New tech tensions - new insights. Or is it time to capitaluate to AI?
What’s one of the hottest topics currently? ChatGPT I’d say.
This super-interesting AI tool has created huge interest in a few months across the globe - throwing up plenty of pushback, ethical concerns, Angst, even despair.
In market research, I haven’t read much yet - but potential is there for massive change.
In a world already full of uncertainty and rapid change, this tool introduces another level to the debate about what humans will do in future versus what AI can do quicker, better, cheaper. And maybe even puts a spanner in the works.
Human Focus - Yes, But….
Client talk in market research seems - or seemed - to be about “getting back to the human”.
A survey of CMOs quoted in Germany’s trade magazine Horizont included the following from insurance giant R&V’s Anja Stolz:
“….after times with a partially obsessive focus on technology, tools and methods, we’re seeing the Human Factor centre stage again. Customers become what they the always were: humans with all their multiple facets”.
Cue ChatGPT: wow does that POV hold steady now, I wonder.
The human factor is also stressed when it comes to creativity. Employees should get back to the office, boost creativity with in-person interactions.
No less than Disney CEO Bob Iger stresses the value of in-person stuff: stating that employees will be required to be in the workplace no less than 4 days a week as from 1 March 2023. His rationale: “In a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together…”
(Quote from Seeking Alpha/ WallStreet Breakfast, Jan 14, 2023).
Contrasted with this, ChatGPT has some writers despairing about the future of creativity.
Sean Thomas suggests gloomily that advanced AI means the end of writing - check out The Spectator, 10 January 2023 (AI is the End of Writing). He sees writing as something that can be replicated, however “creative”, as rule-driven, algorithmic no less. Well, I’d beg to differ, but still.
Plenty of tension here - radically diverging views.
Market Research and AI - Moving up the Value Scale
So what about market research - the business of understanding humans, in all their complexity?
Partly, buiness as usual I imagine - AI will continue to take on MR tasks that were previously areas of human expertise. But maybe it’s going to a new level, encompassing areas that were regarded as more sophisticated. Take conjoint.
MR pro Saul Dobney’s recent LinkedIn post on ChatGPT’s ability to replicate conjoint is alarming. To say he was impressed is a understatement - his reaction he describes as jaw-dropping: How good is Chat GPT at designing Conjoint?
Be interested to hear what the folk at Sawtooth have to say ;)
Outlook - Inspiration 1st
My personal take:
Seems like anything driven by a process that can be broken down, automated, replicated will be done by a machine. The role of the human is challenged radically to rethink itself.
The good news - there’s plenty left of insights areas left ;)
Things that can’t be codified or predicted with a degree of certainty won’t easily be AI’d .
Aspects relating to the innovation process for example - imagining future growth spaces, and engaging in co-creation processses with various stakeholders in how to best fulfil likely needs, for example. Difficult to imagine ChatGPT replacing that. After all, it’s essentially a language tool.
Or experiential areas - ethnographies for example. Human stuff.
And then at the activation phase - involving multiple data sources and intelligence levels to get to the “now what?”
One common aspect to all these, likely “human” lead aspects of insights, is bringing insights to life.
Inspirationally.
Which is something I’ll be exploring in the coming months - how to do that and what my experience of 30 years in marketing, advertising and research has taught me.
See you soon. And yes, curious, as ever, as to others’ thoughts. Just don’t ChatGPT me ;)
(Photo - Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash)