Big Insights and Small Nuggets in Lucerne
I’m just back from the Spring 2026 meeting of IRIS Market Research Worldwide in Lucerne Switzerland.
Hosts intervista AG Organized a fantastic event, including an International MR evening with clients and IRIS members, followed by the two-day conference as well as a cruise around Lake Lucerne and a host-guided tour of the old town. Thank you to Dr. Julia Urbahn, Michael Schrackmann, Britta Isenschmied and all the crew from Intervista for their hospitality.
We learned from our hosts that Switzerland is a small country with substantial diversity (4 official languages, 26 cantons, multi-party governance) and that listening to the people through active democracy and citizen participation somehow continues to work in social, economic and political terms.
Artificial Intelligence was a big topic of discussion at the meeting. Here are my three key takeaways:
AI will impact HR in our industry as traditional junior tasks are replaced by AI and/or automation. But all will not be lost as human judgement, perspective and experience will continue to be needed. The nugget for me in this discussion was the idea of recruiting and training directly into consulting roles, bypassing the traditional data management roles that the machines will increasingly take on.
In an AI-powered future, thriving in our industry will mean taking advantage not only of the efficiency advantages of AI, but also embracing its ability to identify connections in seemingly unrelated data and fields. This is the space where the most powerful insights are often found, and making these connections was much less common and often accidental before widespread AI.
AI by itself won’t replace experienced insightful research experts, but smart people who use AI effectively will likely dominate the industry of the future. To succeed in insights/business intelligence become a co-creator with AI. The future value of consultants will be the perspective and experience they bring to the table. Clients will be looking to insights consultants to guide their thinking and help them make better decisions with AI as another tool in the kit, not the answer. And while thinking and insight does trump speed, increased speed will also be important.
Our conference theme was ‘A Little Nugget that Had a Big Outcome’ and we heard numerous examples of this: some operational, some in terms of finding hard-to-reach respondents, and some related to keeping tracking studies relevant despite their tendency to become stale.
IRIS is a network of colleagues and peers, not competitors, meaning that the sharing is open, providing a wonderful conference experience and numerous practical takeaways.
While IRIS currently has members from 30+ countries, we are always interested in hearing from independent full-service research agencies in countries not currently represented in the network. Reach out if that is you.
