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Will generative AI help or hurt market research jobs?
The rise of generative AI brings with it a wave of questions about job loss and disruption in almost every field, including the market research field. And that’s fair enough: automation has disrupted jobs profoundly in the past, and Goldman Sachs recently reported the unsettling statistic that two-thirds of occupations in the US could be partially automated by AI. So what does that mean for your job as an insights professional?
How generative AI will transform the market research role
Even the writers of Goldman Sachs’ recent report point out how there’s still much uncertainty about how generative AI will affect the job market. They write that not all automation directly translates to layoffs. Most jobs are only partially exposed to automation, “and are thus more likely to be complemented rather than substituted by AI,” the report says.
Job security in market research: human expertise meets technological intelligence
There’s huge potential for generative AI to augment rather than replace market research jobs. Insights professionals are already overwhelmed by too much data, too many stakeholder questions, and too little time to focus on priority research that leads to high-impact business decisions.
Generative AI can shift the role of insights professionals by freeing up valuable time for serving their organization’s strategic knowledge interests. If market researchers can leverage generative AI for consumer insights, they can supercharge their efforts and drive better business outcomes.
But the key is human expertise combined with artificial intelligence. Market researchers possess irreplaceable gut instinct and experience they can combine with generative AI tools to refine and curate knowledge, hypotheses, and ideas faster while giving them more time for collaboration and innovation.
Ways market research jobs may shift with the help of generative AI
With generative AI helping market researchers significantly cut the time they spend on some tasks, the typical market researcher role may naturally shift to more strategic work. This move the business forward faster and even materialize as a competitive advantage.
In our DeepSights Launch Event, Insight Platforms Director Mike Stevens discussed how certain insights responsibilities might look different after integrating AI tools. Here are some ways AI for market research will enhance market research jobs:
- Desk research: Instead of searching through, reading, and summarizing long documents, market research professionals can prompt a generative AI tool, like DeepSights, to draws from trusted sources to give them summarized answers in seconds. Imagine how quickly a generative AI could give you a sense of what’s already known by your organization, so you can form a razor-sharp hypothesis for your research.
- Proposals & RFPs: Generative AI tools can help market researchers whip up a proposal outline in no time. With the depth and context of the market opportunity, target audience, customer personas, leading brands, and market shares and trends, generative AI tools can give a market researcher starting points and inspiration to jumpstart and quicken their work.
- Conversational surveys & synthetic respondents: As generative AI tools develop, market researchers will likely spend less time managing conversational surveys with respondents because generative AI can handle many of those tasks effectively. AI can also serve insights professionals well with a leg-up on research design. Synthetic respondents and data can give market researchers an avenue to test scenarios and refine their research before talking to real people.
- Stakeholder engagement: There’s a lot of demand for insights, data, and knowledge that isn’t reaching parts of organizations that need it. Generative AI will be part of the solution to insights bottlenecks, giving businesses conversational interfaces for stakeholders to self-serve insights, and relieving insights teams with too much on their plates.
Become an asset: leverage AI in your market research job
Using AI to generate quality answers, and leveraging tools made for insights professionals, will become an essential skill for market researchers. AI can free up time-strapped insights professionals’ time to drive better business outcomes. If you’re a market researcher, knowing how to combine your unique knowledge and experience with the power of AI tools will make you an asset to your organization.