Who Is Redefining Insights?
How organisational choices shape its mandate, its influence and what it is held accountable for
This essay was developed through original research and analysis with AI assistance in the research, drafting and editorial process.
Salesforce is making a bet on where customer research belongs. On 29 September 2026, it announced an agreement to acquire Listen Labs, a platform that uses AI for customer research and simulations of human behaviour. The deal, still pending, is intended to complement its marketing, service and AI products. Research would inform both people making decisions and agents taking action.
Alfred Wahlforss, Listen Labs’ co-founder, promises to place that understanding “at the heart of every decision”. Implementation remains to be seen. The ambition is to make research about people part of an enterprise platform.
If more teams can access research through their own systems, the organisation may become less dependent on a specialist function to handle every question. It would then need to establish which work can be distributed, which decisions require expert involvement and who is accountable for how the knowledge is used. The capability may spread before those agreements are in place.
Debates about the future of Insights cover which tasks to automate, which skills to develop and how to exercise human judgement. They also address organisational change. In September 2026, Jordan Harper of Qualtrics proposed that teams orient themselves towards decisions and outcomes, take responsibility for interpretation and governance, and bring research, customer experience and data science together. Published as partner content, the article sets out a vision of transformation from within the profession.
A team can learn new skills and improve how it conducts research. Changing when it gets involved, which budgets it can use or what it is accountable for requires agreement with other parts of the company. For an Insights team, changes outside the function can begin inside its own company, through platform choices, budget allocation or a redesign of decision rights. The organisation may be redefining what it needs Insights for while the profession redefines how to do the work.
When Understanding Spreads
Research as an activity, consumer understanding as a capability and Insights as an organisational function can develop in different directions. More people may conduct research while a central team plays less of an intermediary role. A function may retain its name and acquire a different mandate. It may also extend its influence by building capabilities that others will use.
Amazon has described a tradition of leaving an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. The gesture keeps the customer symbolically present. Translating that presence into influence requires people and processes: who brings knowledge about the consumer into the room, who can question its interpretation, and what happens when it challenges a priority?
Distributing knowledge leaves the distribution of authority unresolved. Accessing information is not the same as deciding what deserves investigation. Generating an answer does not ensure that someone can examine its sources or use it to challenge a decision. A platform may make some questions easy to ask and leave others beyond its capabilities. Access can expand while priorities and the criteria for deciding what counts as sufficient evidence remain concentrated.
Embedding research in everyday work adds another dimension. The Experience Agents announced by Qualtrics in 2025 are designed to respond within interactions such as surveys and other touchpoints. The proposition connects collecting feedback with intervening in the experience itself.
That can help someone who needs a problem resolved. It also changes the questions we need to ask about the knowledge being produced. If an interaction listens while also responding or offering compensation, are we observing the earlier experience or the response to our intervention? Designing that combination requires agreements between research, service and customer experience.
The scope of the organisation’s understanding depends on those choices too. Imagine a system that continuously learns from current buyers, reviews and service interactions. It may help us understand their frustrations better. People who never bought, left the category or cannot find a way to express their experience may still be absent. Continuous listening increases the frequency of observation; its breadth depends on how sources are selected and whether the organisation looks for people those sources leave out.
The Choices That Shape the Role
Capital is funding different combinations of capabilities. In May 2026, Qualtrics completed its acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta for US$6.75 billion, bringing its experience platform together with healthcare data and expertise. Welcoming the deal, David Entwistle, CEO of Stanford Health Care, pointed to the potential to turn insight into “timely, human-centered action”.
Ipsos, meanwhile, acquired BVA in 2025 and highlighted its capabilities in behavioural science, experience research and packaging evaluation. Investment can also seek methodological specialisation and sector expertise.
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These investments could extend specialists’ reach, redistribute tasks or change how research is purchased. They do not establish how Insights’ budgets, mandates or involvement will change within client organisations. An acquisition alone cannot tell us which outcome will follow.
Within companies, a broader mandate can also create new questions. In a 2024 account published by McKinsey, Mustafa Shamseldin, then category growth officer and chief marketing officer at PepsiCo International Foods, described a model connecting marketing with insights, analytics, R&D and supply chain. His teams considered products and their costs, commercialisation and performance after launch. Research into meal occasions had helped identify opportunities and prompted the creation of a team dedicated to exploring them.
Accountability and the Room to Influence
A broader business mandate can create new uses for research. The practical question is whether Insights gets involved when opportunities are chosen or when a bet is already being executed. That distinction matters when the function is advised to become a strategic partner and take responsibility for outcomes.
What does it mean to hold Insights accountable for outcomes when another part of the organisation controls the priorities, resources and decisions?
Consider a hypothetical launch. The market has been chosen, the investment committed and the timetable approved. Insights is asked to improve the proposition and then demonstrate its contribution to growth. It can add value within that space. But perhaps it had no opportunity to investigate another market, question the need for the product or recommend a different allocation of resources. Its involvement began after some of the most consequential decisions had already been made.
Being accountable for the quality of knowledge, sharing responsibility for a decision and being accountable for a commercial outcome are different commitments. The relevance of a question and the soundness of an interpretation belong directly to research work. Growth also depends on decisions about product, price, distribution and execution. Evaluating a contribution requires understanding those relationships and the opportunity each participant had to influence them. Research that changes or stops a launch also needs a way to have its contribution recognised.
Many functions work with shared responsibilities and limited control. Insights does not need to control the business to contribute. Building trust, understanding constraints and presenting useful evidence are part of its work. But influence depends both on the ability to exercise it and on the conditions that make it possible. An invitation to a meeting does little if the decision that could benefit from the knowledge is no longer open.
The function can also help change those conditions. Anticipating decisions, proposing research before a bet is settled and building shared capabilities are ways to shape its own mandate. Its responsibility includes explaining the contribution it offers and demonstrating how that contribution is used. That means making a case for involvement in specific decisions and for the resources needed to improve them.
Insights leaders have already helped shape alternatives. In an interview published in 2021, Stan Sthanunathan, then leading CMI at Unilever, argued that “tomorrow Insights should be everyone’s responsibility”. He described teams aligned with countries and divisions that retained a common functional home. Democratisation was already part of a vision advanced from within Insights.
P&G offers another configuration. Kirti Singh currently brings Analytics, Insights and Media under a single leadership role. The public description of his position documents that combination. Distributed capabilities and a specialist function can coexist, although an organisation chart cannot show how their everyday tensions are resolved.
The everyday work of making research usable offers another view. An exploratory study by Stephanie Rosenthal and Shamsi Iqbal interviewed 24 professionals in design, user research and data science at a single technology company with strong AI adoption. One participant asked: “how do I make sure you’re informed enough to actually incorporate those two bullet points correctly?” Their colleagues wanted research reduced to a handful of bullets. Another participant adapted findings into files that could provide context for subsequent AI use. The study is a preprint, and its setting limits generalisation.
Both accounts help us examine what happens when the route from knowledge to a decision changes. Adapting knowledge can make it easier to use while also reducing the context needed to interpret it. Producing and distributing information still leaves the work of building shared understanding.
The hypothesis is that distributing the ability to conduct research may change the mandate of Insights by changing who needs its involvement, for what and at which point. The signals gathered here justify exploring that mechanism; they do not establish that external changes matter more than internal ones or happen faster. Acquisitions may also reflect commercial consolidation, and automation may improve tasks without changing mandates. If widespread adoption of these systems mainly made existing research work faster, without materially changing Insights’ mandate or involvement in decisions, the simpler explanation would be efficiency gains.
What Management Must Decide
The future of Insights also depends on who designs the conditions under which consumer understanding can change a decision. As that capability spreads and becomes embedded in everyday work, those conditions include the questions that receive attention, the resources available and the involvement of people who can interpret the limits of the knowledge.
For business leaders, this adds a responsibility to organisational redesign. Choosing a platform, bringing functions together or changing how budgets are allocated can change what the company learns about the people it serves. A system focused on resolving current frustrations can deliver considerable value. The organisation also needs to decide how it will investigate needs it does not yet recognise and opportunities that do not fit its existing priorities.
Transforming Insights therefore requires agreements about specific decisions. When do its specialists get involved? What room is there to investigate before an investment is committed? How is a priority reconsidered when the evidence calls it into question? Those agreements allow accountability for outcomes to be discussed alongside the actual opportunity to influence them.
Insights leaders have work to do: clarify where they contribute, make the limits of their knowledge explicit and build capabilities that others can use with judgement. Management shares responsibility for establishing how that contribution enters decisions and how it is evaluated. Research quality and the conditions for using it are part of the same problem.
A company can multiply its answers without becoming more willing to reconsider what it believes. As it redesigns how it understands consumers, it also needs to decide what it is prepared to change when it learns something new. If management holds Insights accountable for outcomes, it must also answer for the conditions under which Insights can influence them.
