One of the strongest themes in Valencia was insights professionals actually playing with what seemed slightly futuristic not so long ago: all the new types of data that come with the new tech, put to use and evaluated with rigour.

Ultimately the challenge was never about generating more data. The industry has no shortage of that, and insights teams were drowning in information long before the AI boom. The question running through many sessions was a different one. How can this technology solve our data collection problems, while helping us make better sense of the evidence already in front of us?

Our team put that question to the test directly, running synthetic augmentation live inside Unilever’s brand guidance tracker; not a pilot, real production data, across categories and countries. The finding was refreshingly practical: a smaller human sample, boosted with synthetic respondents, reached decision-grade precision faster than waiting for the next full wave to land. Speed, not just accuracy, turned out to be the real prize, the currency that lets an insight team move from project delivery to continuous intelligence.

Digital twins were the bigger, thornier topic in Valencia, and it is fair to say the overall tone was to approach them with care. Two sessions made the point from different directions – one presenting research from Ipsos and Stanford University, the other from Panoplai, Firefish and Mars. Both warned against assuming that a single chatbot style LLM can accurately emulate the full range of human attitudes, with accuracy varying dramatically from project to project. Set the right expectations and put proper checks in place, though, and digital twins can be useful.

Somewhere inside Coca-Cola, there is an AI alter ego that Begonia Fafian, Global VP of Human Insights and Marketing, and her team built and named ‘Begonio.’ It hasn’t replaced Begonia. It has stretched what she can do and sped up how fast she can decide.

That was more or less the plot of the whole week: everyone has an AI strategy, hardly anyone has redesigned how they actually work. Kantar’s Kimberley Burbidge and Marie van Blaricum, Managing Director of Global Insights at Google, put a number directly on that gap: seven in ten C-suite leaders are confident they’re ready for a human-plus-AI future, yet only 42% can say roles are actually clear, and just 48% say structures and processes are aligned. Their conclusion focused on the need to build a strong decision architecture as organisations progress with AI adoption. AI doesn’t just make research faster. It changes what we’re willing to call evidence, and how much confidence we place in an answer.

L&E Research put that exact tension on a literal stage: same dataset, four researchers, four different working conditions, four completely different ‘truths’ with the live audience voting on which one they’d trust and which they’d act on. It was never about who was smartest. It was about the system each person was working inside.

Something sets Esomar congress apart: its honest commitment to rigour. Where else do speakers open by listing the limitations of their approach, or gently talking down expectations for a shiny new technology?

Compare that with other marketing conferences, where the opening slide declares that search is dead, TV is dead or that a new toy that will change everything. That contrast matters, because most CMOs are looking for the middle ground – trusted decision intelligence that guides investment and drives growth.

Several sessions acknowledged the need to bake intelligence into decision-making, like IKEA and NielsenIQ, who generously opened the doors to their kitchens to see how their insights programmes are changing. What was served less often was evidence of the impact on brand growth.

Why is that? In an on-stage interview with Kantar’s Mary Kyriakidi, Nyambura Mambo, Safaricom’s Head of Strategic Foresights and Market Intelligence, captured one of the key barriers that stands between insights and intelligence making an impact in the board room. She sees that insight gets ignored when it isn’t translated into the language of whoever’s in the room:

“If I go with financials to the brand and marketing director, she’ll say it’s not relevant to her... I think sometimes people just also don’t adopt insights... because we haven’t packaged it in the way that it is relevant to them.”

Nyambura Mambo, Head of Strategic Foresights and Market Intelligence, Safaricom

Take a decision most CMOs face; whether to change their creative agency or even move that work in-house. That’s what ‘Creative Consequences’, our work with Felipe Thomaz from Saïd Business School, set out to understand – the relationship between creative quality and brand equity, and the impact of agency changes on both. We found that the relationship between creative and brand is almost immediate for some brands, while for others there is a two-year lag before they see the impact.

In the context of today’s CMO fluctuation and increasing frequency of pitches, many brands are looking to switch their agency partner before the creative has had a chance to make its impact. The research showed that only 30% of brands ended up in a better creative place two to three years after a switch than before it. It was sessions like these that were anchored in marketers’ everyday challenges, whether familiar or novel, that demonstrated the importance for insights and intelligence to be in the room when decisions are made.