Ask a gathering of corporate researchers about their vendor relationships and you'll get something between a therapy session and a performance review. During a recent conversation with members of the Professional Insights Collaborative (PIC) – a free organization for client-side insights pros underwritten by Quirk's – I did exactly that. The discussion covered everything from what makes a vendor relationship click to where the industry is still leaving researchers frustrated. (I recapped an earlier PIC gathering on the topic of synthetic data in this space in our January/February issue – https://bit.ly/49NdFnW.)
The group was quick to identify what separates good vendor relationships from great ones. Industry expertise came up repeatedly as a differentiator. PIC member J, who works in automotive, prizes vendors who already understand his category – ones who know the right questions to ask without needing a primer on the industry. PIC member S, a one-person team in health care, echoed that sentiment, describing a qualitative partner who has become so immersed in the category that she jokes he'll become a doctor in his next career. PIC member T, working in the notoriously complex streaming space, has learned through experience to be wary of vendors who assume a category is easy to pick up because they're consumers themselves.
The storytelling gap
If there was one frustration that animated the group most, it was the failure of vendors to tell a story with data. PIC member T described a widespread and persistent problem: vendors delivering charts and visuals that simply restate what's in the table, rather than synthesizing findings into meaningful narrative. "I can take a set of tabs and do that," she said. "That's not what I'm asking for."
The problem, she suggested, isn't necessarily automation or AI. It may be a combination of vendors taking on too much work and researchers acquiescing on scope when deadlines tighten, creating a dynamic where "checking the box" becomes the de facto standard. The consequence is that researchers end up redoing deliverables themselves, which raises an obvious question about the value being provided.
AI: promising but not yet a magic fix
The group had a nuanced read on AI adoption among their vendor partners. PIC member T described a spectrum – some vendors have meaningfully integrated AI in ways that accelerate open-end coding, identify trends earlier and enable tools like real-time campaign effectiveness dashboards that previously required waiting weeks for results. She's also using an approach where a subset of survey completers opt into a brief AI-moderated follow-up conversation that adds qualitative color to quant work – something her executive stakeholders have found valuable.
PIC member S said her partners are using AI internally for coding and report-building, though it's largely invisible on her end. PIC member B was more skeptical: he's found that when vendors point to proprietary or opaque AI capabilities, the reality behind the curtain often doesn't hold up. His preference is for vendors who stay in their lane rather than overselling AI as a cure-all. PIC member Jo described a pilot-first approach – requiring vendors to prove out AI applications before committing – driven partly by internal uncertainty about how AI should be used and partly by the absence of dedicated budget for experimentation.
One area where the group agreed AI has conspicuously not delivered is social listening. PIC member T described social tools as "antiquated" – still reliant on manually constructed keyword queries, weak sentiment analysis and labor-intensive data cleaning that falls on her team. PIC member A added that the walled gardens of platforms compound the problem and that the analysis tools available simply don't handle the ambiguity and sarcasm of internet language. Both found it puzzling that a category seemingly built for AI-driven analysis has been so slow to evolve.
Know your audience
Budget pressure is pushing most researchers toward smaller, more trusted vendor rosters, with several doing more work in-house than they once did – not by choice, but necessity. When the group was asked what they'd want the next generation of vendor-side researchers to prioritize, the answer was unanimous: storytelling. Know your audience, understand what your client's stakeholders actually need to hear and learn to communicate findings accordingly. PIC member J put it simply: If a vendor has worked with a client for years, that institutional knowledge about what makes the client tick should be part of how new team members are onboarded.
The soft skills, as PIC member S noted, are often the hardest ones to teach.