From AI Hype to Business Impact: Key Takeaways from Quirk’s NYC
After two packed days at Quirk’s NYC, one thing became incredibly clear: our industry has crossed a threshold. A year ago, nearly every conversation centered on AI itself. Would it disrupt research? Could it replace traditional methodologies? How quickly should organizations adopt it? This year, those questions had largely disappeared. The focus is no longer on AI as a technology. It’s on AI as an operating model: how do we combine artificial intelligence with human expertise to make better decisions, move faster and create greater business impact? Across client conversations, keynote sessions and our own presentation with Mars Snacking, six themes emerged that point to where consumer insights is heading next.
1. AI has become infrastructure.
The most interesting organizations are no longer asking, ‘Should we use AI?’ They’re asking, ‘Where does AI create the greatest value?’ The strongest examples weren’t about replacing researchers. They were about eliminating friction. AI is accelerating signal detection, synthesis and pattern recognition, allowing researchers to spend more time applying judgment, asking better questions and helping organizations make better decisions. That’s a very different conversation than we were having just twelve months ago.
2. The competitive advantage is no longer more data. It’s better decisions.
Most organizations aren’t suffering from a lack of information. They’re suffering from an inability to turn information into action. The role of insights is shifting from answering business questions to helping businesses ask better ones. Success is becoming less about delivering another report and more about influencing strategy, shaping innovation and accelerating confident decision-making. In many ways, the discipline is evolving from research to decision intelligence.
3. Trust will define the next generation of AI-powered insights.
As AI-generated content, synthetic data and automated analysis become commonplace, one message echoed throughout the conference: the quality of AI will always depend on the quality of what goes into it. Better data, transparent methodologies, expert interpretation and human judgment will become the true competitive differentiators. AI can process enormous amounts of information, but it cannot compensate for weak inputs or poor strategic thinking.
4. The real innovation isn’t AI. It’s a new way of working.
One of the highlights of Quirk’s for us was presenting alongside Druthi Patel from Mars Snacking, where we shared how Radius and ONE Strategy Studio partnered to rethink the future of the Combos brand.
Druthi captured today’s challenge perfectly: ‘I needed a methodology that was going to be innovative. I needed a methodology that was going to be quick because I needed impact by Q3. And I needed to make sure it fit within the guardrails of my dollars because I didn’t have a lot of dollars to spend.’
That isn’t just a Mars challenge. It’s today’s business reality. Timelines are shrinking. Budgets remain under pressure. Expectations continue to rise. Meeting those expectations requires more than new technology. It requires a fundamentally different way of working.
Instead of beginning with traditional qualitative research, we started with AI. Our AI Studio explored more than 270 curated consumer, cultural, competitive and expert sources across ten strategic lenses, surfacing ten evidence-based hypotheses before a single interview was conducted. Rather than using qualitative research to discover the problem, we used it to understand the problem. Researchers entered conversations with hypotheses instead of assumptions, allowing them to spend their time exploring emotion, memory, behavior and context: the uniquely human experiences AI simply cannot access.
The biggest surprise? Consumers hadn’t rejected Combos. They still loved it. They had simply forgotten it. That realization completely changed the trajectory of the project. The challenge wasn’t product innovation. It was mental availability. One participant described eating Combos on a road trip with their dad before leaving for college. Suddenly the work shifted from reinventing the brand to helping consumers rediscover a brand that already carried emotional meaning.
The project ultimately delivered six strategic opportunity platforms spanning communications, packaging, innovation and retail activation in less than two weeks. But the biggest takeaway wasn’t the timeline. It was the operating model.
AI finds the signals. Humans find the meaning. Together we find the areas of growth.
We’re not serving up insights anymore. We’re serving up solutions and speed to impact.
That’s the future of insights: not AI replacing people, but people doing their best work because AI allows them to.
5. Distinctive brands will outperform louder brands.
Consumers don’t reward brands simply because they’re newer or more modern. They reward brands that create emotional relevance, distinctive memory structures and meaningful experiences. The Combos work reinforced exactly that. The opportunity wasn’t to reinvent the brand. It was to reconnect consumers with something they already loved.
6. Insights teams are becoming growth teams.
The best insights organizations are no longer measured by the reports they produce. They’re measured by the business outcomes they influence. Increasingly, researchers are expected to identify opportunities before they’re requested, shape innovation before it’s funded and help leadership make better strategic decisions with greater confidence.
Looking Ahead
One final highlight from Quirk’s was the response to our latest thought leadership report, The New Gen Z Loyalty Economy. The report explores why Gen Z isn’t abandoning loyalty but redefining it in a world of endless choice, AI recommendations and instant comparison. Brands no longer earn loyalty once. They earn it again and again through relevance, trust and proof. Download it here: The New Gen Z Loyalty Economy
If Quirk’s NYC taught us anything this year, it’s that we’ve moved beyond the AI hype cycle. The organizations that win won’t simply adopt AI faster than everyone else. They’ll build better ways of working that combine the speed of AI with the empathy, judgment and creativity that only humans can provide. Because the future of consumer insights isn’t about generating more insights. It’s about creating more impact.
Interested in learning more about this innovative approach for speed to impact, contact us now!
