This year’s report reveals a significant shift in top challenges—moving away from traditional budget constraints toward concerns about AI outpacing teams’ abilities to adapt.
Diving into the Qualtrics Study
All Things Insights: We are here on day one of TMRE at the Qualtrics Engagement Zone. Thank you so much, Ali, for coming on and talking a little bit with us today. One of the things we wanted to discuss was the market research trends report that Qualtrics publishes. How many years has it been going on? This is a comprehensive landmark study about threats, opportunities, and market research professionals’ concerns.
Ali Henriques: The survey has come out roughly every other year for about six years. It’s over 3,000 global market researchers that we field the study to each year. I think 16 different countries, 15 different industries are represented, and we’re targeting specifically those insights professionals who have decision making authority within their organizations around providers, budget, and how the decisions are made. That’s the kind of baseline for this study. Each year, we’ve, of course, had to evolve it.
Our industry is evolving, and so this year we had to fold in new AI questions. This year, we also had to fold in new Agentic questions. And so trendability is a little bit challenged, with so much change happening, which is great. But there are some core kind of KPIs that we track year on year and have done so for about four years of the six, plus things like how has demand for your research within your organization changed over the course of the past year? Budgets, of course. What is the kind of shift if that’s happening, if any? A couple of other areas focus around impact of the insights within your organization. So some trending KPIs, but also some fresh content each year.
Facing Top Market Research Challenges
All Things Insights: That brings up so many of the themes that are resonating right here at TMRE. Doing more with less resources is something that really strikes a chord with a lot of market researchers. Lack of budgets or lack of resources, lack of technology and tools. Is that an opportunity for companies to develop something more comprehensive in the industry?
Ali Henriques: Absolutely. Here’s what’s interesting about this year’s report, we ask a question and have done so for the past couple of years around what are the top challenges that you face within your organization. As you’d expect, many of the top results are something to do with budget constraints, vendor costs increasing, something along those lines.
What we saw this year was actually a shift away from those as top challenges and towards AI outpacing my team’s ability. That’s a yes. That’s a big shift for us this year. Back to the KPIs I was referencing earlier, budgets are staying flat for the most part from what we’re seeing in this data. That’s the largest proportion. Of course, on either end, you’ve got some budgets that are slightly increasing and some budgets that are retracting. But I think this, it’s certainly on our minds, this notion of AI potentially replacing our jobs and at a bare minimum kind of threatening those entry level positions across any industry. So we’re starting to see that emerging.
However, we do ask and have done so since AI has been a topic. We do ask about job security. We ask the participants to rate how confident they feel about their own job longevity, and that stat has stayed about 90 to 92% feeling confident about their job security. But something’s happening kind of beneath the surface here, if we see challenges emerging around AI outpacing our team’s abilities.
All Things Insights: There’s that fear factor happening, but then on the flip side, is the industry getting more used to using AI as a tool or as just part of the researcher’s toolkit?
Ali Henriques: I was actually just chatting with a client earlier about that very same thing. So we are seeing that as well. We asked explicitly this year, we asked participants to kind of plot themselves along an adoption curve. Are you traditional, not using AI at all? Are you using kind of AI assistance in certain tasks and phases of your research workflow? Synthetic adoption, conversational, and agentic. And so what we see, looking at it that way, we are largely in the AI assisted phase of this adoption curve. I’m talking 65% of the participants indicated as such. Synthetic adoption use within the past three to six months was about 40%, conversational about a quarter, and Agentic about 15%.
We’re absolutely turning to these tools to help us with task and workflow, efficiency mostly. And another trend we saw in this year’s report is a shift away from general purpose LLMs to AI tooling embedded within our research platforms. So that paradigm flip flops year over year, whereas last year, we were dabbling in this AI assistance with the likes of ChatGPT, improving headlines, summarizing open ends, things of that nature, cleaning the data potentially. This year, it’s flipped entirely to, what we see again in this room—a lot of the AI powered solutions from partners. That’s another kind of a shift in how we’re thinking about it.
The Rise of AI-Powered Qual
All Things Insights: Speaking of these trends, one trend at the show I see a lot of is qual at scale, this idea of qualitative research being assisted with AI. Do you feel that’s something kind of bubbling under the surface now?
Ali Henriques: It is. We certainly saw that last year that, particularly because of COVID, all of our in-person methodologies had to shift online. And this notion of remote call we just became more comfortable with it, in the absence of in-person. And now we’re seeing AI assistance, again, showing up there in terms of moderation, even recruitment, analysis, of course, features and tools that we as well as so many of the other providers on this floor also offer. I do personally believe that qual’s kind of having its moment, when we’re challenged with fraud and bots in our third-party panels.
There is the emergence of synthetic data, which means we are going to have to be extra particular about when we invest in human intelligence. And so qual is a great way to do that. A lot of synthetic providers train their data exclusively on qualitative transcripts because there’s just such rich context that you can’t get from quant data. So we are absolutely seeing qual having its moment. It really is.
Steering Through Synthetic Data
All Things Insights: There’s a few sessions here at TMRE on synthetic data. What are some of your takeaways from the show so far? Are there any other trends that you see on the agenda?
Ali Henriques: I had the pleasure of attending the executive retreat yesterday. So I spent some quality time with 40-plus phenomenal brands, and client-side researchers. It was illuminating just hearing what we’re kind of all up against. I manage a team of about 200 researchers inside of Qualtrics. And just like those clients, we can all kind of relate to what we’re dealing with as the market changes and evolves. My takeaways really are born from that. It’s really one of struggle, and we see this in the MR trends data as well.
There’s this kind of mounting tension between leaders and ICs with how to embrace this new technology and make it work for us. And so in the data, we see great divides between the benefits of AI, particularly, completely reinventing or reimagining our workflows. You see this chart quite literally, halved between leaders and ICs, making our teams a great deal more efficient, things of that nature.
Then there are the leaders who are feeling the pressure to embrace AI and ideally, as profitable companies, return savings by way of efficiency back to the business, but it’s just not happening at the pace that I think we all thought it might. And so there’s just a general kind of unease in the room around how to get started and how to do so, as good stewards of objectivity and the trust that we’ve earned as researchers in our capacities.
All Things Insights: The next era of insights, that’s the theme of the show. Obviously, we’re talking a lot about AI. But more specifically, what do you see as the next era?
Ali Henriques: I really do believe it starts with synthetic. Synthetic is our first step into embracing AI. I’ll use my favorite personal analogy. As a researcher myself, I like to keep my hands on the steering wheel. I want to influence and control many aspects of my research. So right now with synthetic, I can. I control the design. I can agonize over every question, and how it’s framed and how it’s worded and the response options. I’m letting go of control a little bit with data collection. Considering synthetic as a new tool in my toolkit, if you will, not replacing humans, I will still always meet human participants. But then my hands are back on the steering wheel for the analysis and reporting.
Once we’ve got the trust and confidence in this synthetic data as a powerful new tool, we can start to kind of step into conversational, and this is baby agentic in my opinion. You start to see a lot of that here too. Synthetic personas are a great way to kind of engage with your data in different ways, but it has to be rooted in a repository where the synthetic data is being collected and captured that we have a high degree of confidence in.
So we’ll start to see more conversational applications, which means we are maybe no longer agonizing over the questions and how they’re worded and maybe a bit more focused on our prompt or how we structure our research question. But we can’t let go of the same kind of level of detail and rigor that we have with our answers and what we deliver ultimately back to our clients.
All Things Insights: Well, Ali, this has been a great conversation—speaking of getting conversational between two humans, not two AIs! We really appreciate the time here at TMRE.
Click here to download Qualtrics’ 2026 Market Research Trends report.
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.
