The AI: Powering Up Insights 2025 conference held in late January highlighted how generative AI is reshaping the insights industry. The one-day conference cosponsored by Carat explored how this technology, from its groundbreaking applications to its potential challenges, is transforming strategies and empowering teams.
In a room of more than 120 people from the insights and research community, we focused on the ways generative AI can democratize insights, enrich understanding of customer journeys, and refine creative (and other!) ideas.
Here’s a closer look at what we shared, along with key themes that emerged throughout the day.
Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI
Generative AI is opening doors to faster, dynamic, and actionable learnings. We shared three key applications where it’s making a difference for us.
- Growth Audience Personas allow us to move beyond static pen portraits, creating dynamic, data-driven audience personas that empower teams across organisations. By making insights more accessible and more human, we’re enabling faster, more informed decision making.
- Customer Journey Enrichment uncovers nuanced patterns that inform a richer, more detailed understanding of customer motivations and behaviors. This depth of insights, paired with personalized and relatable data delivery, empowers teams identify opportunities to enhance experiences. By serving data in an accessible and engaging manner, even teams unfamiliar with data are inspired to leverage it creatively, crafting unique and impactful customer experiences.
- Creative and Messaging Testing by generative AI helps teams simulate audience responses to creative concepts and messaging, offering a first relevance test before development and testing.
Driving Innovation Through Collaboration
Innovation thrives on collaboration, and we are very proud our relationship with Microsoft enables us to do just this. By working together, we’re pushing the boundaries of what generative AI can achieve, staying ahead of emerging capabilities and unlocking new opportunities.
The Watchouts: Balancing Promise with Practicality
While generative AI offers significant advantages, it comes with important watchouts.
- Data Quality is Key
Generative AI is only as effective as its training data. Without a validated data source, there is the potential to make poor business decisions based on misleading insights generated by the AI – a point echoed across the conference.
Additionally, based on our tests and those conducted by others, we have found that synthetic respondents cannot yet accurately replace human-based quantitative research. We observed discrepancies in responses related to brands and bespoke audiences, as well as challenges in meeting quotas and performing more complex tasks such as routing and scaled answers.
- Critical Thinking is Essential
As AI becomes more integrated into schools and workplaces, critical thinking must remain a priority. AI often provides oversimplified or misleading results, making it more important than ever that we develop the ability to evaluate information critically. In education, reliance on AI can limit students' opportunities to analyse multiple sources and assess credibility – skills they risk losing when AI shortcuts the process.
In the workplace, the rapid adoption of advanced AI highlights another challenge: many companies fail to invest in data literacy, offer proper training, or attract the right talent. This gap could undermine both productivity and innovation.
Key Themes from the Day
The conference also sparked thought provoking conversations about the broader implications of AI.
- The Role of Prompts: The ability to craft effective prompts is becoming a core skill that shapes how AI generates the right outputs.
- Addressing Bias: Built-in biases remain a challenge in AI systems. Ensuring fairness and inclusivity requires continuous vigilance and improvement.
- Empathy: Can generative AI simulate the empathy that a human researcher would have when investigating a sensitive topic?
- Human Oversight: What’s the acceptable balance between humans and AI? What sacrifices in understanding are we prepared to make for increased efficiencies?
Looking Ahead
Generative AI has the power to revolutionize market research by offering deeper insights, faster processes, and more precise strategies. At Carat, we’re excited to continue exploring its potential and ability to drive ethical, impactful applications.
But with this power comes responsibility. We must remain vigilant about data quality, mitigate bias, and foster critical thinking to ensure AI enhances rather than replaces human expertise.
By striking the right balance, generative AI won’t just support our work, it will elevate it.
Image source: MRS
