO of Generation1.ca, offered a perspective that grounded the conversation in equity, safety, and global human mobility. She expressed gratitude for the AI ecosystem powering her organization’s work: generative AI accelerating research, synthesis, and strategic scanning; advanced analytics uncovering workforce shifts, global talent flows, and socio-technical risks; and synthetic data enabling privacy-preserving modelling and governance stress tests. She highlighted AI-driven visual tools transforming storytelling across Generation1.ca’s communities, and machine-learning systems that reinforce fraud detection, bias audits, and data quality—critical pillars for building a more ethical, inclusive, immigrant-centred future. Her message resonated across the industry’s broader sentiment: when applied with intention, AI is not just a technical upgrade—it is a catalyst for equity, safety, and deeper human understanding.
Taken together, these voices reveal an industry that has moved from shock to stewardship. AI has made research faster, smarter, deeper, more predictive, more emotional, more visual, and more human-centered. Yet perhaps the greatest gift of all is clarity: AI has shown what can be automated and what must remain distinctly human. As we head into 2026, the insights industry stands before a banquet of possibility—one we must approach wisely, creatively, and with the humility to let machines assist us without ever allowing them to define us.
