There's no shortage of analysts and pundits making predictions for any given year. These five are specific to qual research - and while they were written with 2024 in mind, the underlying forces are long-term. AI is seen as an inflection point that colours everything.
None of these predictions require a crystal ball. They follow logically from what's already happening in the sector - from the way researchers are adopting new tools, from the demographics of who's entering the field, and from the changing relationship between agencies and the brands they serve. What they require is the willingness to adapt rather than wait for the landscape to settle.
1. AI adoption accelerates - and best practices emerge
Despite reservations among some researchers, adoption of AI will accelerate within every organisation. Not only will AI features emerge in more tools - those already integrated will continue to mature and be tested earnestly on real projects. The early scepticism is understandable and healthy, but it won't stop the momentum.
The future may be AI-enabled, but in qualitative research engagement the human aspect remains vital. This period will be about finding balance: understanding where AI genuinely saves time and reduces cognitive load, and where it risks flattening the nuance that makes qual research valuable. Best practices around AI in research organisations will start to emerge, making everyone feel more certain about the path ahead. Industry bodies will play a role, but so will individual researchers sharing what's actually working.
The firms that experiment now - carefully and critically - will be the ones setting best practice rather than following it in two or three years' time.
2. Traditional and digital qual find a new balance
Platforms like Qualzy wouldn't be growing at the rate they are if digital online research weren't increasingly and widely in use. But a new balance is emerging - and it's more nuanced than "digital won." The big shift to digital from the pandemic era isn't the only factor. Changing demographics and society's general drift to digital normality are equally important. People are simply more comfortable engaging with research via a link on their phone than they were five years ago.
Yet face-to-face research is far from dead. Researchers are now blending traditional face-to-face and remote digital qualitative research with confidence. Expect to see many more projects which leverage both the old and new in perfect synchrony - a face-to-face focus group followed by an online diary to capture how behaviour changes over time, or an online community that culminates in an in-person workshop with a subset of the most engaged participants.
The blended approach isn't a compromise - in many cases it's genuinely the most powerful methodology available.
3. Gen Z challenges continue to mount
The oldest of Gen Z are now in their late twenties. Not just digital-first but social-first - their default mode of expression has been shaped by platforms built around short-form video, reaction content, and non-linear conversation. Gaining their attention and feedback means offering a rich array of choices, challenges, and routes to engagement. The standard text-based survey or even the traditional online community activity isn't always going to cut it.
Throw out many assumptions about which tools they will love or hate. Platforms that constantly offer new and engaging ways to interact - video responses, photo diaries, creative tasks, quick polls alongside richer activities - will be important here. This isn't just about novelty; it's about respecting how this generation actually communicates and building research experiences that fit their natural mode of expression rather than forcing them into someone else's framework.
4. Researchers of the future step forward
Research businesses must adapt for an AI-enabled digital future. The next generation of researchers entering the sector are thoroughly digital by default. They will assume AI is part of the landscape and that geographic boundaries are irrelevant. They expect information to be always-on and engagement with participants to be digitally enabled and social.
This creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that existing processes, tools, and mental models will feel increasingly foreign to the talent you most want to attract and retain. The opportunity is that these researchers, once given the right platform, will do things with it that more experienced practitioners simply wouldn't have thought to attempt. Organisations that create space for this - rather than insisting that new entrants learn the old way first - will build genuine competitive advantage.
5. In-house teams become more self-sufficient
Amazing research technology is now accessible directly to brand teams, without agency intermediaries. There is no structural reason at all why an in-house insights team couldn't set up an ongoing customer insight community, run their own diary studies, or conduct their own concept tests. The barriers of cost, complexity, and technical expertise have been dramatically reduced.
But the deep expertise of external agencies remains relevant and valuable - it simply means brand teams will turn to them for different, higher-value things. The transactional project work that agencies have relied on for volume will increasingly be handled in-house. It may be time for agencies to put the thinking cap on and conceive new products and services that make their value clear and compelling: strategic interpretation, methodological design, the kind of expertise that can't be replaced by a well-configured platform.
These trends aren't abstract - they're shaping decisions that researchers and research businesses need to make now. Qualzy is building with all five in mind: AI that supports rather than replaces, flexible methodologies, engagement tools that work across generations, and pricing that makes ongoing research viable for teams of any size.
