Market Research & Public Opinion Polling NAICS 541910

Nov 21, 2025 - AI's Effect on Market Research

• Generative AI is changing the way the market research industry operates, giving companies tools to gather and analyze data faster and cheaper than ever before. Instead of waiting weeks or months for survey results or focus group insights, firms can now create synthetic data, run automated sentiment analysis, and even build virtual “digital twins” of customers to simulate behavior and test scenarios in real time. This opens up new ways to understand consumer preferences, uncover unmet needs, and spot emerging trends that traditional methods often miss. AI does come with risks, however, like biased data, quality issues, and privacy concerns, which means human oversight is still crucial. Combining AI’s speed and scale with human judgment lets market researchers deliver faster and more actionable insights.
• US brands are experiencing a notable decline in global trust and purchase intent, according to Ipsos’s Brand America 2025 report. When a brand is perceived as distinctly “American,” its international trust and purchase scores drop by about 20 points on average. While the American identity remains a powerful cultural and economic asset, it has also become a liability in certain international markets due to shifting political, social, and economic perceptions. Per the report, consumers abroad increasingly weigh the perceived values and actions of the US when evaluating American products and services, which can influence brand reputation and willingness to purchase. For US corporate leaders and brand managers, the findings suggest that success in global markets increasingly depends on understanding local perspectives, adapting messaging, and aligning brand positioning with regional expectations.

• Employment for market research and public opinion polling companies fell 8.8% year over year in April 2025, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, continuing a steady decline in an industry grappling with fundamental structural change due to technology. The heavy lifting of market research - data collection and analysis - has increasingly been taken over by software, automation, and AI, reducing the need for human staff. Businesses are also hiring outside market research companies less and relying instead on open-source survey tools to gather information in house. The industry also has to respond to the decline of traditional polling methods - landline phone calls, for instance - that are no longer as effective in the age of cell phones and call screening. Self-reported opinions have also decreased in importance as the industry favors the hard data of digital tracking (Web activity, online purchasing) that it deems more accurate.
• Americans trust family and friends the most when it comes to advice about finances, according to a new poll from Gallup. About 43% of Americans said that close acquaintance opinions were the most sought after when it comes to money matters, followed by financial advisors and planners (41%), financial institutions (36%), and the media (20%). The Gallup poll, combined with other recent surveys by Ipsos and Kaiser Family Foundation on everything from health care to institutional trustworthiness, reflects a pattern of believing those close to home over experts, the government, or the news media. Powerful institutions are perceived as, “insensitive, unresponsive, or even hostile to their own priorities and concerns,” said Tony Mills, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The pandemic greatly contributed to this phenomenon with a steep drop in trust for the Center for Disease Control and the news media.