responsive customer service, mental health support, and personalized experiences.
Explainable AI( XAI): As AI decisions impact critical sectors like finance and healthcare, transparency is key. XAI helps make AI decisions understandable, build trust and accountability and ensure compliance with regulations.
AI Legislation and Ethics: Governments are stepping in to regulate AI use. In 2025, expect stricter rules on deepfakes and misinformation, ethical standards for AI deployment, as well as greater focus on human rights and data privacy.
Quantum AI: Still in its early stages, quantum computing could supercharge AI by solving problems at unprecedented speeds, and enabling breakthroughs in medicine, energy, and materials science.
AI for Sustainability: AI is helping tackle climate challenges by optimizing energy grids, reducing waste in agriculture and monitoring biodiversity and deforestation.
AI in Cybersecurity: AI is becoming essential for detecting threats in real time, automating responses to breaches and simulating phishing attacks for training.
AI-Driven |
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e-commerce, AI is delivering predictive |
recommendations, |
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experiences |
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real-time |
behavioral |
analysis. |
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Ipsos has not been left behind even as the world over embraces AI. It has embraced a wide range of cutting-edge AI trends to transform social and market research whilst delivering impactful client outcomes.
Generative AI for Instant Insights: Ipsos launched Signals GenAI, a generative AI tool that converts millions of realtime consumer signals into actionable insights in under 60 seconds. It uses validated prompts to uncover emerging trends, shifting attitudes, and whitespace opportunities across industries.
AI-Powered Ad Testing: CreativeSpark AI predicts emotional and cognitive reactions to ads within minutes. It enables rapid creative optimization by analyzing brand performance and audience engagement, making ad testing faster and more costeffective.
AI-Generated Personas: Ipsos PersonaBot allows researchers to interact with AIgenerated personas that simulate real customer segments. These personas can answer questions, simulate focus groups, and provide deep segmentation insights for both consumer and healthcare applications.
AI Assistant for Researchers: Ipsos Facto is an internal AI assistant that supports researchers with transcript summarization, response coding, literature synthesis and anomaly detection. It integrates multiple large language models( LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Mistral, offering a secure and adaptable research environment.
AI-Driven Innovation Strategy: Ipsos launched Collective Innovation, an AIenabled program that blends human and machine intelligence to identify highpotential innovation opportunities. It combines ethnography, social data, and trend forecasting to guide product and service development.
Multimodal and Emotion-Aware AI: Ipsos is expanding into multimodal AI, incorporating image and video analysis to enhance brand perception studies. Emotion-aware tools help decode consumer reactions across digital channels.
Global AI Surveys and Public Sentiment: Ipsos partnered with Google for a multicountry AI survey to understand public expectations and concerns around AI. This helps shape responsible AI development and informs brands on how to build trust with consumers.
Ipsos’ approach is hybrid and humancentered- AI enhances and does not replace expert judgment.
Even as these trends take shape in the consumer world, there are challenges and considerations that still come to play with the adoption of AI.
Data privacy and compliance: With regulations like GDPR and CCPA, businesses must ensure ethical data collection and transparency.
Talent gaps: Finding skilled professionals to manage and interpret AI tools remains a bottleneck. AI / ML engineers take an average of 70 + days to hire.
Trust and authenticity: While trust in AI is growing, concerns about bias and loss of human touch persist- especially among older demographics.
To address these issues, companies are investing in hybrid models that combine human expertise with machine intelligence. Platforms like Synthesio by Ipsos exemplify this approach, offering scalable insights through integrated human-AI teams.
Preparing for the Future: A Strategic Roadmap
To stay ahead, businesses must evolve their consumer intelligence strategies.
They must assess digital and data maturity by understanding where their organizations stand in terms of infrastructure, talent, and data readiness and tailor their AI adoption strategies accordingly.
Consolidate data sources by breaking down silos across CRM, social listening, customer feedback, and support channels, and create a unified view of the customer to enable consistent insights.
Invest in scalable AI tools by choosing platforms that align with company goals- whether it’ s real-time sentiment tracking, predictive modelling, or persona generation.
Upskill teams by equipping marketing, product, and insights teams with the skills to interpret AI outputs and to make data-driven decisions. Also consider partnerships to fill talent gaps.
Lastly, prioritize ethics and transparency by adopting privacy-first approaches, labelling AI-generated content, and ensuring consumers understand how their data is used.
AI Is the New Competitive Advantage
In 2025, consumer intelligence is no longer a nice-to-have- it’ s a strategic imperative. AI empowers businesses to understand their audiences with unprecedented clarity, speed, and depth. Those who embrace this shift will unlock new markets, build stronger relationships, and drive sustainable growth.
Whether you ' re a startup exploring new audiences or an enterprise optimizing global campaigns, the message is clear: AI is the key to unlocking the future of consumer insights. The time to act is now.
Chris Githaiga, is the Ipsos in Kenya Managing Director and the Country Manager, East Africa Cluster. You can commune with him on this or related matters via email at: Chris. Githaiga @ ipsos. com.