Issue #50: No Touch. No Choice
​Read this on my website​

I am obsessed these days with AI, and it's not even because of all the things AI can do, which, even for people who are building AI tools, is impossible to keep up with.

I am obsessed because I see the future of the industry I've worked in for the past 20+ years on the cusp of a change that will have a massive impact on a lot of people.

I have spoken about the concept of no touch operations in different pieces I've written. Without rehashing all of it, the central principle is simple:

1. Market research as an industry is almost wholly peopled by folks with specialized knowledge who are paid primarily for performing largely operational tasks for largely similar studies.
2. The vast majority of that work is easily automatable, and even the parts that leverage specialized knowledge can be offloaded to an artificial intelligence today, using affordable technology available to ordinary people.

There are pieces of this at work all over the industry:

• Matching of respondents to surveys
• Draud detection
• Data cleaning and coding
• Report generation
• Brief writing
• Concept generation

About the only thing that hasn’t been touched yet (to my knowledge) is fieldwork, but that is easy.

Unless they spend a significant amount of money on external sample, the biggest cost most companies will bear is labor.

You see where I am going with this.

I am convinced that, in the next year or two, the industry (led by its biggest companies) will begin pursuing large-scale transformation programs to implement “no touch operations”—not because they WANT to, but because they cannot afford NOT to.

When that first domino falls:

1. Product development will begin to shift such that internal/margin-driven development (in big companies in particular) becomes as important as revenue-driven development. The next great wave of AI will be INTERNALLY, not EXTERNALLY focused. Again, not because companies want to undergo painful transformations, but because they can’t afford not to.
2. Massive numbers of employees will be displaced, particularly in tech-enabled service industries (like market research), and particularly in the developing world where these industries have offshored operational tasks.
3. The ability to leverage AI and yet feel and sound unique will be the source of brand equity for the next 10 years. This is a personal feeling (and probably as much of a hope as it is a belief). But if you read 90% of the posts on LinkedIn today, it looks like everyone has offloaded their content creation to the same eager marketing intern with an unusually large memory called ChatGPT who can write utterly forgettable posts in the blink of an eye. And if the ability to build product no longer ensures the same moat it used to, about the only thing left is the face you show to the world. This goes doubly for personal brands.

There are companies today that—given a few months and some integrations—could replicate the operational engine of a Kantar or Ipsos and certainly smaller MRAs. That’s tens of thousands of jobs. Let that sink in.

I’m not saying it will be easy. In fact, experience tells me that it will be hard, which is why I think firms might try to avoid it initially. Executives don’t like large-scale transformations because they are hard and consume attention and resource from the day-to-day business. They will therefore do everything in their power to avoid them—until they can’t afford to avoid them any more.

Now what?

Now is the time to begin to pivot. Seriously. What can you do?

• Technology people should be working with operators to figure out how to bring no touch ops to life.
• SMEs (researchers, ops people, and other specialists) should be looking at which part of their jobs are most amenable to AI and starting to approach product people so that their expertise can be built into the product.
• Executives/leaders: find people who have the commercial, operational, and technical background to help you put this in place. (I’ve done huge transformations of this nature if you’re looking - reply to the email and we can set some time up to talk.)

You will probably have a couple years before these transformations come to fruition. But it is a matter of WHEN not IF, for there is too much money at stake for them not to.

(Incidentally, if you have an engineering background and you are reading this, I would be interested in talking about building such a system. Just respond to the email to get in touch.)

People, stuff, travel, reading, and more

(h/t to Dan Entrup for the idea)

• The JD US Spring Tour starts this Sunday. I will be at Restecher Capital Markets Day in NYC on April 28 then at IIEX NA in DC from April 30-May 1. Want to meet up? Book time or just reply to this email.
• Dave Carruthers’ post on LinkedIn and the linked article should be essential reading for pretty much anyone regardless of industry. You can tell who has been pushing the limits of AI: I’m seeing more and more people converging on some version of the idea of no touch operations and its consequences.
• If you’re using ChatGPT for thought leadership articles, please have a look at this dos and don’ts post on LinkedIn. It’s spot on. I am thinking of doing a training on how to use ChatGPT for thought leadership. Let me know if you’re interested.
• A bright spot in my life right now is this Carsten Henn novel called The Door-to-Door Bookstore. I’m reading it in French—Le Passeur des Livres—but here is an English translation.