For most of the last thirty years, customer research has been a craft. A senior researcher would scope a study, run a handful of interviews, write a deck, and present it once. The findings would shape one or two decisions and then quietly evaporate.
That model is breaking down. Continuous interview programmes, automated transcription, structured tagging and increasingly capable retrieval systems mean that an organisation can now hold a live, queryable understanding of what its customers think — not as a deck, but as a system. The half-life of an insight has gone from a quarter to a week.
The interesting consequence isn’t methodological, it’s political. When research is a craft, it’s rationed. When it’s infrastructure, it’s ambient — and decisions that used to require a study can be made by anyone with the right access. Product managers stop commissioning research and start querying it.
The organisations getting this right are not the ones with the biggest research teams. They’re the ones whose researchers have rebuilt themselves as platform owners.
Alex
