May 9, 2019 by Dr. Jian Huang

IIeX North America has made a name for itself as an event for research innovators and new technologies. Everyone you meet, from attendees to presenters, has their own thoughts on what technologies are going to impact the world of insights the most. This year, the Survature team had the opportunity to present our research and innovations in capturing group psychology through our methodology—Priority Modeling.

While at IIeX, we decided to conduct our own research (via our behavior-enabled survey platform) to not only understand how attendees view the impact these new technologies will have on the Insights Industry but also to predict which technologies will take off based on using the collective subconscious awareness of these technologies (i.e. priority modeling). Here are our top 4 findings:

1. Mid-Career & Younger Professionals Are Looking At Big Data and Virtual Reality (VR)

We could easily see using our priority modeling methodology that big data and VR are top-of-mind for professionals under the age of 45 based on how they interacted with our behavior-enabled survey. But will these technologies impact insights in a positive or negative way? 50% of respondents believe Big Data will have a positive impact while only 43% believe VR will have a positive impact.

2. Healthcare & Financial Services Professionals Are More Interested In Blockchain and Automation

It was very clear in our study that researchers in these two industries are paying attention to blockchain and automation. When looking at the opinions of whether these technologies will impact insights for the better – 50% agreed that they both would.

3. We’re All Paying Attention To Alexa And Apple Watch

While we uncovered distinct differences in opinions based on age and industry among attendees at IIeX, two things everyone is paying close attention to (and keeping top-of-mind) are Voice Assistants and Wearable Devices. No matter how we segmented the data, these two technologies were consistently at the top of everyone’s (subconscious) mind. While 50% of professionals believe that Voice Assistants will bring positive change to insights, a staggering 85.7% of respondents believe Wearable Devices will make a positive impact.

4. Everyone Wants Data Faster But Female Professionals Also Want Deeper Data

In addition to posing a question around technology innovations, we also asked IIeX attendees about how they expect data to improve by 2025. Speed of Data was a clear priority to everyone. In fact, 73% of professionals believe speed will likely improve in the next 6 years. However, what was most interesting in our findings was the huge difference in priorities between men and women. Women showed that Depth of Data was almost equally important to them as the Speed of Data, while men displayed that it was one of the lowest priorities (Cost of Data was almost equal to Speed of Data for male respondents).

It’s important to note that relying only on traditional explicit responses would make it appear that all tech trends are equally important to insights professionals. The addition of Priority Modeling, available only through Survature’s behavior-enabled survey, reveals our collective subconscious and shows us the real picture. As the years come, we will continue to monitor how the future of insights will take shape. Through these initial discoveries, a reliable view into the Insights Industry’s consensus wishes is already compelling.

Jian Huang is the Chief Executive Officer at Survature providing the vision for reinventing the way the world experiences surveys. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee (UT) researching data analysis, visualization, and human-computer interaction. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Interior, Intel, NASA, and UT-Battelle. Jian received his PhD from the Ohio State University.