Curiosity & Connections
All Things Insights was on hand at TMRE 2026 and we wanted to examine social media, particularly LinkedIn to delve into takeaways from the event. Insights and market research professionals of all levels were on hand for TMRE and it was their enthusiasm, passion, and curiosity for insights that made the event as distinctive as it was. Here’s some of what they were saying about TMRE 2026:
“TMRE26 even does good yoga. Thank you to Erin for an early session before day two got going. From there, a full day of sessions and meetings. Keith Smith and I also did three interviews: a WARC podcast with David Tiltman; Signal & Noise podcast with Lucas Longacre, and a video interview with Amanda Subler of Content Marketing Institute about the TMRE experience. Keep an eye out for those.
‘Making Effectiveness Happen: The Power of an Insight,’ with Traci Alford, Elizabeth Oates and Jeff McCrory, was a great look behind the Coors Light ‘Case of the Monday’ work. Everyone knows Mondays are rough. The campaign found the ‘Mondiest of all Mondays,’ the one after the Super Bowl, and built around it. A core human truth, placed inside a cultural moment. It also had to be true to the brand and true to the culture, and it was a natural extension of where the brand was already going.
Gabrielle Union kept her advice direct: start from a lived experience and respect the community you’re targeting. Trust is everything, fight truth with truth, and you deserve every room you’re in. And AI is both overhyped and underhyped: overhyped for everything it can do and underhyped for its dangers.
And a fitting end to a day that included a Coors Light case study: the evening party was at Coors Field. Food, drinks, music and plenty of good people. Thanks TMRE!” —Tracy Adams, Sr. Director, Research & Insights, The ARF (Advertising Research Foundation)
“TMRE26 came to our backyard this week! For three days in Denver, the insights industry compared notes at the Colorado Convention Center, and our team was glad to be in the room. (Home-field advantage: we knew where the good coffee was.)
A few things we heard again and again: Speed is easy now. Accuracy is the work. ‘Fast, wrong, or both?’ set the tone on day one. The clearest answer we heard was that AI output quality is a data design problem before it’s a model problem. Fast research on bad inputs just gets you to the wrong answer ahead of schedule.
Synthetic data is getting validated, and the findings are converging. MSI and the ARF presented a framework that scales the burden of proof to the decision being made. Qualtrics shared early results from a 16-study benchmark comparing fine-tuned research models with general-purpose LLMs. Both kept circling the same risk: synthetic output can look plausible while flattening the variation real people produce. Anyone can match a mean. Matching the distribution is where it gets honest.
Methodology is back in the conversation. The industry has moved from fearing AI to choosing the right tool for the job. Research teams are being pushed to define what research needs to become, not defend what it used to be. That starts with being able to show why the answer is right. As a panel company, we didn’t mind hearing the word ‘methodology’ one bit.
Trust was the common thread. It came up in keynotes on brand authenticity and in sessions on who narrates your brand in AI search. Trust gets earned through real people, real evidence, and honesty about what the data can and can’t support. Thank you to everyone who stopped to talk, and to the clients who made time to meet with us. Already looking forward to next year!” —ROI Rocket
“Really enjoyed speaking at TMRE26 with Hadley Edwards from Google! We got great questions around how to successfully roll out digital twins in an organization. The takeaway: experiment within insights first, but don’t be precious. Join other teams’ status meetings, introduce the twins, and run a study alongside them before granting full access. But do this relatively quickly: if we don’t give access, teams will find their own persona or twin solution.” —Jason Kramer, Co-Founder, Focus
“TMRE 2026 in Denver, in one line: Insight alone isn’t enough. The winners will be those who turn it into impact. My three takeaways: AI is only as smart as the knowledge beneath it; trust must be built in from day one; the real prize is moving from insight to action. The future of market research is trusted knowledge converted into intelligent action.” —Sylvester Daniel, CEO and Co-Founder, D2R AI Labs
“Great time at TMRE26 with the team! Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat and check out Anthro. Hearing how brands are blending traditional research with new methods showed me that the pressure has moved from getting information to making sense of it. ‘How do people feel?’ is still the starting question. What’s changing is that teams are realizing they can get to the deeper ones too: why do they feel that way, and what’s driving them to say it?” —Jake Haug, Growth & Customer Success, Quilt.AI
“Our team had a fantastic time at Day 1 of TMRE26, connecting with fellow researchers and sharing Sharpies to celebrate how real insights and partnership allow brands to create BOLD, memorable identities. I’m energized by the enthusiasm and openness of the people that work in our space, and so inspired to see an uptick in focus on the traits of reliable, impactful research among both buyers and providers at the conference. While AI is still a central part of most conversations, the return of phrases like ‘methodology’ and ‘bringing insights to life’ marks a shift from what we saw as recently as a few months ago. This industry has faced rapid change with openness, bravery, and a creative spirit that makes it so energizing to work in. Looking forward to day 2!” —Spencer Imel, Partner, Langston
“Good insights answer questions. Great insights influence action. That’s one of the biggest themes I’m taking away from TMRE26. Whether it’s connecting the dots across data sources, translating findings into compelling narratives, or building stronger relationships with business stakeholders, the opportunity to turn information into influence is so exciting. A special highlight was finally getting to meet Eli Clemens in person! After working together virtually, it was so great to spend a few days learning, exchanging ideas, and getting excited about what’s ahead for our team. And as it turns out we’re just as good at brainstorming in person as we are virtually.” —Jordan Glanville, Market Intelligence & Strategic Insights Senior Specialist, CBIZ
“What a week at TMRE26 in Denver! The proudest moment for us was seeing SIVO, Inc. strategist Anna Stoesz take the stage with a look at the future of MRX. Her message was a timely one: AI is powerful, and getting the most from it means knowing where to draw the line and starting to think about intelligence orchestration.
Our team shared that this showed up in different forms all week as Marilyn Gordon Weiss, Yogesh Chavda, Jon Overlie made their way through the sessions. Procter & Gamble’s keynote, ‘Consumers Lead. Insights Guide. Growth Follows’ set the tone, as Marc Pritchard and Kirti Singh spoke about using AI and data to accelerate learning while keeping people at the center of every decision. The panel with Merck, Indeed, and BECU picked up the thread, focusing on the human advantage in making better decisions when information is everywhere.
With AI taking on more of our work, the judgment (and knowing when to be careful), along with humanity and community feels more important than ever, and this week was a great reminder of how much of that our industry has.” —SIVO Inc.
“It was a privilege to be invited to chair Track 3 at TMRE, Aligning Analytics & Insights. Across the day, one question kept repeating: how do we drive insights fast, retaining accuracy, and what tools or attitudes can make the insights function a more strategic partner to the business?
The conversation has shifted from fearing AI to using it well alongside traditional tools and methodologies. AI enables us to look back through a series of modelled mirrors but every tool, whether agentic or traditional method, is a component of insight enablement, and choosing the right one matters as much as the goal it serves.
What drives better decision making is the insights professional who validates the data using a combination of the best tools for the job. When we lead with good data, insight drives better decisions, stronger growth and the ability to see pitfalls before they happen. Without it, we are doing a disservice to ourselves and will become obsolete rather than the true insights and analytic leaders we deserve to and have earned the right to be.
AI has started to bridge the skill sets of insights and analytics professionals meaning we now have deeper understanding and can help provide better advice grounded in data.
Accuracy set the tone early. Thomas Ramsøy of Neurons opened by asking whether AI marketing is fast, wrong, or both. Daniel Muise and Jonathan Feldman of Outset then argued that simulation accuracy is a data design problem rather than a model problem. That is a timely reminder that how we build our inputs matters as much as the tools we use.
Narrative was the second thread. Everett Alatsis moderated a panel with Jean Shaw (Cigna), Gireesh Joshi (Adobe) and Reshma Bennur (Comcast) on bridging the gap between analytics and insights. Susan White Frazier at Hilton closed the day by exploring where research meets analytics and how to tell the story that matters.
We also heard how major brands are building insight into their operations. Joshua McGinty of Toyota and Olaf Lenzmann of Market Logic described a consumer-centric insights engine. Emily Weinstein of Danone and Jilleun Eglin of Discuss shared how Danone built an always-on empathy culture. Dom Wong introduced the Pogo Insights Library where he talked about connected data points and how Pogo can integrate into insight in a fraction of a minute using their normative database.
Many thanks to the Informa team, to every speaker and to everyone who filled the room.” —Robert Pierson, Senior Vice President, Schnell Research
“TMRE26 has been a great experience so far, and getting to moderate the ‘From Numbers to Narrative’ track, seeing the range of topics and the quality of the speakers, and connect with people in the room reinforces what’s great about being in-person: getting out from behind the screen and truly making connections!
Leigh Katharine Smith from Typeform gave one of my favorite talks of the day, with a huge amount of passion, energy and clear, deep expertise for research methods and uncovering human behavior and thoughts. Her talk is well worth watching for anyone that applies strict frameworks to how humans interact with brands, experiences, or anything really but some important implications for things like brand tracking and ideas on how to get better, richer, and more true-to-life perspectives than with a strict tracking questionnaire.
Michael Bagalman from Starz gave a useful heuristic to think about the types of decisions that companies need to make, from a ‘rule of thumb’ to the ‘crystal ball’. He challenged that most decisions should start from the rule of thumb and only become more complex as needed based on the commercial impact, the scale, or the reversibility of the decision—and even managed to bring Barack Obama into the talk with the need to move to the decision on imperfect information!
Andrew Tindall was on the main Effie’s stage sharing the Creative Dividend, which is always a great reminder that we as marketers are the ones that get bored of marketing much quicker than consumers, and by committing to creative ideas over time their compound effects really add up to much more effective advertising.
Topping off the day was the event at Coor’s Field, the home of the Denver Rockies baseball team—an amazingly eerie experience to be in the near empty stadium, but a beautiful outlook to catch up with the Effie’s team with Deanna, Liz and Rory Cahalan. Thanks for all the support this week!” —Matt Andrew, General Manager, Americas, Ekimetrics
“TMRE Day 1 highlight: Beyond hearing our great panel speakers and hanging out at our beautiful booth, I was looking forward to this morning’s keynote. For someone who has never said no to having more sports in his life, hearing the merging of insights and the sports world at this morning’s keynote was a highlight. Hailey Sullivan, CMO of the Denver Broncos football club, walked us through how her team builds fandom. Her team’s test for good marketing was just as simple. Does it grab you? Does it make you love the team a little more? Is it strange enough that you’ll remember it tomorrow? Over the course of three short years, the Broncos moved from the bottom of the league in fan experience to the top. What struck me wasn’t the ranking. It was what all three questions have in common. They’re about how people feel, not what they know. Fans aren’t built by information. They’re built by belonging.” —Stephan Leman, Managing Director, Brandtrust
“TMRE26 day 1 was incredible. The energy of this first combined TMRE, Content Marketing World and LIONS event is different, bigger. Marc Pritchard and Kirti Singh of P&G set the tone: Brand and Insights standing on the stage, together. That energy carried through the day with insights leaders, marketers and creative mavericks learning from each other under one roof. Pamela Forbus brought it all together at the end when she challenged us to have a point of view and the courage to lead with it: ‘If you haven’t been wrong in public, you might not have said anything of consequence.’ —Oksana Sobol, Vice President Consumer Insights, The Clorox Company
“It was my first time moderating a panel at TMRE, and what a panel to start with! Joel Ballezza (BECU), Angela Kesselman (Indeed), and Holly Hertsgaard (Merck) made one thing clear: insights leaders don’t want data dumps. They want a point of view that drives decision making. In the age of AI, information is abundant. Human judgment is the competitive advantage. Angela put it perfectly: speed up so we can pause. AI makes the front end of market research faster. The point isn’t rushing to market. It’s buying time to ask why something matters. Grateful for partners who push our thinking as much as we push theirs.” —Alyssa Kearney, Managing Director, Client Experience, Brandtrust
“Amazon is reportedly in talks to pay up to $7 billion for Decart, a three-year-old AI company. The news landed days after the amazing TMRE26, where one theme surfaced: insights is becoming intelligence, embedding insights into all workflows, and shaping decisions across the enterprise.
This is how I connect the two stories. Decart’s software sits between the AI model and the chips and squeezes more work out of each one. The company says models run up to eight times faster on chips from Nvidia, Google, and Amazon. The value is not in adding more hardware. It is in getting more out of existing chips, regardless of who made them.
Insights teams face the same challenge. Most CPG insights functions do not have a data shortage. We have POS data, household panels, trackers, social listening, years of qual/quant research and internal commercial/financial data sitting in separate platforms, files, and decks. Each source answers its own individual business question. Breaking the information silos and synthesizing them into a clear recommendation that drives business decisions is where teams slow down.
The market sees it and is evolving too. In June, NIQ launched Optiq Bridge to bring its data into third-party applications and AI workflows. This is what the shift from insights to intelligence looks like. Not more data. A knowledge management hub where the data we already have is synthesized faster and sharper to drive decisions. Connecting what we already pay for and getting more value out of them. Asking one question across POS, trackers, and qual to guide a business decision. Looking hard where sources disagree, because that tension is where the insight lives.
AI makes connecting faster and cheaper. It does not decide which tension matters, or how to turn it into a decision the business will invest in. That remains human work.” —Sibel Raif, Founder, 4sight Consulting
“The first thing people learn about a show is increasingly a short-form video someone else made. So what’s the one asset that survives that fragmentation? Music.
That was the thread of my session at TMRE26 this week. To demonstrate it, I played four five-second audio clips with no visuals, and most of the room placed Friends, Succession, Stranger Things and Barbie from audio alone. No poster, no trailer, and they still got the title, the tone and the feeling (even the tech guy shouted ‘This is Friends’ when we tested the audio with no slides). It’s the most portable asset that survives fragmentation—it works stripped of context, at any length, on any platform, made by anyone.
The research backs it up. On Heated Rivalry, 62% of the accounts that touched the title engaged with its music, and a single TikTok mood edit took one viewer to a finished season in four days. Music has always enhanced the content experience. In short form, it can also promote a title, extend its life and get fans and UGC creators to do the marketing for us.
It was great to catch up with my team buddy Tracey Chen and other great people in my industry. Sessions were excellent and in particular great fun was had with Martyn Hill ‘s Throwdown.” —Iva Kralj-Taylor, Director, Global Corporate Strategy Insights, Warner Bros. Discovery
“We apparently weren’t finished talking about synthetic data when our TMRE session ended. Tracy Adams and I spent our session on a fairly practical problem: When is a synthetic result actually good enough to act on? The conversations afterward kept coming back to the same issue. Synthetic respondents can produce results that look remarkably plausible. But the more consequential the decision, the less satisfying ‘it looks right’ becomes as a standard for validation.
The framework we’ve been developing at the Marketing Science Institute draws heavily on academic research MSI has supported and organizes that work around three practices: stress-test, benchmark, and calibrate. Stress-test the evidence to understand how it can break. Benchmark it against something meaningful. Calibrate the validation burden to the decision the evidence is being asked to support. The same synthetic system might be perfectly useful for exploring an idea, require additional evidence for prioritizing alternatives, and be insufficient on its own for making a high-stakes decision.
There is considerably more behind each of those pieces. MSI will be publishing a white paper in the coming weeks that brings together the framework and the research behind it.” —Keith Smith, Managing Director, Marketing Science Institute
“After a few days to reflect on the 2026 TMRE Conference in Denver, one thing stands out to me: AI is creating a lot of opportunity for insights teams, but it also brings some real risks. On the positive side, AI can help us reduce busy work, scale projects, reuse existing research more easily, and free up time for the work that matters most.
Anna Stoesz from the University of Minnesota outlined four possible future scenarios for the insights industry. Her framework suggested that we may be moving away from a ‘fast, cheap, narrow’ model toward a ‘human-intelligence advantage,’ where AI handles more of the execution and people add value through judgment, context and deeper understanding.
Renee Neubecker from Motorola Solutions also showed how new approaches can help with the realities of B2B research, where audiences are often small, specialized, and hard to reach.
I also liked the example from Lalo Luna of Grupo Lala and Lasse Telling of GetWhy. Grupo Lala is experimenting with synthetic respondents while grounding that work in continuous learning from real consumers. Their approach captured an important theme I heard throughout TMRE: AI can help us scale and extend what we know, but it still needs to stay connected to what real people are saying and doing.
At the same time, several sessions focused on the risks. Lore Oxford from Reddit introduced a term, ‘insightslop,’ for outputs that may sound interesting, but do not have enough context, originality or clear value.
Angela Kesselman from Indeed emphasized that researchers need to know the business, question the data and look beyond the most obvious answer. And Christopher Barnes from Escalent and Anneli Dey from Tremendous highlighted another growing challenge: AI-enabled fraud and the need to protect the quality of research data.
My biggest takeaway is that AI may change a lot about how research gets done, but it does not remove the need for strong researchers. If anything, it makes judgment, context, curiosity, soft skills, business understanding, the ability to ask good questions, and challenge assumptions even more important. Faster does not always mean better. More output does not always mean more insight. The real opportunity is to use AI for what it does well, while keeping people in the driver’s seat.” —Antonina Redko, Market Research Consultant, U.S. Dairy Export Council
“I’ve spent the last week having an awesome time at #tmre26 #cmworld and #lions in Denver and, as is à la mode, there was lots of chat about AI and also how we all need to be more human. As I showed in my session, the real sentiment the world wants to see is actually more soul. Which I believe is why whimsy and humor is having a big moment right now (and it’s something I always try to bring to the world). I loved hearing Hailey Sullivan say she brings whimsy and a bit of weird into giveaways. It’s how you meet people where they are. And it’s also why wonderful things get made with AI. For now—more whimsy, please. And to all my partners in play, thank you.” —Martyn Hill, Head of Business Development, The Mix Global
“At TMRE26, James Turner argued that any insights team pitching AI only as a way to do the same work for less is making the case for its own replacement. The session ‘Accelerate or Be Replaced’ launched our new research with 400-plus brand-side leaders. Thank you to everyone who came, and for all the positive feedback. The study found that most research buyers have started using AI in their insight work, but only around a third are what we call AI Accelerators, meaning they already use both AI tools and AI-enhanced data day to day. The biggest difference between Accelerators and everyone else is in how they use the research they already have. 89% of Accelerators use AI to pull insight together across studies, compared with 42% of everyone else. They’re also much more likely to check what AI tells them against real data.” —Delineate
“Taste, Intuition, Passion, and a Superwoman Pose in the bathroom was the much-needed conversation at the TMRE26 annual Women’s Luncheon. Here’s a recap of what these baddies had to say:
- Map out the future you want, work backwards from there.
- Start doing. Perfection is a pretty effective form of procrastination.
- Lean into what you’re passionate about. That’s usually where authenticity lives.
- Taste and intuition can be leadership advantages. Use them.
- And if someone tells you you’re ‘too much,’ maybe that’s useful information. Just not necessarily about you…
Here’s to more women trusting their instincts, taking up their space, and just DOING the damn thing.” —Lizzy Martinez, General Manager, Customer Research & Advisory, Delta Air Lines
“Just returned from TMRE and this resonates. One of my biggest takeaways from the event was that nearly everyone is wrestling with the same challenge, turning increasing volumes of data, analytics, and AI capabilities into decisions that drive measurable business outcomes. Lots of exciting conversations around how insights teams can become even more strategic partners to the business.” —Sandy Park, SVP, Socratic Technologies
“TMRE 2026: what an experience. Three days. Countless conversations. New connections. Fresh perspectives. And so many reminders of why the insights and market research community continues to be one of the most exciting spaces to be part of. Being at TMRE in Denver as a sponsor was more than just showcasing what we do. It was about being part of conversations around consumer intelligence, market research, AI, data, brand strategy, and the future of insights.
What stood out to me the most was the openness of the community, people willing to share what they’re solving, what’s changing, and where the industry is heading. From conversations at our booth to meeting incredible researchers, insights leaders, marketers, and innovators, I’m walking away with new relationships, new ideas, and a lot of inspiration.
A big thank you to everyone who stopped by, took the time to connect, shared their perspective, or simply said hello. Those conversations are what make events like TMRE truly valuable. And of course, what a backdrop.” —Simran Yadav, Business Growth Consultant, InfoVision Inc.
“The last two days at TMRE 2026 in Denver gave me a lot to think about… Here are five quotes that stuck with me:
1. “The last 18 months, insights professionals created a faster and cheaper version of what they did before. Now we have to do it better.” —Pamela Forbus, Mondelez. That may be the biggest challenge for our industry right now. AI has dramatically improved speed and efficiency. But faster and cheaper cannot be the destination. The next frontier is better questions, better decisions and better outcomes.
2. “Plausibility is not validation of synthetic data.” —Keith Smith, Marketing Science Institute (MSI). AI can produce an answer that sounds incredibly convincing. That doesn’t automatically make it true, representative or decision-ready. I also liked Keith’s framework for calibrating the role of synthetic data to the stakes of the decision: it can lead in exploration, support prioritization, or inform higher-stakes decisions alongside stronger validation and human evidence.
3. “The risk of AI is to lose the delicious difference of humans.” —Tracy Adams, Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). Probably my favorite phrase of the conference. Humans are inconsistent. Contextual. Contradictory. Emotional. Different. And that messiness is often exactly where the most valuable insight lives.
4. “I feel a thirst for going back to old-school research like ethnographies.” —Molly Bullock, HP. Everyone in the room felt this one. The more we automate, synthesize and scale, the more valuable it may become to simply sit with a real person, watch what they do, and understand their world.
5. “No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to have more AI in my life.’ We need to start with the problem to be solved.” —Laura Rivera, Peloton. Exactly. AI is not the value proposition. Solving a meaningful human or business problem is.
What quote resonates most with you? Or what was your favorite quote from TMRE?” —Niels Neudecker, Managing Director, North America, Human8
“At TMRE, the sessions set the tone and the conversations at the booth kept it going. One thing came through clearly: the gap isn’t in the data. It’s in what happens after, turning intelligence into something an organization can actually act on.
A few themes that kept coming up: the shift towards always-on consumer understanding. Teams that check in with consumers continuously are making faster, more confident decisions than teams that don’t. We’ve been helping brands build exactly that, a continuous read on what’s happening in their media environment, not a snapshot.
AI is moving from experimentation to execution. The real question now isn’t whether to use it, it’s knowing where human judgment still has to lead. Our approach has always been AI precision combined with human context. One without the other misses too much. And insights teams are being asked to do more than answer questions. They’re being asked to build systems that the whole organization can use. That’s something we work on with our clients every day. It was good to hear the same challenges playing out at scale.” —InfoVision Intelligence
“Did you attend Insights to Impact/TMRE? Then you may be suffering from AI Fatigue Syndrome (AIFS). While not yet an official diagnosis, it may be an accurate one for many leaving Insights to Impact/TMRE 2026 in Denver. Insights leaders aren’t anti-AI, but many report that they’re overwhelmed. Every vendor has AI moderated qual, synthetic data, AI personas and more, and it’s getting hard to tell what’s truly reliable and impactful vs. new packaging of existing solutions. My four takeaways:
1. We’re at an inflection point. While AI is no doubt a momentous tech shift, like previous ones in market insights, the field will narrow.
2. Fewer providers and tools will stand the test of time.
3. Speed isn’t the same as understanding. More output makes judgment more valuable, not less. AI is starting to talk to itself. Suppliers send AI-generated outputs to clients, clients run them through AI, and stakeholders reply with more AI. Everyone is busy, but no one is learning anything new. Rising above it takes people who add real context and a point of view.
4. Human truths are still the foundation. AI should help sharpen them, not replace them. Winners will be the partners who combine the best of AI with expert curation, so clients get efficiency without losing humanity.
That’s the work that we do at Burke, Inc. So if you think you may be suffering from AIFS, ask your doctor if Burke, Inc. is right for you. See you in Nashville in 2027!” —Chuck White, Senior Vice President, Client Services, Burke
“Throughout TMRE, conversations focused on the future of insights, the growing impact of AI, and the continued importance of understanding people in a rapidly changing marketplace. One of the biggest takeaways? Community matters. Meaningful relationships remain at the heart of successful partnerships and great research.” —The Logit Group
“Consumer behavior is moving faster than most research cycles were designed to track. By the time data is collected, analyzed, socialized, and reported, the moment that mattered has often already passed. That raises an important question: How should intelligence functions evolve when decision-makers need answers in days, not months? At InfoVision Intelligence, we believe the future is not about generating more information. It is about creating intelligence that helps teams identify which signals matter, understand why they matter, and act before opportunities or risks disappear.
That means connecting insights across consumer conversations, brand perception, competitive activity, cultural shifts, media narratives, and campaign performance to provide a clearer picture of what is changing and where it is likely headed next.” —Nandita Sen, Senior Director, Social Media Research & Analytics, InfoVision
“Great connecting with industry leaders and peers at TMRE 2026! I enjoyed learning about their priorities and how they’re thinking through AI’s role in research.
Across the conversations, a few common themes stood out: speed to decisions: Deliver insights that help teams act faster, with confidence; AI innovation in research: Move beyond experimentation to practical applications that improve research, analysis, and decision-making; human judgment: Keep curiosity, context, and consumer understanding at the center.
This is where SG Analytics has been bringing valuable innovation, applying AI to accelerate research and turn insights into faster, better-informed decisions. Thank you to everyone for the thoughtful conversations and fresh perspectives. Looking forward to staying connected!” —Parth Arora, Senior Vice President, SG Analytics
“From TMRE in Denver to the inaugural Jupiter Festival in Miami, a full week of listening, learning and connecting. Both offered so much compelling programming that I wished I could have attended every session. The common thread: understanding audiences and building lasting connections as technology, creators and new formats reshape our business. At TMRE, AI research tools and real-world case studies offered fresh perspectives on understanding consumers and informing decisions. Equally valuable was time with colleagues, friends, and clients.” —Holly Leff-Pressman, Chief Client Engagement Officer, Screen Engine/ASI
“Faster and cheaper answers a procurement question. ‘What should I do?’ answers a leadership question. I know which one I want market research to answer. Pamela Forbus of Mondelēz International made that distinction hard to ignore at TMRE. Her keynote, ‘Leaders Make the Future,’ was the session that stayed with me the most over two days of incredible presentations. My takeaway: bring the questions our clients and CMOs haven’t thought to ask yet. Then help them decide what comes next.
That connects with our recent DLG Research report, The Hispanic Market Research Perspective. Understanding cultural differences matters. Knowing which differences should change a brand’s decision matters even more.
Research should minimize uncertainty, giving leaders a clearer path forward. Waiting for perfect certainty could become a very long meeting. Pam put it plainly: ‘If you haven’t been wrong in public, you’ve never said anything of consequence.’
Researchers have the evidence. Leaders have the nerve to move forward. Be both. TMRE 2026 was incredible. DLG Research will be back as a sponsor in 2027.” —Edgardo de la Garza, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Multicultural Research, DLG Research
“Four gatherings, 6,000 industry folks and a spaceship congress center in Denver that hosted it all. Welcome to the Insights to Impact Conference 2026. Informa Markets organized parallel AI, Marketing Effectiveness, Insights & Research Tracks under its brands #lions #cmworld #tmre with participants from WARC and Contagious.
Key takeaways: everything keeps changing rapidly in the business world. Marketing and insights main job (which we are forgetting) is to build relevance and consumer trust in a world of abundance and technological convenience. It will be at the heart of everything. Sounds basic since on every company chart customer centric is being manifested yet consumers lost significant trust over the years. And consumers can now cut through most of corporate BS with their new AI intelligence layer. I went to a session that proved how choice will be offloaded to AI and how persuasive it is to change opinions.
Tash Walker spoke about this disconnect between trust and brands in our joint session and about the overabundance of choice and the chance of truly understanding and solving consumer tensions they face.
How to identify the tensions and practice what you preach: I ran a workshop on cultural intelligence based on The Mix Global’s powerful cultural insights framework which guides teams to ask deeper questions about consumer realities of today and offer new perspectives on how brands should act and build their narrative. Loved the energy in the session and the questions it raised, hopefully something to bring to more organizations very soon based on the feedback.
A theme I heard from Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard in his great keynote is actively architecting around the consumer. Nothing else is the job. The frameworks he presented framed his whole organization around it. The question I always come back to is: Are we decorating or architecting?
During the crazy days I had the chance to meet many architects and had good conversations, a few margaritas and some new sights of the Rocky Mountains. Thanks Martyn Hill for a high energy week and a fantastic throwdown session at TMRE and Tash Walker for the passion to build brands that matter. And to all the organizers of this impactful event. I was grateful to be invited.” —Robin Karakash, Founder, Curious Altitudes
“Just wrapped Day 1 at TMRE 2026 in Denver and I have a lot to say. Five sessions, one through-line: we have more data, more AI, and more speed than ever. And the thing that keeps mattering most is still the thing hardest to automate: human judgment. Human empathy. Knowing which signal is actually worth acting on.
P&G opened the day with a story about a product that crushed in the U.S. and got completely rejected in the U.K., because AI could surface the pattern but it took a human to understand why British people soak their dishes. Dr. Thomas Ramsøy followed with a number that should stop everyone cold: ad and brand memory has dropped from 30% to 5%. Generative AI doesn’t fix that. It accelerates the same mistakes at scale.
The day closed with the Future of Insights Throwdown. Experts debated whether traditional research, metrics, and gut feel are all BS. Audience had tambourines. It was exactly as fun as it sounds.” —Lucas Longacre, Head of Product, Inlightended
“Day 2 of Informa’s TMRE2026 is a wrap! Amazing speakers, great conversations, and so much fun with old friends and new. A few things that stood out today:
The first keynote featured Dr. Amy Cuddy. She shared research showing that we judge trustworthiness first, and weigh it more heavily than competence. Why? Because from an evolutionary perspective, a competent person you can’t trust is dangerous! So many brands lead with how good they are, when what people really want to know first is whether the brand has their back. Competence matters, but only once trust opens the door (As you might imagine, this one resonated with a company named Brandtrust!)
Sol Rashidi gave one of the most refreshingly honest AI talks I’ve heard in a while. No Instagram version of AI success here! She warned against bringing a chainsaw to a job a pair of scissors can handle, but the idea that really stuck with me was knowledge formation friction. If AI takes over the entry level work (the research, the synthesis, the first drafts), where do our future experts come from? In our business, those early reps are how consultants build the instincts clients count on. We need to find new ways to build our people up.
I saw a few great sessions, mostly panels. I caught the brilliant Michael Nevski, lately of Visa, on two panels, one on Insights to Impact (with another very smart Michael, Michael Gunther, CFA of Consumer Edge) and one on digital twins. There were some common themes, including the importance of ‘Human first, AI second’ (which sounds like an echo of Douglas Healy’s “Humans in the LEAD, not in the loop” comment from yesterday), the fact that garbage in (poor training data) still begets garbage out, the need to provide verifiable solutions not black boxes, and, lastly, the growing role that human judgement plays in the corporate insights role.
Which brings me to my headline for the day—the always on point Angela Kesselman of Indeed presented on The New Skill Set of the AI-Era Researcher. Angela shared a fantastic case where human judgement played a key role in interpreting AI-driven research. But what really stood out to me was Angela’s first slide. She identified a human truth that explains so much of the tumult that our industry has recently experienced. It may be true that insights professionals can do more than ever, and have more impact than ever, because of AI. It may be true that it will enable us to elevate our roles, and spend more time thinking about strategic implications. But it is hard for us to accept this for one simple, and very human, reason: yes, AI has taken over the busy work of our jobs. But it’s also taken over the part of our jobs that our identity and pride was most rooted in. I predict that the AI tools that thrive will be the ones that understand this tension and work to resolve it.” —Alexander Millet, CEO, Brandtrust
“TMRE 2026 in six takeaways. The last one may be the biggest shift of all. AI is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. Insights teams are no longer asking whether to use AI. Companies are now working out how to embed it in everyday research, decision-making, and workflows.
Synthetic personas are getting more nuanced. A year ago, the conversation around synthetic consumers and digital twins was much more optimistic. Now the view is more realistic about where they work and where they don’t. One session summed it up well: digital twins still lack the living context that shapes human decisions, real human data will continue to be needed, and what looks great in a demo can be much harder in production. The direction points toward more specific, niche applications, not a replacement for real consumers.
Behavioral evidence is outweighing stated intent. More conversations are moving past what people say they would buy toward what they do: transactions, behavior, engagement, and other forms of real commitment. This one is close to home for us. It reinforces what we’ve believed from day one: the stronger the commitment, the stronger the signal.
Human judgment is becoming more valuable, not less. AI can speed up research, but context, causality, emotion, and knowing the right question to ask still take strong human judgment. The emerging model feels less like human in the loop and more like human in the lead.
Research is becoming continuous. Instead of isolated studies every few months, more companies are moving toward always-on understanding, learning from customers across the whole journey. Research is getting closer to product, marketing, sales, and customer success.
Insights are shifting from finding answers to influencing decisions. A report is no longer enough. The best insights teams are becoming more connected to prioritization, investment, product decisions, and growth. That may be the biggest shift of all.” —Narek Vardanyan, CEO, Prelaunch.com
“Back from TMRE 2026 in Denver and reporting back on my things I’m pumped about list from last week: 1. Real Fall weather: It was still kind of hot in Denver, can’t sugarcoat it. But the lack of humidity was glorious and did good things for my hair.
2. Speaking with Nik Blach: Was really fun to talk shop with you on participant POV on AIMI. For those of you that weren’t there, the TLDR is that our mutual research concludes that participants are fine with AI moderation (90% of the 100 people in our Strella / Cint study said they were just as comfortable with AI as with a human moderator, and nobody walked out feeling worse about it). So, we think the more useful question is when to use it (and sometimes the honest answer is “not for this study”).
3. The hallway chats: I’m famously known for chatting up folks in line, at a shared table, you name it, so I had a lot to choose from here, but I think one of my favorite moments was when a researcher came up after our talk and admitted she loves moderating and is a total skeptic. Good news for her is that I believe the art of human moderation (and the empathy, the lived experience of being a human being) will never not be relevant.
4. Themes I kept hearing: Recruiting is still the hard part, humans aren’t in the loop, they’re at the center, and corporate AI policies that haven’t caught up to the tools yet. Lots to chew on.” —Genevieve Becker, Growth Lead, Strella
“Back from TMRE with a lot to think about. A few conversations and sessions stuck with me: 1. AI is only as good as the data underneath it. Everyone is talking about GenAI, synthetic data, and automated insights. But the strongest voices in the room kept coming back to the same point: without clean, consistent, trusted data, AI just gets you to the wrong answer faster.
2. Speed is the new expectation. Stakeholders no longer want to wait weeks for a readout. Insights teams are being asked to deliver answers in real time, and that only works when the data is already connected and ready to use.
3. Insights need to drive action, not just inform. The best presentations weren’t about more data. They were about better storytelling, clearer decisions, and showing business impact.
4. Breaking down silos is still the hardest part. Retail data, panel data, first-party data, and market data often live in different places and speak different languages. Teams that connect them get a fuller picture of the consumer and the shelf.” —Tanya Sarakinis, Business Development Director, Redslim
“Attending TMRE is always one of the highlights of my year! Serving on the Advisory Board alongside such dynamic leaders is a privilege, and each year reminds me of what’s possible when we bring our experiences, ideas, and passion together.
From amazing sessions and inspiring keynote speakers to meaningful conversations, I left with fresh perspectives and so much to bring back to my work.
One of the most meaningful moments for me was the Women in Insights Luncheon. I’m honored to help lead this experience and see our vision come to life. It is a space where women can pause, connect, and elevate together. A special thank you to this year’s amazing sponsor, Stephanie Balderrama, and our wonderful panelists, Jessica Serrano and Bridget Nelson. Your support and perspectives made this even more special. We can’t forget our surprise panelists who volunteered from the audience. They are the true shining stars.” —Antoinette Staples, Senior Director, Customer Insights & Success, McKesson
“Three days at TMRE, rounded off with an invite to the Executive Retreat hosted by Audience Strategies founder David Boyle. Around 50 insight leaders, a day off the record, and I felt very VIP. The thing that stuck with me: insight needs a rebrand. Sales, marketing and finance all have a name everyone in the business understands. We call ourselves insights, analytics, research, strategy, and our companies can’t always tell what we do or the value we add.” —Sarah Clerkson, Insight & Strategy Director, Audience Strategies
“AI is taking the middle out of research. That makes the beginning and the end more valuable than ever. Last week I opened The Future of Insights track at TMRE in Denver with a show of hands. Who’s worked in research for more than ten years? Most of the room. More than twenty? Still most of the room! I’ve been in this industry for three, so I wasn’t going to tell that room how research works. I came in after fifteen years in tech and have since had hundreds of conversations with insights leaders and the marketers who brief them.
The pattern I keep seeing: insights has one of its biggest opportunities in decades, and most of the AI conversation frames it as a threat. Do more with less. Move faster. Can AI just do the work? When I asked who’d heard all three this year, nearly everyone raised a hand.
Research used to enter at defined moments. Brief in, study run, answer back. Now it happens everywhere at once. Marketers run their own studies, product teams talk to customers directly, and AI interrogates a dataset in seconds. That gives insights a bigger role, for three reasons:
1. The value is moving upstream. When answers were hard to produce, the value sat in producing them. That’s getting easier every month, so the leverage moves to deciding what the business needs to know. The most useful question I’ve heard in insights this year is five words long: what should we stop doing?
2. Research can finally get there first. Every researcher knows the feeling of being brought in after the idea is built, presented and loved, to sign the permission slip. Now you can learn on Monday, change the idea on Tuesday and test again on Wednesday. Research shapes the work while there’s still time to change it.
3. Judgement is the scarce skill. Summaries, personas and synthetic consumers appear almost instantly. The harder question is whether they’re good enough for the decision in front of you. A quick call on an early idea needs a different standard of evidence from a multimillion-dollar investment. Experience makes the difference, so AI makes experienced researchers more valuable.
In Denver, Douglas Healy shared how changing one word, “testing” to “learning”, shifted how creative teams relate to and engage with insights. The team dropped “validation” and pass/fail scores and judged creative against the brief instead—absolutely loved hearing this! Eli Moore at Burke analyzed 240,000 job ads and found that insights roles increasingly value stakeholder management, judgment, and influence.
The mechanics between question and answer keep getting faster. The value sits at either end: asking the right question at the start and making the right decision at the end. Both need people. The biggest mistake insights teams can make right now is treating AI as a faster way to do the same job. If AI takes more of the middle, researchers should own more of the edges.
Also, any conference that supports a puppy rescue is a top-tier one in my books!” —Joshua Nuu-Steele, Co-founder and CRO, Ideally
Editor’s Note: The next Insight to Impact Festival will be held November 2-4, 2027, at the Music City Center in Nashville, TN.
