The gen-AI marketing conversation tends to fixate on content and customer service. Korst, Puntoni, and Toubia argue the larger disruption is still ahead of that, upstream in market research itself: how firms gather data and understand their customers.
They lay out four categories of opportunity: making current research faster and cheaper, replacing parts of it with synthetic data, filling gaps that conventional data cannot reach, and creating new kinds of insight through digital twins.
We read this as a Strategic Fork story. Using AI to learn faster about your market is a growth move. It creates new value; it isn't an efficiency play. It's the difference between automating a survey and seeing something your competitors can't yet.
So what: Point AI at understanding your market, not just trimming your research budget. That's the growth side of the fork.