For most of my career, finding customer insight was hard. And not just because research itself was difficult. The challenge was that understanding people always seemed to require more time, patience, and investment than organizations felt they could afford. There were never enough interviews, or budget, or time to study every question that mattered.
When insight was scarce, the job was figuring out how to get more of it. Lately, I've started wondering whether we're about to face the opposite problem.
Over the past few years, nearly every development in our industry has moved in the same direction. Research platforms have become more accessible. Customer data has become more abundant. AI can summarize interviews, identify patterns, generate reports, and surface opportunities faster than most teams ever thought possible. The effort required to produce an observation keeps falling.
That's generally been framed as a good thing, and I think it mostly is. But every time a constraint disappears, another tends to take its place.
The more I look around, the more I suspect the future challenge for many organizations won't be generating insights at all. It will be figuring out what to do with the ones they already have.
From discovery to choice
One lingering assumption in the insights industry is that more understanding naturally leads to better decisions. Sometimes that's true.
But anyone who's spent time inside a large organization knows the reality is often messier. I've seen teams sit on shelves full of research while struggling to decide what to prioritize. Companies accumulate years of customer feedback without gaining much confidence about where to go next. The problem was that every piece of information seemed to point toward a different opportunity, a different risk, a different need.
The challenge of discovery became a challenge of choice. And choice gets exponentially harder as information becomes more abundant.
You can hear it in how client conversations have changed. Research discussions used to start with "How do we learn this?" or "What's the best way to understand this behavior?" Increasingly, they start somewhere else entirely: information that already exists. Usage analytics from the digital team. Feedback from the service organization. Competitive intelligence. Internal stakeholder opinions.
We‘ve gone from “how do we learn more” to “how do we make more sense of it”.
I've circled this idea before — on protecting empathy in an environment optimized for speed, on curiosity, and the danger of trying to answer too many questions at once. Different angles on the same shift.
What doesn't get automated
Technology will keep making information easier to create, collect, summarize, and distribute. That's not going to reverse. What's becoming more valuable is something technology doesn't do on its own: the judgment to navigate what all that information actually means.
Noticing what matters. The discipline to ignore what doesn't. And judgment to tell an interesting observation apart from an important one.
For years, the insights industry has focused on helping organizations generate knowledge. The next chapter is helping them manage abundance. That’s a distinct skill, and one worth building deliberately rather than assuming it comes free with more data.
JUSTIN SUTTON
CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS
Justin Sutton has led qualitative and mixed-method research programs for brands including retail, QSR, CPG, financial services, and durable goods organizations. His work focuses on behavioral drivers, innovation, Moments of Truth, and the intersection of System 1 and System 2 decision-making.
