While AI, automation, and dashboards increasingly take over technical analytics and reporting, the true value of the insights professional now lies in what cannot be automated: interpretation, creativity, cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to turn insight into meaningful organisational impact.

Back to the core: better decisions

For years, the insights industry has invested heavily in speed, scale, and reporting efficiency. That progress is real and valuable. But it has also had an unintended side effect: attention has drifted away from where the profession creates its greatest value. Not in producing more charts, but in framing the right research question, making sense of ambiguous evidence, and helping organisations choose a better course of action.

That return to the core is especially urgent because sustainability will become one of the most important themes in marketing. Every self-respecting brand will increasingly have to make clear choices about its societal impact. But sustainable marketing is harder than “normal” marketing: It’s often trying to encourage behaviour that feels less attractive in the short term, while the benefits are distant, collective, and harder to feel. That is exactly why marketers need better consumer understanding. And why insights professionals should lead.

Why this is a strategic opportunity for insights professionals

For client-side insights professionals, this is a golden career opportunity. Sustainability gives the insights function a chance to become more central to strategy, because it forces organisations to make difficult choices under uncertainty: which behaviours matter most, which barriers are real, which claims will resonate, and what would genuinely shift consumer choice. If you can help answer those questions, you are no longer just supplying evidence but shaping direction.

For agency-side insights professionals, the opportunity is commercial as well as strategic. The agencies that truly understand sustainability (not as a communications topic, but as a behavioural challenge) will be the ones best positioned to help clients solve the problems that are coming next. The agencies that can help marketers turn sustainable ambition into consumer preference will be solving one of the most commercially important problems of the coming years. Sustainable marketing is difficult precisely because consumers often experience sustainable choices as compromise. The researchers that know how to decode and reduce that compromise will be in demand.

What insights professionals must do differently

1) Put interpretation back at the centre

If dashboards and automation are becoming more omnipresent, then interpretation becomes more valuable, not less. Insights professionals should lean harder into synthesis, judgement, and sense-making: connecting signals across data sources, distinguishing noise from pattern, and translating evidence into implications that leadership teams can actually use. In an AI-rich environment, the scarcest capability will not be analysis or reporting. It will be meaning.

2) Help marketers navigate their new responsibility: societal impact

Marketers are expected to help their organisations create societal value. That makes sustainable consumer behaviour part of any marketing brief. But because sustainability is full of trade-offs, intentions are unreliable, and behaviour is context-dependent, this is something marketers can not solve through instinct alone. They need insight into what people do, why they do it, and what would make a better behaviour feel normal, attractive, and worth choosing.

3) Become the function that turns ambition into action

The future of the insights profession lies in helping organisations move from stated ambition to measurable change. That means designing smarter research, asking better questions, and testing interventions in the real world. It also means working cross-functionally: with marketers, sustainability teams, innovation leads, and leadership. The most valuable insights professionals will not be the ones who know the most tools. They will be the ones who can turn evidence into momentum.

The new job description: from insight service to behaviour leadership

What this means for the role of the researcher

The role of the modern insights professional, whether called CMI‑manager, researcher, strategist, or data‑driven marketer, has undergone a profound transformation. In many organisations, insights has even shifted from a full‑time craft to something that is done on the side: a part‑time responsibility squeezed in between competing priorities. As a result, fewer people have the time or focus to truly dive deep. And yet, the need for high‑quality insight has never been greater. While AI, automation and dashboards increasingly take over technical analytics and reporting, the true value of the insights professional now lies in what cannot be automated: interpretation, creativity, cross‑functional collaboration, and the ability to turn insight into meaningful organisational impact.

From Data Technician to Creative Insight Generator

A persistent misconception is that the process of turning data into insights is purely rational and analytical. In practice, the most meaningful insights often emerge when analytical thinking and creativity meet. Creativity is essential to seeing the opportunities hidden within data, and that applying a “creative lens” to datasets leads to deeper and more surprising insights. Where we need to realise that an ‘insight’ is not merely a surprising finding from a study. A real insight is a finding that has real and direct implications that can be used to improve the outcomes of business decisions.

The most successful insights manager is someone who:

• Recognises patterns but also infers meaning from them.
• Moves beyond mere reporting to hypothesis‑building and conceptual thinking.
• Helps teams understand not only what people do, but why they do it, and what could make them behave differently.
• Is able to translate insights to business implications and persuade teams to implement these implications.

Modern researchers must therefore be as comfortable brainstorming with creatives as they are discussing models with data scientists or advising senior leadership. They are no longer passive suppliers of data but active shapers of organisational direction.

In this changing role, understanding (un)sustainable behaviour has also become a more natural part of the researcher’s skill set. Good researchers do not only understand how people make decisions in general, but also how sustainability fits into those decisions: when it matters, when it competes with other values such as price, convenience or taste, and when it simply remains too abstract to influence behaviour.

At the same time, they increasingly draw on behavioural science to understand what makes interventions work in practice, whether that means reframing benefits, reducing friction, changing defaults, or strengthening social norms. The strongest researchers are therefore those who can combine deep consumer understanding with behavioural knowledge about how change happens, and use that combination to help design more effective strategies, products, policies and communication.

And perhaps most importantly: it makes the work better

There is also a more personal reason this shift matters. When insights professionals work on the questions that genuinely shape better products, better communication, and better consumer choices, the work becomes more valuable. You are no longer producing outputs that disappear into decks and dashboards. You are helping organisations make decisions that matter.

And that makes the work more enjoyable too. You can deliver insight that is not only commercially useful, but also meaningful work you can feel proud of. For client-side professionals, that will make you more influential in your own organisation. For agency-side professionals, it will help you build a proposition that is both future-relevant and commercially distinctive. For yourself, it simply means spending more time on work that is worth doing.

If insights professional are willing to return to the core, helping marketers make better decisions, then sustainability becomes more than a topic. It becomes a proving ground for the next generation of insight leadership. Strategically, commercially, and personally, that is an opportunity worth chasing.

Want to join the conversation?

If this topic resonates, the upcoming Insights Summit ’26: Where Research Meets Impact on the 9th of June in Amsterdam is one to put in your calendar. The summit brings together professionals to explore the future of insights, decision-making, and societal relevance, with a clear focus on how research can once again drive meaningful impact.

One of the highlights will be the opening keynote by Future of Food Institute, led by Durk Bosma, the internationally thought leader in the field of insights on sustainable consumer behaviour.

 It also marks the perfect moment to look ahead to the launch of Durk’s new book, Understanding Sustainable Behaviour, which will be published in September this year.

Photo by Anirudh on Unsplash