129 - Smarter Data Wins: Following the Money in AI and Insights

135 - How AI Agents Are Changing Market Research in 2026

AI is reshaping how research gets done, how data gets valued, and who owns the intelligence that drives decisions. This episode covers Meta's push into agentic business tools, a $10M bet on social video intelligence, the rise of embedded AI agents in research workflows, and why first-party data ownership is pulling ahead of intermediated access. Plus: a Harvard study on how knowledge workers are actually using AI agents, and what that means for the industry.

134 - AI Agents Are Changing Everything. Are Insights Firms Ready?

With IIEX Europe weeks away, this episode zooms out from the logistics to tackle the bigger questions reshaping the insights industry: who survives an agentic future, and how? From a $250M raise rewriting how AI finds information on the web, to the structural trap that kills promising boutique firms, to why AI may be creating more work before it eliminates any, this conversation covers the forces every researcher and strategist needs to understand right now.

133 - The Infrastructure Shift: Why Everyone's Buying Data Companies

Big moves are reshaping how brands access and use data. Publicis bought LiveRamp for $2.2B to solve identity and attribution across platforms. Qualtrics paid $6.75B for healthcare data specialist Prescani. A retail sensor startup raised $170M to track what actually happens on store shelves. Meanwhile, the supplier world is evolving from selling surveys to building data infrastructure, synthetic respondents need quality standards, and quantum computing could upend everything we know about security. Plus: why Google's new 3D world-building tool matters, what consumer AI backlash means for research, and why good moderators still beat algorithms.

132 - The AI Shift No One Saw Coming: From Software to Services

The research and CX industry is at a crossroads. Traditional platforms are struggling under debt while AI deployment is reshaping how enterprises buy and use analytics tools. This episode explores what happens when private equity leverage meets the need for transformational AI investment, why major vendors are hiring armies of engineers instead of just selling software, and how market research is evolving from static reports to always-on data infrastructure. Plus: the case for AI-moderated interviews, and why your insights might soon find you in Slack rather than waiting in a dashboard you never open

131 - The Real Story Behind AI’s Rapid Takeover of Research

IIEX North America proved to be more than just another conference: it was a turning point showcasing real AI deployments in action, from synthetic sampling to AI-moderated calls. The energy on the floor reflected what's happening across the industry: massive funding rounds, strategic M&A combining behavioral and conversational data, and a fundamental shift from insights-as-service to insights-as-infrastructure. Meanwhile, data quality has moved from technical concern to boardroom priority, with new approaches to fraud detection and verification gaining traction. The team also covered upcoming IIEX events, product launches, and why the GRIT report is making waves.