MQO to Present on A.I. Research Innovation: 2023 CRIC Future of Insights Summit

MQO Research is proud to be ‘on the program’ for this year’s conference of the Canadian Research Insights Council’s (CRIC) 2023 annual conference, the Future of Insights Summit (Toronto, June 5-6, 2023).

MQO’s innovation leader, Brenden Sommerhalder, will lead the session:

Researcher in the Loop: The MR Profession in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence tools are changing the world, and the market research industry along with it – are you ready to adapt?

The rise of AI-powered automation has introduced new efficiencies and “superpowers” for the industry, but it has also brought new pressures and challenges; pressures to evolve our service offerings to compete and provide value, and challenges such as the proliferation and increasing sophistication of bots infiltrating online research methods.

In this talk, we will explore the value of what AI researchers call the “human in the loop” approach to working with AI, and how embracing this approach can enhance the value we deliver to our clients as expert market researchers and the sophistication with which we can protect the integrity of our research from bad actors.

We will share real-world and replicable examples of how AI tools, in the hands of seasoned but open-minded market researchers, can be layered on top of existing tools and methodologies to augment our research, and to help automate some “grunt work” steps in our processes so that we humans can spend more time doing what we do best – delivering the insight.

The use of AI in market research is still in its earliest stages; but not for long. Understanding these tools and establishing a role for “the researcher in the loop” is crucial for the future of the industry not only for delivering innovation and value to our clients, but also in fulfilling our role as gatekeepers of high-quality, valid research outcomes.

We believe that as an industry, we need to be active in defining our roles and responsibilities in the face of this new and rapidly evolving technology. The CRIC conference this spring will be an opportune time to invigorate this discussion. MQO Research and our VP Brenden Sommerhalder have been working to implement and utilize AI tools for market research and business operations since the first of the large-language models were released and have been keeping up ever since. We look forward to sharing some examples and stories of our frustrations and successes, and to help jump-start thinking on this topic for industry colleagues who may not yet have had experience with this technology.

[Read MQO’s A.I. Code of Ethics]

[Register to attend the CRIC 2023 Future of Insights Summit]

Speaker Bio

Brenden Sommerhalder
Vice President, Client Development & Innovation

Brenden is an innovation-minded marketing and communications insights hunter with over 15 years of experience in people research and marketing strategy development. He has worked with clients across public, private, and not-for-profit sectors in a variety of industries such as telecommunications, utilities, consumer packaged goods, hospitality, retail, pharmaceuticals, and media.

As a “techie” and “tinkerer” at heart and a hardened “quant” at mind, Brenden has always been quick to adapt and adopt the latest tools available to solve the task at hand – be it panel APIs, public sentiment scraping, virtual reality methods, or lately, AI – while protecting the integrity of the work through careful planning and rigorous validation.

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