Webinar

AI in Market Research: What Matters Now?

It’s been a wild six months in AI.

While 95% of AI projects fail, market research is different — real, practical wins are becoming easier and faster. But are you focusing on the right strategies… or chasing hype?

In this candid webinar, Displayr CEO Tim Bock cuts through the noise: what agents can really do now, why analytics still needs a verify-and-correct workflow, and the winning vs losing strategies for using AI in market research.

In this webinar you will learn

  • Conversational analysis is coming fast — what to do now
  • Why AI can orchestrate analysis, but not replace it
  • The verify + correct workflow every MR team needs
  • Winning strategies: translation (text→code, text→categories), automating routine decisions
  • Losing strategies: asking AI to do what humans can’t (e.g., advanced analyses)
  • Live demos: AI for cleaning, coding, analysis, and reporting

Transcript

This is my semi-regular update on how AI is evolving and what the implications of this evolution are for the market research industry, principally focusing on data analysis and reporting.

Frequently asked questions

How is AI used in market research today?

Everyday uses include secondary research and competitor scans, drafting questionnaires, generating synthetic respondents to pressure-test a concept, translating open-ended responses, and categorizing text into themes, which is the single biggest value most Displayr users get from AI. Newer uses are agents: a Data Prep Agent that checks, cleans, and tidies a survey file, and a Research Agent that writes a full report with charts and commentary from your objectives.
It cannot do math reliably. Large language models guess at arithmetic from patterns, so a survey analysis involving thousands of percentages will contain errors you cannot find by hand. It is also poor at checking its own work, reasons from large amounts of data rather than small, and lacks the context that comes from being in the room. Displayr works around the math problem by having the AI choose which of its statistical tools to run rather than calculating anything itself.
Adoption is already widespread. A recent survey of market research CEOs shows most firms using AI, even as a widely cited MIT study claims 95% of enterprise AI projects fail. What is changing is not whether researchers exist but what they do: AI orchestrates analysis but does not replace the researcher who verifies and corrects it. The winning strategies are translation tasks (text to code, text to categories) and automating routine decisions. The losing strategy is asking AI to do what humans cannot, such as advanced statistical analysis unaided.
An agent reads your dataset, proposes research objectives for you to refine, selects relevant data, builds an analysis plan, runs crosstabs with significance tests, groups findings into themes, and writes an executive summary with linked chart pages. A report of that kind used to cost thousands of dollars; the AI cost is about a cent. The workflow that makes it usable is verify and correct: you give it the sample description and objectives up front, then review each chart against its commentary.
At the classification step it performs about as well as people. Two human coders given the same code frame typically agree only around 80% of the time, so the AI will not match any one person exactly, but there is no evidence humans generate better themes. Where AI falls behind is ambiguous responses that a human can resolve from context the AI does not have. For important studies, ask for more themes than you need (twenty or thirty) and classify into those, rather than defaulting to ten.

Meet the host

Tim Bock, Founder of Displayr

Tim is a data scientist, who has consulted, published academic papers, and won awards, for problems/ techniques as diverse as neural networks, mixture models, data fusion, market segmentation, IPO pricing, small sample research, and data visualization.

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