Meta was facing challenges with complex, time-consuming research workflows and developed a new playbook to streamline their approach. Discuss offers a platform that combines AI and human intelligence to help brands better understand their audiences through both AI-assisted human conversations and fully AI-driven interviews.
Getting to the Heart of Decisions
All Things Insights: Thank you so much, Adam, for talking a little bit about insights with us. Why don’t we start off with your presentation this morning at TMRE with Peter Lively, formerly with Meta.
Adam Mertz: We talked a lot about this new playbook that Meta was really using as a blueprint from what was the Meta monetization team, Peter’s team, for how to rethink research across the entire organization. There were so many steps and so many different tools in the process. It was so complex for everybody that they finally said, OK, we need to figure out a different way and think about it more holistically. They’ve been putting it together kind of piecemeal for a long time, and it just got more cumbersome.
So we talked about this new playbook and how Meta was really trying to, again, rethink the entire process of market research and getting market insights quickly.
All Things Insights: Do you feel that the market research process was related to innovation, product development, and service development efforts? In a large company, without market research, what leg do you stand on?
Adam Mertz: I think that global companies like Meta, what they really want to do is bring a better human understanding to every key decision that gets made, to the heart of all those decisions that are getting made. And I think the challenge that they have is that a lot of their people need to have a better user experience, whether it be their business users that are using their ad manager platform, or their consumer audience that’s using Instagram, Facebook, and those different apps. They need to do that market research, and they literally have thousands of UX and other researchers that are trying to do that. But, it was just so complex. At the end of the day, they want to bring that human understanding to the heart of every decision.
Getting to Know the Discuss Platform
All Things Insights: Speaking of complexity, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about your company, Discuss? Can you tell us about the platform and how it relates to the theme of the show, the next era of insights?
Adam Mertz: The idea that Discuss is really focused on is helping our customers, in a way, to shatter assumptions, which a lot of times as a brand manager or a researcher, they might have because they didn’t have an opportunity to really go out and understand the “why.” Sometimes they understand the “what.”
Our focus is helping our customers better understand what their customers, their target audiences are feeling with a platform that leverages AI at every part. If they want to have a human-led conversation that’s assisted with AI and have an AI assistant in creating report-ready deliverables and so forth, they can do that. If they want to lever and that might be for a focus group or really going in-depth, or if they want to use AI to actually ask questions, they could do that.
Maybe that’s something where they have a little bit more high-level questions that they just want to get something turned around very quickly from maybe 20 or 30 or maybe 100 or 200 people. So having that combination all in one platform where they can do cross project analysis, and they can look at all that, and they can come back and more easily just access that data. So that’s what Discuss really brought together as a more holistic way for them to approach market research and offer these tools all under one roof.
Supporting the Human Element
All Things Insights: How do you see that playing out with AI, human intelligence, and that mix? People say, well, it’s a tool. They say all the right things. But there’s a fear factor there as well.
Adam Mertz: What people should be feeling in this industry is excitement. This industry has changed more in the last two years than it has in the past two decades. There’s an incredible opportunity if you’re a researcher to be leveraging these tools. For instance, in my job, as many people have today, you have a notetaker. If you’re using Google Meet, you have a Gemini notetaker. I have an assistant that I don’t have to worry about at this point, if I’m talking to somebody and it is important. I can go back later.
It is going to enable organizations to understand what people are thinking at a much more massive scale. But you still need humans, and that’s actually on both fronts. It’s enabling them to understand at a human level, get better human understanding, and do that much more often.
You are now making those humans do research in a much more strategic way and it’s a bit more fun. Why? Because they’re not stuck in all the details that maybe that they have to do in order to get a research project going and to manage that project. It’s so complex to write the questions, to find the respondents, to ask the questions, put this all together. It can be very complicated and complex.
I think there’s a huge opportunity for anybody who’s in research to really do what Peter’s doing and kind of say, you know what? We’re going to make this so we can have many more product launches. When the product launches or the marketing messages launch, it’s much more successful. We’re not just meeting our key KPIs and goals, but we exceed them. There’s a huge opportunity.
Connecting Humans & AI
All Things Insights: What other trends or takeaways do you see in the market and at the show? For example, do you feel like qual is sort of having a moment here with the scale of it and AI-enabled qual?
Adam Mertz: I think that qual is having a moment. So many people are now thinking about how can we rethink qual? But I think the one thing when I look into the future, a lot of times it’s really easy to get fixated on AI. Oh, we’re going to use synthetic data and have AI interviews.
But coming back to the connection between human and AI, I think they’re all going to be new parts of the research lifecycle. There’s going to be synthetic data that’s used for virtual personas where you can bounce off some questions, maybe better craft your questions when you’re talking to people. But at the end of the day, you’re going to have that human understanding, either a human conversation or AI that’s having that, and then humans getting a chance to understand those clips, those summaries, and weave that into those final reports that are helping to drive better product launches, longitudinal studies, understanding overall markets and target audiences.
All Things Insights: The human element, shining through.
Adam Mertz: Absolutely. But there is a lot of talk here at TMRE about the AI side. Of course, people can get almost a little too fixated on it, and it’s going to be such a critical part of the entire research lifecycle and is today. While it is redefining the research lifecycle, humans are actually part of every step of that research lifecycle, in my opinion, moving forward.
Editor’s Note: The next TMRE will take place on October 5-7, 2026, and will be co-located with Content Marketing World at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO.
