The GRIT Report shows insights and analytics teams in transition. Roles are becoming more distributed, operations are more central, and the boundaries between research, analytics, strategy, and activation are increasingly blurred. What we learned was that org charts are getting messier as insights work spreads out across the enterprise. Underneath this is the spread of AI, which is not the only cause of these shifts, but is accelerating these changes, pushing insight work outward into the enterprise.

More Distributed Teams:

Our own research showed some insights roles getting pulled closer to decision-making as they are even more tightly woven into product, marketing, CX, and growth. As AI makes everyone a potential insights user, these teams are expected to move faster to test ideas against known data, to generate new ideas or creative executions and to translate what the data means for action. To own their value, they now simultaneously need to be the strategic partner that proactively asks the right questions, determines research gaps, and helps guide alignment. Their future work product may not look like standard research deliverables. Instead, it may look like a decision brief, a launch scorecard, a trade-off simulation, or a set of guardrails or risks for a team that is already prompting GPT.

Centralized Research Operations:

At the same time, GRIT found that more than 80% of both insights and analytics teams consider operations a core part of their role. AI only heightens the need for a central “control tower” to coordinate AI-assisted insights, protect data quality, and manage security concerns. As research flows into data lakes and as we’ve implemented AI personas trained on existing knowledge, teams need clear confidence levels, validated inputs, and continuously optimized data and models. Centralized insights operations win by making distributed teams faster and more trusted through governance, shared standards, training, reusable knowledge assets, and workflow integration.

Better Analytics Integration:

AI makes evidence streams more connectable. GRIT did not see evidence of convergence between insights and analytics. However, we have found a growing opportunity for AI to integrate internal and external signals to better predict behavior. And AI can create connections across work teams even if org charts do not converge. Brand-side analytics professionals may be the ones to lead the way, as they are much more likely than researchers to be using agentic AI today, both for creating/updating reports and dashboards (71% vs. 50%) and for preparing/integrating data (73% vs. 43%). While the GRIT report highlights role differences, there is significant opportunity for AI to make it easier to connect multiple evidence streams that turn synthesis into strategic decisions. 

The Future of Insights Impact

We see a future state emerging for client-side teams that is powered by decisions. They will not define success by how much research they conduct or how fast they’ve uncovered it. They will define success by how effectively they can predict outcomes and impact the top and bottom line of business performance.