As AI, privacy reform and self-serve tools reshape the research industry, The Lab’s managing director, Andrew Therkelsen, has argued the proposed TRS and ADIA merger are an opportunity to protect quality, modernise the profession and give research a stronger voice when it matters most.
The research industry is no stranger to change, indeed it’s our job to chart it, but right now it feels like it is happening to us from many different directions.
Shifting privacy and data laws, AI, self-serve tools, diversifying data sources and the appetite for faster, ‘good enough’ insights are changing how research gets done and who it’s done by. At the same time, declining participation, polarisation and stubborn misconceptions are raising bigger questions about our role and value.
Which is why the proposed merger of The Research Society (TRS) and the Australian Data and Insights Association (ADIA) – aimed at strengthening representation across the research, data and insights sector – comes at such an important moment.
It’s also part of a broader industry consolidation, with organisations joining forces to tackle increasingly complex issues – as seen in the AANA and ADMA’s decision to form the Marketing Association of Australia.
For more than 30 years, ADIA and TRS have represented different parts of the same industry, so bringing them together makes practical sense. A larger membership base, greater resources and a stronger collective voice should benefit everyone from independent researchers to the country’s largest businesses where insights help keep them a step ahead of the competition.
It also creates an opportunity to broaden the industry’s tent, bringing together agencies, client-side teams, technology businesses and the growing number of people doing research who may not traditionally have considered themselves ‘researchers’.
The merger promises “one unified voice”, greater “financial resilience” and “future readiness”. We collectively need to make some important decisions about what we want to protect, what needs to change and where we need to have more influence. We also need to think bigger about how we grow the category and make the value of quality research more visible to the organisations and people who benefit from it.
After almost a decade of attempts to bring the two organisations together, the timing feels significant.
Tackling research’s image problem
If there’s one thing the research industry needs to tackle, it’s our image, and a unified voice making a stronger case for our value could be a good place to start.
For much of the public, ‘research’ is synonymous with polling, and recent history has given us plenty of high-profile examples of polls getting it wrong. When a poll misses an election result, everyone hears about it, yet when research helps a government design a better service, a business understand its customers or an organisation make a multimillion-dollar decision, the qual and quant teams aren’t taking a victory lap.
Those misses tend to define us in people’s minds far more than the successes, helping misconceptions take hold that research is slow, expensive or out of step with the speed at which organisations need to make decisions.
Challenging that narrative is even more important as society becomes more fragmented and polarised. Our own research from The Australia Project found 79 per cent of Australians believe people on the opposite side of politics have lost their way, which tells us something pretty stark about how differently Australians are seeing the world around them.
As misinformation and AI-generated content continue to flood our feeds, there’s an even bigger opportunity for our industry to make a stronger case for the value of rigorous and evidence-based research.
A unified industry body should give us a stronger platform to challenge outdated perceptions and make the case for the role quality research plays while helping grow demand for it.
A stronger voice in the privacy debate
There is also a battle underway over data, and the research industry should be much closer to the centre of it.
Understandably, consumers are becoming more sceptical about why their information is being collected and conscious of what organisations know about them. The public conversation around data is too often about monetisation, targeting or misuse, creating a climate in which almost any request for personal information is met with suspicion.
Research has a different purpose. We ask people to share information to help create better public services and make better decisions. But we can’t assume the public understands that distinction, nor can we simply expect their trust.
As Australia’s privacy rules evolve – including proposed changes to the Privacy Act – and conversations about AI governance grow, the research industry has an opportunity to be one of the loudest and most credible voices shaping the debate.
Responsible data collection is fundamental to what we do, which means we should be helping set the standard for how people’s information is collected and used, rather than waiting for rules designed elsewhere to dictate it to us.
A stronger peak body gives us greater weight to make that case. If any industry should be able to articulate what responsible, ethical and genuinely useful data collection looks like, it should be ours.
Defining what ‘good’ looks like in the age of AI
Self-serve platforms, rapid-turnaround surveys and AI have made it possible for almost anyone to generate something that looks like research.
That kind of democratisation can have enormous benefits and could help grow the role insights play in decision-making, but it also creates a quality problem we shouldn’t shy away from.
The irony is that the smarter our tools become, the more valuable human research judgement may become.
Methodology, questioning, sampling, interpretation and an understanding of human behaviour are the skills that give researchers the ‘spidey senses’ to look at an apparently impressive piece of AI-generated analysis and know that something doesn’t add up.
My concern is that we’re at risk of losing some of those instincts at exactly the moment we need them most. Even experienced researchers are asking different questions about what they should be learning, where they should invest and which skills will matter in five years’ time.
Importantly, we need to guide the next generation – creating pathways for young people to enter the industry and show them why research is still an exciting and valuable career – rather than allowing AI to swallow the junior work through which many of us honed our craft.
As an industry, we need to decide which fundamentals are non-negotiable, which new capabilities researchers need to develop and what good research should look like as the tools continue to evolve.
If bringing our two industry bodies together puts us in a stronger position to do that, that’s a very good reason to get behind it.
