Making AI stick: A practical path to maturity, ROI and scalable insight impact
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. For the full session, please watch the recording.
On January 29, 2026 a panel of researchers discussed how they are getting the most out of AI in a Quirk’s Virtual – AI and Innovation session.
Andrew Reid, CEO and Founder of Rival Technologies, moderated the discussion between Jason Jacobson, senior director, consumer insights of Sekisui House, Patricia Chapin-Bayley, senior vice president of Reach3 Insights and Adam Husein, SVP, head of data, analytics and insights, Supercell.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody, and welcome to our session, “Making AI stick: A practical path to maturity, ROI and scalable insight impact.”
I'm Quirks Editor, Joe Rydholm. Before we get started today, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion.
You can use a chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session, and you can use a Q&A tab to submit questions for the presenters during the session, and we'll get to as many as they have time for during the Q&A portion.
Our session is presented by Rival. Andrew, take it away.
Andrew Reid
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Great to see everybody. Thank you very much for your time.
I want to quickly introduce our panel. Then we've got some content to deliver and a great conversation we're looking forward to having.
So, very happy to have some really smart people with us today. I'm just going to quickly read through these and then we're going to have folks do their own introduction.
Jason Jacobson, who spoke with us many times from Sekisui House, who is the senior director of consumer insights.
We have Adam Husein, who's the SVP of data analytics and insights at Supercell.
Patricia Chapin-Bayley, who is senior vice president at Reach3 Insights, which is one of the companies in the Roval Group portfolio.
And I'm Andrew Reid with a catfish picture from 10 years ago. I'm the founder and CEO of Rival Technologies.
Great to have everybody with us. Let's just start with some introductions.
Adam, do you want to go ahead and just introduce yourself?
Adam Husein
Sure. Adam Husein here.
I focus on really building data and AI systems across companies like Supercell and in my past at Warner Brothers and Firebird Music. My focus has really been on turning research and analytics and AI into decision systems that people can trust, and they can use on a regular basis.
And if you're thinking about how to move great insight into real ROI, I think that's what we're going to talk about today.
Andrew Reid
For people that don't know what Supercell is, do you want to maybe double click just real quick on them as a company?
Adam Husein
Sure. I appreciate that.
Supercell is one of the top mobile game companies in the world. We're based here in Helsinki, Finland. And so it's a little dark at this time of night. We have some of the top mobile games in the world, brands you may have heard of like Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars and Clash Royale.
We have over a hundred million people play our games regularly.
Andrew Reid
Amazing. Thank you.
Jason, if you want to introduce yourself, that'd be great.
Jason Jacobson
Yeah. Hi everyone, very excited to be here.
I work for Sekisui House, which is probably hard to pronounce, but we're probably the largest home builder that you have never heard of. We own seven U.S. new home brands and we are the number six home builder in the United States.
And really my role is just about really understanding consumers, what they're looking for in homes so we can build homes that ultimately meet people's needs and help them get to a good place and live a happy life.
Andrew Reid
Amazing. Thank you very much.
Patricia.
Patricia Chapin-Bayley
Hi, I'm Patricia Chapin-Bayley. I'm the Senior Vice President at Reach3 Insights.
We're the full-service research arm of Rival Group, and we're an AI forward agency heavily focused on innovation.
Andrew Reid
Awesome. Thank you very much. Okay.
Before I even get into my content, just a bit about us.
If you haven't heard of us before, we're called Rival Technologies. I've been in the online insight community and panel space for a long time. We spent a lot of time back in 2016 to 2018 re-imagining quantitative research to be conversational. We have a platform that's used by many of the brands you're seeing on the screen here to drive insight communities, run agile research programs and to do things like integrate with CRM databases to drive what we call “Action Triggered Insights.” Fortunate to be number three on the grip report this year.
And yeah, not a lot of time, so I'll just continue to keep going. One thing that would be great is if you do have, which I'm guessing, most people have their cell phone tethered to them. If you have your cell phone with you, go ahead and scan that QR code that's right there.
It should take you to a quick three or four question study that will give us a few insights when we have our conversation just about this audience and give you a chance to check out what our platform looks like and check out our new UX.
We've just moved all of our conversational surveys over to Liquid Glass, which is that new UX. And if you have an Apple phone that your phone has updated too.
In the purpose of time, I'm just going to continue to move forward here. So obviously this session's all about AI.
You've all been watching sessions on AI. You've been getting a lot of stats. You may have already seen these stats, but they continue to come out every day. We're seeing 20% of cyber sales were influenced by AI and AI advertising. 62% of people say that most or some of their team is using AI.
We've really moved from, I think, a world where there was, I guess the haves and the have nots, the folks that were really not doing anything and the folks that were doing a lot. Now we're starting to see this groundswell happen.
Then 46% of researchers say their budget for AI tools is increasing, whether that's tools that they're building themselves or whether that is tooling that they are going to be subscribing to or purchasing. So, we are seeing this build.
I mean, I saw a stat on LinkedIn yesterday, which started to sort of show that what's interesting is the C-suite is really taking advantage of A, at a very high level to really understand what's going on in the business. And that was a really interesting stat versus a lot of other knowledge workers that are out there. And that was almost a little bit surprising to me, but at the same time, I think it makes sense.