Quirk's Chicago: Our Major Takeaways

We left Quirk's Chicago this year full of fresh ideas and inspiration from some major thought leaders in the market research space.

While much of this year's conference was centered around AI-automated solutions, a major theme we kept bumping into was a hunger for more authentic consumer sentiment that doesn't get sanitized by social desirability bias or dulled by survey fatigue. Sound familiar?

Across the sessions we attended, we saw real innovation around getting consumers to self-report in more genuine ways, making foresight a core tenant of leadership (not just a deliverable), and how AI-driven innovation intelligence is continuing to reshape the game for CPG brands. Here's what stood out.

AI moderation: Snickers and Conveo

Snickers came to Quirk's with a familiar problem: they wanted to understand how and where customers were lapsing, and most importantly, why. What they didn't want was another round of flat, by-the-book survey responses. 

Their solution? An AI moderator. By partnering with Conveo, Snickers implemented an AI-powered qualitative research tool that could probe respondents dynamically, following threads that a static questionnaire would have missed entirely. The results were richer and more nuanced. Respondents were prompted in creative ways, like writing a breakup letter to the brand, to surface the kind of honest, emotionally resonant feedback that traditional methods rarely capture. 

Our team's biggest takeaway was that this is a genuinely smart way to use AI in research. Not to replace human curiosity, but to scale it, and to sidestep the usual pitfalls of acquiescence bias and social desirability in the process. When you make the format unexpected, people actually tell you the truth. 

Foresight as a leadership capability

Nestlé and Dig Insights brought one of the more thought-provoking frameworks of the conference: the idea that foresight is a muscle. A leadership capability you build, train, and embed into how your organization makes decisions.  

In a world where annual trackers and post-campaign reports are always playing catch-up to how fast consumer behavior actually moves, the brands that win will be the ones who've made "seeing around corners" part of their identity, not an afterthought on a quarterly deliverable or a slide deck that gets emailed and forgotten, but rather a core part of organizational methodology. 

The Chili's Grill & Bar session with YouGov brought this idea to life in a really compelling way. Chili's has been on an absolute tear with American diners lately, and a big part of that story is about what happens when insights and marketing actually talk to each other. By letting fast, real-time consumer signals fuel culturally resonant content decisions, they've shown that you can win the social feed and the dining room, but only if consumer intelligence is baked into how the brand moves. 

The through-line: foresight shouldn’t be thought of as a luxury for brands with big research budgets. Building it starts with treating insights as an ongoing conversation rather than a periodic report. 

How in the wild research adds to the conversation 

In the wild research is behavior-first.

Unlike traditional research methods that ask consumers to recall or reflect, real world approaches capture what people are actually doing and feeling, in real contexts where they live: in-feed and on socials.  

When combined with the kind of authentic sentiment capture Snickers demonstrated and the foresight infrastructure Nestlé is building, it starts to paint a picture of what a truly modern research methodology could look like. 

Our takeaway from the room 

Agility without defined standards creates risk.

Quirk's this year felt like an inflection point. AI is everywhere, obviously. But the most interesting conversations weren't about replacing researchers or automating at every intersection. They were about using technology to help us get closer to what consumers actually think, feel, and do. 

The common thread across every session we attended: Playing catch-up won’t cut it. The brands investing in authentic, behavior-grounded, foresight-oriented research are the ones moving with confidence.