AI in marketing research: How it affects our job

While AI offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance data analysis, customer insights, and decision-making, it also presents significant challenges. Businesses must navigate ethical concerns surrounding data privacy, workforce displacement, and biased algorithms.

As we know, AI is transforming marketing research by streamlining processes from data collection to analysis and presentation. In data collection, AI automates surveys, chatbots, and web scraping, allowing businesses to gather vast amounts of structured and unstructured data efficiently. It also analyzes social media conversations, customer reviews, and IoT-generated behavioral data in real-time, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy. Once the data is collected, AI-driven analytics tools identify patterns, segment customers, and forecast trends using machine learning models. Sentiment analysis and anomaly detection further enhance the ability to understand consumer preferences and market shifts. Finally, AI simplifies the presentation of research findings through automated reports, interactive dashboards, and natural language-generated summaries. AI-powered business intelligence tools allow decision-makers to access insights quickly, transforming raw data into actionable strategies. Sounds great, right? But where does that leave us as researchers?

In theory, human expertise remains essential in interpreting insights and applying strategic thinking. The question is how many jobs are still left for humans in marketing research? For example, with AI, we can eliminate the need for an entire desk research team, leaving just one person to manage the AI. The same goes for entry-level research roles (research executives). With AI enabling more efficient analysis and reporting, we can reduce the department by half and prioritize the research planning.

On one hand, we can concentrate on the consultation aspect of marketing research, providing clients with deeper insights. On the other hand, reducing human resources raises ethical concerns such as job displacement, where skilled professionals may struggle to find alternative employment as AI takes over traditional research roles. Additionally, workplace inequality could emerge, as companies may prioritize AI-savvy employees while sidelining those with traditional research expertise. Lastly, the loss of human intuition and critical thinking in research could lead to a reliance on AI-generated insights that lack context, creativity, and emotional intelligence, which are essential for understanding complex consumer behaviors.

As an industry, marketing researchers possess two key areas of expertise: gathering customer opinions and translating those insights to help clients make better decisions. The previous paragraph focused on the latter. But with AI now readily available, what does this mean for the process of collecting customer opinions?

Traditionally, we relied on respondent recruiters to find the right participants and employed interviewers for structured interviews, as well as moderators for unstructured interviews or focus group discussions (FGDs), to collect the required information. Until now, we believe that selecting suitable respondents requires essential human qualities, such as building rapport and establishing trust with potential participants. Thus, the roles of recruiters and interviewers remain secure. But AI-powered chatbots are said to be capable of asking open-ended

questions, adjusting based on responses, and even analyzing emotions through sentiment analysis. What will happen to the moderator jobs?

Most researchers recognize that respondents are not always articulate and may struggle to clearly express their thoughts when describing their behavior. AI can handle this more effectively than respondents. This leads us to question whether we truly need respondents' opinions. What if we asked AI instead? Would there be any difference in terms of our recommendation to clients?

I'm not necessarily in a position to answer those questions definitively. As a businessperson, I seek more effective and efficient processes. However, as a researcher, I also want to preserve as many jobs as possible. I believe, finding the right balance between AI and human involvement will be a key challenge in the decade ahead.

Regards,

Dr. Ardi Wirdamulia