The Future Of Research Is Here

You’ve seen it and there’s no denying it.  Industries have been reshaped by the increasing utilization of Artificial Intelligence just in the last few years alone.  Promising and delivering speed and optimization at the fraction of the costs and resources, it’s powerful, revolutionary and exciting.  And as with any emerging technology, it comes with its own set of anxieties.  

In line with its growing popularity and adoption, people in different industries have been expressing nervousness over being replaced in their jobs by AI.  Certain repetitive, data-driven tasks are at the greatest risk of being supplanted by AI.  However, AI also opens up opportunities to shift focus and upskill the more complex and creativity-driven facets of work roles, creating new jobs or augmenting existing ones.  

The research industry is just as impacted by AI’s progressive application.  It’s naive to assume that researchers would be replaced wholesale by AI, but there’s more to delivering research results than just gathering and crunching data. 

Image: Circe Deyer

Our take on the integration of AI into research

We’ve always maintained that AI is a good advisor, but it’s a poor decision-maker.  We’d like to modify that by saying it’s an even worse storyteller, if at all.  

Cascade Strategies has been in the market research industry for over three decades now, serving some of the biggest local and international companies.  You can say we’ve seen it all in this industry, but we’re just as fascinated as everyone else by the mainstream popularity of AI in the past few years.  We’ve applied it in our methodologies, been impressed by its operational benefits and how it changed industries, but in the end, we know truthfully that it is not the end-all, be-all for research work.  We believe that AI would serve us better by being a powerful extension of human judgment, creativity, and insight. 

AI can be fed large datasets to approximate human thinking, but we believe it can never replicate human perspicacity, the kind of intelligence honed and guided by human values and experience.  Take a look at our Expedia Group Case Study where we’ve utilized AI to generate multiple revenue-granting scenarios, then tempered the decision-making process by applying high-level human thinking to craft messaging that resonates with the end-user.  

AI-driven research can produce results based on what has come before, but it can never uncover the truly novel, meaningful and resonant insights high-level human thinking unlocks.  These are the insights that empower big and sweeping decisions.  Data-based results from AI would seem lifeless and unrelatable.  But if they are imbued with human interpretation, that output elevates into a masterful narrative that sparks imagination, questions boundaries, and transforms perspectives.  

Image: geralt

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