Adrien Vermeirsch on Data Quality, Transparency, and Rebuilding Trust in Insights

Editor’s Note: The following interview features a 2026 Greenbook Future List honoree, Adrien Vermeirsch. The Greenbook Future List recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, passion, and excellence in the next generation of consumer insights and marketing professionals within the first 10 years of their careers.

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Adrien Vermeirsch, Founder of Enlightn and a 2026 Future List Honoree, is focused on tackling some of market research’s toughest challenges around data quality, fraud, and transparency. Drawing on his experience in the sampling ecosystem, he advocates for stronger respondent experiences, greater visibility across the supply chain, and systems that make quality measurable and worth investing in. His vision for the future pairs AI and emerging data sources with a renewed commitment to trusted, fairly valued human input.

Since starting your career in MRX, what would you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?

Leaving a stable role to launch my own company has been the biggest milestone so far. Not only because it was a risk, but because it marked the end of a loop and the beginning of a new chapter. In my previous role, I learned a lot: I met incredible people, shaped internal processes and tools, and got a front-row seat to the real constraints of the insights and sampling ecosystem. Over time, I also accumulated a clear point of view on what’s broken, especially around respondent experience, trust, and data quality, and what could be built differently.

Entrepreneurship, for me, isn’t only about financial outcomes. It’s about taking an idea you’ve carried for years and actually materializing it: turning it into something real, testable, improvable, and useful for others. Whatever the outcome, building and commercializing something from A to Z, and putting your beliefs into the real world, feels like a meaningful accomplishment.

What are three skills you believe to be crucial to succeed in market research and why?

Curiosity. In market research, curiosity is the engine. Early in your career it’s what makes the work meaningful, helps you learn faster, and increases your impact. Curiosity is what turns a project from “running a study” into “finding the real insight”: asking better questions, challenging assumptions, and digging deeper. Adaptability. There’s rarely a perfect playbook in market research. Every project comes with constraints (budget, timing, feasibility, quality, stakeholders), and the “best approach” is always context-dependent. Strong researchers are the ones who can adjust without losing their standards. Rigor.

Our industry runs on trust, and trust is fragile. Rigor in definitions, methods, QA, and interpretation is what makes insights reliable and actionable, and it’s the best way to earn that trust. It doesn’t conflict with creativity; it enables it. When the foundations are solid, you can be more inventive in how you explore problems and communicate results.

What do you think the key characteristics or qualities of a leader are? How does this play into MRX?

To me, the foundation of leadership is passion. Passion for a mission, for clients, and for the team. Not in a “hype” way, but in a way that creates energy, resilience, and clarity when things get messy (which they often do in market research).

From that, a few qualities really matter in insights:

• Clarity: simplifying complexity without oversimplifying, and aligning people around what matters.
• Humility: knowing what you don’t know, inviting challenge, and being willing to update your view when new evidence appears.
• Operational realism: setting strong quality standards, then designing processes that make them achievable in the real world.
• Ability to influence: MRX leaders often lead without formal authority, you need to bring people on board through trust, teaching, and persuasion.

In market research specifically, leadership is about protecting the integrity of decisions. It means being the person who says: “Let’s make sure we can trust what we’re about to act on.”

Tell us about any advocacy/volunteer/association work you're doing within the industry.  What issues are you trying to solve? Why is this work critical for the industry?

A big part of the work I do is advocacy around data quality and fraud in online sampling. Concretely, I spend a lot of time tracking fraud. I’m part of more than 30 Telegram groups where survey fraud is discussed. My goal is to see what methods fraudsters use, what they know about our security measures and what they don’t. It’s one of the best ways to stay close to the “ground truth” of the quality challenges we face. Then I try to make this useful for the industry in two ways.

First, I share learnings publicly on LinkedIn to raise awareness and spark more honest conversations. Second, when I see something that could impact a specific company, I share it privately with the organizations concerned. Fraud is an industry-wide issue, and the more players strengthen their processes, the less attractive the ecosystem becomes for bad actors. Overall, my goal is to build transparency and collective awareness so the industry can improve sustainably.

Where do you see the future of insights heading in the next 10 years?

I think we’ll see a major shift in what data is used to generate insights and how “listening to humans” is positioned. Historically, market research has depended heavily on people accepting to give their time, often for very little, especially in online panels. At the same time, trust in survey data quality is under pressure, and we now have new alternatives: behavioral data, richer internal data, and synthetic data that can help explore hypotheses quickly and cheaply.

To me, that doesn’t mean “humans will be replaced.” It means human input will become more intentional and more premium. Synthetic + behavioral data will cover a lot of exploratory work and iteration. And when companies truly need human depth, nuance, or validation, they’ll invest more in interviewing real, verified humans and rewarding them fairly. Generative AI is a huge opportunity if we use it well: it can empower researchers, automate the boring parts, and help amplify real human voices, as long as we build the right systems and incentives around quality, trust, and transparency.

If you could change one thing about insights, what would it be?

I would increase transparency across the sampling supply chain. Sampling powers a huge portion of the insights industry, and yet it often remains a black box understood by only a small subset of researchers. There are taboos, marketing narratives, and sometimes unethical practices that aren’t discussed openly, especially around the true source of respondents, fraud pressure, feasibility, and how incentives actually flow.

This lack of transparency creates a fragile system: buyers struggle to know what they’re really paying for, suppliers struggle to invest in quality when economics are tight, and genuine respondents end up having a poor experience and leaving, which makes the ecosystem even noisier. I don’t see this as a “buyers vs suppliers” problem. It’s a system problem. But transparency is where improvement starts: shared definitions, clearer sourcing, honest feasibility, and feedback loops that make quality measurable and rewarded. Without that, we’ll keep patching symptoms instead of fixing root causes.