The Insights Industry Has a Decision Problem — And It’s Costing Companies Millions

Only 15% of executives consistently incorporate customer input into their decisions, highlighting how much valuable insight still goes unused at the highest levels of business (McKinsey & Company, 2025¹).

But this isn’t for lack of effort. The insights industry has spent decades focusing on churning out more data, better research, and faster answers. New tools, methodologies, and technologies have made it smoother than ever to understand our customers in depth.

But in many organizations, the challenge isn’t access to insights—it’s applying those insights. In so many cases, valuable intelligence exists across teams, reports, and systems, yet fails to surface when decisions are made.

Instead, leaders base big decisions on what’s readily available, what they’ve recently seen, or what they can easily recall. And organizations are left with a growing disconnect between what they know and what they actually use.

In other words, the data are fine.

What the insights industry has is a decision problem.

Most enterprises have a treasure trove of insights. But when it comes to making decisions, they’re leaving that treasure buried.

Most Enterprises Already Have the Intelligence

Most enterprises aren’t lacking in insight and data. If anything, they’re saturated with it.

Consumer research, segmentation studies, concept testing, brand tracking, competitive intelligence, and market analysis all contribute to an ever-growing pile of knowledge, usually representing millions of dollars in investment. With time, it builds into a rich and valuable understanding of customers and markets.

Yet, hardly any of this hard-worked intelligence influences the decisions it was designed to inform. Research from technology consultancy esynergy found that 95% of organizations in the UK and the US report data issues that affect their decision-making processes and business operations.

And the issue isn’t the quality of the research. It’s where and how it lives.

Insights are often:

• Distributed across teams
• Buried in slide decks
• Stored in disconnected or unused platforms and systems
• Stuck in formats that are difficult to search and synthesize

As a result, decision-makers rely on what they already know, what’s easiest to access, or the most recent study, rather than dipping into the sea of information that the organization collectively knows. This disconnect is both inefficient and incredibly expensive.

The Insight Activation Gap

Let’s talk about the insight activation gap. This is the break between the intelligence a company owns and the intelligence that actually directs its decisions.

The insight activation gap usually follows a familiar pattern. First, a decision starts to form. Then, teams gather the research that springs to mind, or they can quickly access. Other relevant information remains hidden, often within another team, platform, or format.

Finally, the decision is made based on incomplete insight. Only later does a team member eventually discover the research that could have led to the right outcome all along.

The problem isn’t that the insight didn’t exist. It’s because it didn’t surface in time — or ever.

Why the Insight Activation Gap Exists

The insight activation gap is a structural challenge inherent to how organizations manage knowledge and decision-making. Here are three reasons why it exists.

1. Intelligence Is Stored, Not Activated

The first reason the insight activation gap occurs is that intelligence is typically stored — and left alone — rather than activated. Many insight repositories are designed to archive research rather than surface it to help teams make business decisions.

Most research repositories function great as libraries, but are less effective as decision-support tools. With most repositories, teams would still need to manually search, interpret, and connect insights during busy timelines, which is often unrealistic.

2. Knowledge Is Fragmented Across The Enterprise

Secondly, knowledge is often distributed and fragmented across the organization. Consumer insights, market research, customer feedback, and operational data often live in separate systems and are owned by different teams.

Recent research by HubSpot found that a huge 92% of leaders admit that valuable customer insights live outside official CRMs, scattered across spreadsheets, team chats, and personal notes².

3. Decisions Move Faster Than Insight Retrieval

Third, decisions typically move faster than the time it takes to retrieve the right insights. Today, leadership often has to make important decisions within days or even hours.

In contrast, sourcing and synthesizing insights can still take considerable time. Because of this, teams use what’s immediately available, even if there’s more relevant research elsewhere.

The Hidden Cost of Untapped Intelligence

When the right intelligence fails to influence decisions, the consequences add up. Research investments go to waste, and valuable knowledge remains untapped. And future research also suffers. Users of research start to create "disposable research" with the assumption that it will never be used again. This results in lower quality research that ultimately becomes a digital landfill.

Decisions rely heavily on gut instinct or partial information, increasing the risk of repeated mistakes and lost opportunities. Over time, this also makes it more difficult for insights teams to prove their value within the organization.

According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million per year³.

This challenge resembles a recurring loop:

Research is produced → knowledge is stored → decisions move forward → relevant intelligence fails to surface → decisions rely on partial evidence → research is discovered after the outcome.

The cycle then repeats.

What This Means for Insights Leaders

Insights leaders face both a challenge and an opportunity when experiencing these decision problems within their organizations.

The challenge is that if insights don’t influence decisions, their value remains largely invisible. Even high-quality, costly research can struggle to demonstrate impact if it isn’t applied at the right moment.

And the opportunity is to carefully redefine the role of insights within the organization. Instead of churning out new research, leading teams can focus on learning how to surface, connect, and apply existing insights in real time.

This means ensuring insights are easy to find, simple to understand, and directly relevant to the decisions at hand. It also requires a mindset shift, switching from knowledge providers to enablers of better decisions.

The Next Frontier: Activation

If the past decade was defined by the collection of intelligence, the next will be defined by its activation. In the past, quality and breadth of activation was primarily driven by having the most talented human beings, with limited impact from systems.  In the future, System advantage will empower a greater percentage of employees to have activation and be impactful.

Moving forward, the organizations that thrive won’t necessarily be the ones brimming with data. They’ll be the ones who have worked to ensure their research is easily accessible at the right moment, connects across teams and platforms, and delivers clear, decision-ready evidence quickly enough to influence business outcomes.

It’s no longer about how much you know, but how effectively you use what you know.

The Cost of Knowing Too Late

All the insight in the world has limited value if it arrives (or never does) after the decision has been made.

Closing the insight activation gap is far more than simply working on operational improvements. It represents the next frontier for the insights industry. And the companies that address and face it will make far better decisions, at the moment they matter most.

Sources

¹ McKinsey & Company, “Achieving growth: Putting leadership mindsets and behaviors into action,” 2025, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/achieving-growth-putting-leadership-mindsets-and-behaviors-into-action

² HubSpot, “Spotlight,” HubSpot Product Showcase, https://www.hubspot.com/spotlight

³ Gartner, “Data Quality: Why It Matters and How to Achieve It,” Gartner Data & Analytics Insights, https://www.gartner.com/en/data-analytics/topics/data-quality