Generative AI (GenAI) has emerged as a disruptive force across industries, and market research stands among the most impacted. The adoption of GenAI is reshaping market research methods, affecting how insights are generated, delivered, and made accessible.
In this blog post series, we’ll take a closer look at what this really means for our industry. We’ll dive into the core disruptions GenAI is driving, risks facing established players, and how we at Toluna are strategizing to lead this new era.
GenAI is a storm
Large Language Models (LLMs) – currently the most widely adopted form of GenAI – were originally designed to understand and generate human language. However, they’ve evolved to do much more. Now, they can capture reasoning and cognition behind human communication, enabling them to excel at tasks requiring human intelligence, including medicine, mathematics, software development, accounting, content generation, and more.
Today, GenAI is fundamentally altering how we access, process, and apply information. Andrej Karpathy coined the concept “LLM as an OS”, in which the LLM is like a brain powering all kinds of applications in all domains. This evolution is rapidly reshaping industries. While some companies are being propelled to new heights, others face obsolescence or pricing pressures. The most vulnerable are human service-based companies, SaaS providers specializing in digital transformation, and companies offering minimal differentiation beyond underlying LLM technologies.
As GenAI becomes more ubiquitous, only those companies that can deliver genuine, differentiated value on top of core GenAI technologies will survive and thrive.
Impact on market research
This transformation is especially profound for market research, which has traditionally relied on human cognition. GenAI is revolutionizing the industry by making research significantly faster, more affordable, and more effective by automating insight generation – all without the need to sacrifice the tried-and-true methodologies our clients trust.
The need for high-quality insights and trend analysis remains, but the methods of delivery, pricing, and availability are undergoing a rapid evolution. Integrating advanced AI in these methodologies isn’t merely an incremental upgrade but rather a sweeping transformation, visible across every corner of the industry and driven by relentless cost & differentiation pressures.
As agentic AI matures, we anticipate clients increasingly engaging with market research systems themselves. Within three to five years, market research leaders will move beyond selling discrete projects, to also offering continuous, data-driven decision intelligence, grounded in real consumer behavior and with far less reliance on human-powered services. In this new landscape, paid human cognitive labor is rapidly becoming a commodity.
Redefining speed, cost, and quality
As GenAI accelerates across the industry, competitive advantage depends on more than simply adoption. Historically, market research has been bogged down by slow, manual processes. Each project follows a series of specialized steps, demanding rigorous methodology and best practices to ensure quality and reliability.
Even today’s most advanced providers, armed with end-to-end platforms that automate much of the project launch process, still depend on expert customer service teams for every stage of the pipeline. From survey design and sample recruitment to fieldwork, analysis, and reporting, projects often take days to complete. Large-scale studies remain costly, requiring extensive human panels and high-touch consulting, limiting research frequency (monthly or quarterly) and often restricting access to only the most critical business questions.
Software has traditionally occupied a minor share of industry spending, with services dominating budgets. This status quo signals a great opportunity for AI-based technologies to drive new levels of efficiency. GenAI streamlines (and personalizes) tasks such as survey creation, data collection, and analysis that once demanded significant manual effort.
By slashing costs and turnaround times, GenAI democratizes research, empowering teams across product, marketing, and customer experience to pursue data-driven answers that were previously out of reach. Increasing adoption addresses mounting financial pressures, as well as signals that prices will continue to fall as more human labor is replaced by AI-driven automation. In this new era, the winners will be those who harness GenAI to deliver richer insights, at greater speed and scale, than ever before.
Toluna’s approach to GenAI
Since 2018, Toluna has strategically invested in machine learning, GenAI, and other innovative AI technologies, assembling along with this a world-class team of experts across computer science, data science, and market research. Our earlier efforts were focused on enhancing the traditional market research pipeline, particularly field management optimization.
Thanks to these initiatives, our AI capabilities have advanced survey routing precision and elevated our data quality and reliability. As AI evolved, we boldly expanded our vision, applying it across a range of study components. One standout innovation that came from this is QProbe, our cutting-edge probing tool that identifies insufficient answers to quantitative open-ended questions and crafts personalized follow-up questions to gain more valuable insights. QProbe has improved the depth and clarity of an average of approximately 80% of use cases.
We took automation a step further with the introduction of SmartCloud: our open-end analysis tool that digs deeper into survey responses and extracts deeper insights. With instantaneous response analysis, GenAI theme extraction, and sentiment coding, SmartCloud moves beyond words into true meaning, saving researchers time and effort in surfacing key insights. We’re also pioneering the delivery of automatic answer summaries, aimed at spotlighting the most important findings at a glance.
Needless to say, our commitment to AI-driven innovation is unfaltering, with new developments emerging every week. Through a robust combination of AI technology and deep industry expertise, Toluna is determined to redefine what’s possible in market research and empowering businesses to unlock insights at unprecedented speed and scale.
