What I'm Seeing in the Insights World - January 2026

Hard to believe it is January 2026!  The new year brings a predictable flood of prognostications. Every firm has their "Top 10 Trends for 2026" post queued up. I'll spare you mine and my jaundiced view that most of these lists wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of good researchers!  Sadly, many “predictions” lean more towards self-serving wish lists than data-informed insights. (Wow!  A company marketing synthetic data predicting that this is going to be the year of the digital twin…who’d have guessed?)

Instead, I want to share some things that surprised me over the past month—things that are shaping how I'm thinking about the year ahead. They mostly revolve around the shifting roles of clients and agencies.

In December, I posted what I thought was an obvious observation: the insights industry is moving from selling projects to enabling decisions. Not exactly

revolutionary, I thought. But the response floored me. Hundreds of people engaged—not just liking but building. Senior leaders weren't nodding along; they were extending the argument into territory I hadn't fully explored.

A few themes emerged from those conversations that I'll be digging into this year:

The pricing problem is real. You can't sell "strategic value" while clinging to cost-plus pricing. But outcome-based models are genuinely hard to implement. How do you isolate your contribution from everything else affecting the result? Nobody has cracked this yet—but we’ll have to unless we want to see our world in a downward deflationary spiral.

Speed, but not simply for speed's sake. I've always believed operations is the unglamorous superpower of great research companies. But it's become clearer than ever. The firms winning right now aren't just smarter. They're faster. They've rebuilt their infrastructure for speed and agility. Arguably, some have done so at the expanse of rigor. They won't be the winners in the long run. The best in the business are finding ways to marry both speed AND rigor.

The question matters as much as the answer. One comment stuck with me… "How can we inspire clients to ask better questions?" We obsess over methodology. We debate the "right" way to ask questions. But if the question itself is wrong—too narrow, too safe, too shaped by internal politics—the answer will be anodyne no matter how rigorous the method. With AI handling more of the mechanical work, this human capability matters more than ever.

Here's what's different about this moment: The disruption isn't coming only from new competitors or a shiny new technology. It's coming from clients themselves. They're building internal insights capabilities. They're experimenting with AI tools that bypass traditional research entirely. They're questioning—for the first time, in many cases—whether they need external partners at all.

The companies that will thrive aren't railing against this trend. They're leaning into it. They're asking: "If our clients can do 60% of what we do themselves, what's the 40% they genuinely can't replicate?" That 40% is where the value lives. And it's almost never where companies think it is.

If you're wrestling with any of this—how to price differently, how to shift from projects to partnerships, how to make your insights function drive decisions—I'd love to hear what you're seeing.