AI will speed research, but human curiosity and creativity remain essential. Ed Keller explores the skills that will matter most in an AI-driven future.
This article originally appeared on the Executive Insights channel of Greenbook, where forward-thinking market-research and insights professionals explore how to elevate their impact. Thank you to Greenbook for inviting MRII to host this exciting channel.
After dozens of conversations with insights leaders on the MRII Insights & Innovators podcast, a clear pattern has emerged, one that should both reassure and challenge anyone working in market research and insights today.
The reassurance is this: AI is not coming for your job. At least not it’s not necessarily coming for your job.
The challenge is this: it is coming for parts of your job that were never the point to begin with. And in the process, it’s opening up opportunities to do things to make your work more valuable, and more interesting.
Across episode after episode, leaders describe a future where AI will answer questions faster, analyze data more comprehensively, and execute research tasks more efficiently than ever before. In many ways, the core mechanics of research, such as designing questionnaires, fielding surveys, cleaning data, running analyses, among other part of the research process, are becoming increasingly automated.
Pam Forbus, Sr Vice President of Insights & Analytics at Mondelez and an MRII Board member, put it well during a presentation we made together in late April at IIEX in Washington DC.
She said AI will answer questions, deliver insights, execute projects and support stakeholders.
She told the audience that as a result, we as insights professionals must shape decisions, drive growth, build systems for AI, and influence strategies and action.
In other words, there is still lots of important work to be done, but it’s different than what many of were called upon to do in the past. When executed well, it will make our work far more valuable.
Pam Forbus, together with the other leaders we’ve spoken to consistently point to a different set of capabilities as the true differentiators going forward: curiosity and creativity.
Not as nice-to-haves. As essentials.
Curiosity: The Skill That Comes Before the Question
AI is exceptionally good at answering questions. But it is entirely dependent on the quality of the questions it is given.
And that’s where curiosity comes in.
Curiosity is what drives someone to look beyond the obvious business ask and probe deeper:
- Why are we really seeing this behavior?
- What assumptions are we making without realizing it?
- What’s the question behind the question?
- What is the business decision we need to influence, and what are the assumptions that our stakeholders already have that we need to confirm or challenge?
In a world where answers are abundant, the scarce resource is insightful inquiry. The professionals who will stand out are not those who can generate the most outputs, but those who can frame the most meaningful problems.
Curiosity transforms research from a reactive function into a strategic one. It shifts the role of insights from “answering stakeholder questions” to “shaping the questions that matter.”
And that is a fundamentally more valuable place to be.
Creativity: The Bridge Between Insight and Impact
If curiosity defines the questions, creativity defines what we do with the answers.
One of the recurring frustrations voiced by leaders is not a lack of data, but a lack of impact. Insights are generated, reports are delivered, dashboards are built—and yet the business doesn’t always change.
Creativity is what closes that gap.
It shows up in how we:
- Frame findings so they resonate with decision-makers
- Connect disparate data points into a compelling narrative
- Reimagine how insights are delivered, experienced, and acted upon
AI can generate charts. It can summarize themes. It can even draft narratives. But it does not care whether an insight lands, persuades, or inspires action.
Humans do.
Creativity is what turns insight into influence. It’s what makes the difference between being informative and being transformative.
From Producers to Shapers
Taken together, curiosity and creativity signal a broader shift in the role of insights professionals.
Historically, much of the function has been about production:
- Producing data
- Producing analyses
- Producing reports
AI will increasingly take on those responsibilities.
The opportunity, if we choose to take it, is to move up the value chain:
- From producing answers to shaping decisions
- From executing research to influencing strategy
- From delivering insights to driving growth
This is not a small shift. It requires new skills, new mindsets, and in many cases, a redefinition of what it means to be an insights professional.
But it is also a far more consequential role.
The Real Risk Isn’t AI; It’s Standing Still
If there is a risk highlighted across these conversations, it is not that AI will replace insights professionals. It is that some professionals will continue to define their value in ways that AI can easily replicate.
Efficiency will no longer be a differentiator. Access to data will no longer be a differentiator. Even technical proficiency, while still important, will not be enough on its own.
What will differentiate is the ability to:
- Ask better questions
- See connections others miss
- Understand stakeholders and what it will take to influence them
- Tell stories that move organizations to act
In other words, to be both deeply curious and genuinely creative.
A Call to Action
For individuals, this means investing in skills that may have once felt secondary:
- Broader business acumen
- Lateral thinking
- Storytelling and communication
For organizations, it means creating space for these capabilities to flourish, rewarding not just speed and efficiency, but depth of thinking and originality of perspective.
And for the insights industry as a whole, it means embracing a more expansive definition of value.
Because the future of insights will not be defined by how well we adopt AI.
It will be defined by how we elevate what makes us human.
Curiosity and creativity are not relics of a pre-AI world. They are the capabilities that will determine who leads in the one that’s emerging.
The question is not whether they matter.
It’s whether we’re prepared to lean into them.
