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?
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 from Sky reframing the insights role from ‘data points’ to ‘points of view’, through to Eddie O’Brien 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.
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?
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, we must push our way into planning cycles and business processes, break silos and really think about the human insights we can bring.
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.
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.
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.
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?