--- title: "Stop Chasing Insight, Start Driving Decisions: Quirk's London 2026" description: "The message of Quirk’s 2026 is: being right isn’t enough. You can have the best delivery - but if you don’t influence the right person to make a change, you still won’t get your recognition or next year’s budget to do more." image: https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Marketing_Files/Blogs/Headers/Quirks%202026%20blog%20header.png --- close ## Ready to level up your insights? Get ready to streamline, scale and supercharge your research. Fill out this form to request a demo of the InsightHub platform and discover the difference insights empowerment can make. A member of our team will reach out within two working days. close ## Cost effective insights that scale Quality insight doesn't need to cost the earth. Our flexible approach helps you make the most of research budgets and build an agile solution that works for you. 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[Read more](https://blog.flexmr.net/workshops-beacons-customer-salience) 9 MIN READ #### Ed Hill - [Events (1)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/events) - [Insights Empowerment (38)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/insights-empowerment) - [Practical Application (178)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/practical-application) - [Research Methods (285)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/research-methods) - [Strategic Thinking (232)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/strategic-thinking) - [Survey Templates (7)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/survey-templates) - [Tech & Trends (397)](https://blog.flexmr.net/topic/tech-trends) Stop Chasing Insight, Start Driving Decisions: Quirk's London 2026 6:49 Has the market research industry spent years producing insights with no demonstrable impact on business decisions? Quirk's London 2026 seemed to focus very much on the ways that AI is enabling us to do more faster, quicker, and cheaper.  Moving between sessions over the two days, it felt as though only with the arrival of AI can we finally work at the pace of business—freeing up time to create and advise in the way we’ve long aimed to.  But is this really the case? ## Insight isn’t output, it’s impact Quirk’s 2026 leant hard into the idea that if your work doesn’t influence a decision, it’s not valuable. Session after session focused on embedding research into business processes, shaping strategy and proving commercial outcomes. This isn’t about better storytelling for its own sake…  It’s about innovating to demonstrate value.  From [JW](https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwilliamawbrey/) from Sky reframing the insights role from ‘data points’ to ‘points of view’, through to [Eddie O’Brien](https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddie-o-16332223/) at Sage emphasising the need for insight teams to earn their place as consultants through the creation of frameworks and products that support the effective use of AI agents. On top of deep community work, behavioural insights and organisational data, it was clear that insight functions that can’t demonstrate impact are increasingly seen as expendable. ## The death of interesting Interesting doesn’t pay the bills. But what does? - Trackable actions - Quantifiable difference to sales - Qualitatively different operating models based on better customer understanding These are the ways to demonstrate that insight is a specialism that requires our skill, our thinking, and our human understanding. We can support this with the best set of trained, supervised AI tools and automated insight agents. It isn’t the death of the analytical, thorough pattern spotters. It is a change in tools and some knowledge. It requires the quallies and the quantties to unite closer, there is no longer a debate to which one is best, the two cannot survive without each other. This is a cultural shift. Are your insights team ready for that?  Are you ready to muscle your way in on wider company debates? Ready to bring the customer voice to tables where they didn’t think it was relevant? ## AI isn’t the revolution, it’s an excuse Yes, AI is everywhere and yes, I did have my own deck and webinar entitled ‘the AI revolution’ in early 2025! But what Quirks showed us about AI was far more interesting.  AI can increase speed and efficiency, but it can hallucinate. It can miss the point entirely and it doesn’t necessarily save time unless you get your human quality audits in the right place and create something that is repeatably able to add value to the business. AI can generate summaries, analyse sentiment and even draft reports. Therefore, using it raises a bigger question: what is uniquely valuable about human researchers? We must move fast to frame the right problems, interpret the nuance and drive the right decisions. In other words, the parts of the job that many teams have historically underinvested in. AI isn’t replacing researchers; it is raising the bar on what a researcher should be doing. As we heard from [Liz Boffey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-boffey-a12b1157/), we must push our way into planning cycles and business processes, break silos and really think about the human insights we can bring. ## Human understanding, please tell me… Here’s the irony: as the industry becomes more data-rich and AI-enabled, the value of *human understanding* is increasing. Many sessions double down on emotion, context and behavioural insight—the messy, qualitative side of research that doesn’t fit neatly into dashboards.  This isn’t nostalgia. It’s necessity.  Data can tell you what people do. But it still struggles to explain why in a way that resonates with decision-makers. In a world drowning in data, the organisations that win will be the ones that can extract meaning. This requires us perhaps to focus as much on understanding the team we are delivering the insights to as much as the people we are reporting on. ## Relationship management and development One of the most honest undercurrents in the programme is this: the biggest barrier to impact isn’t methodology. It’s the organisation itself.  You can have best-in-class research and sophisticated tools and still fail because if you can’t get your stakeholders to care about what it all means, then it still doesn’t matter to the business. ## Democratisation or dilution? Another big theme continued from last year was making insights more accessible across organisations. On paper, this sounds great. More people using data, more informed decisions, less reliance on gatekeepers. But there’s a tension here that isn’t fully resolved. When everyone has access to data: - Who ensures quality and consistency?  - Who prevents misinterpretation?  - Who owns the narrative?  Democratisation can easily become dilution.  The best teams won’t just open access—they’ll guide usage. That’s a much harder challenge and it involves an open admission of how much hard labour we do as insight teams to protect data quality. This is the elephant in the room: we’re reluctant to show stakeholders how much quality checking and validation we do, because we don’t want to invite doubts in the debrief (did we get it wrong, or is the data dodgy?). One thing Quirk’s gets right is bias toward practicality. There’s very little appetite here for innovation theatre—no endless hype about methodologies that sound impressive but never get implemented. Instead, the focus is on what works in the real world; scalable approaches, repeatable processes, proven case studies.  Because the industry doesn’t have an innovation problem… it has an execution problem. It’s becoming a discipline defined by influence.  That shift has consequences. It means the most successful insight professionals will be the ones who navigate politics, frame the right problems and communicate effectively, and continue to push for action. Technical skills still matter, but they’re no longer enough. ## The bottom line If you strip away the case studies, the tools and the frameworks, the message of Quirk’s 2026 is surprisingly blunt: Being right isn’t enough.  You can have the best methodology, data, sparkling analytical insight, fabulous story-telling and creative delivery - but if you don’t influence the right person to make a change, you still won’t get your recognition or next year’s budget to do more. Are we like the auditors? The sense checkers and story makers who bring businesses back to the humans they claim to serve? [![CUstomer Salience Framework & Toolkit](https://blog.flexmr.net/hs-fs/hubfs/Marketing_Files/CTAs/customer%20salience%20cta_general.png?width=1000&name=customer%20salience%20cta_general.png)](https://resources.flexmr.net/customer-salience-toolkit) #### About FlexMR We are The Insights Empowerment Company. We help research, product and marketing teams drive informed decisions with efficient, scalable & impactful insight. #### About Maria Twigge As Research Director, Maria has spent 10+ years guiding FlexMR service development and building strategic client partnerships. #### Stay up to date ## You might also like... ![Blog Featured Image Header](https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Marketing_Files/Blogs/Headers/Workshops.png) ### [Workshops and Beacons: A Guide to B...](https://blog.flexmr.net/workshops-beacons-customer-salience) Most organisations are not short of data, insight or decks.Their biggest challenge is not whether customer understanding exists since most teams have access to more customer insight than ever before. ... [Continue reading](https://blog.flexmr.net/workshops-beacons-customer-salience) 9 MIN READ ![Blog Featured Image Header](https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Marketing_Files/Blogs/Headers/ZeroParty.png) ### [Communities and the Post-Cookie Fut...](https://blog.flexmr.net/communities-post-cookie-future) The abundance of data available at our fingertips is not an uncommon topic in the industry these days. Neither is the question: how do we use it effectively? [Continue reading](https://blog.flexmr.net/communities-post-cookie-future) 6 MIN READ ![Blog Featured Image Header](https://blog.flexmr.net/hubfs/Thea%20Closeness%20Blog.png) ### [Empathy, Emotion and Compassion in ...](https://blog.flexmr.net/empathy-customer-closeness) Empathy, compassion, and emotional understanding are increasingly recognised as essential components in building a culture of customer closeness, yet many organisations still struggle to move beyond a... 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