Your customers are making decisions before they ever reach your brand.

New research from McKinsey & Company shows that 68% of consumers have used at least one AI tool in the past three months- many without even realizing it. They're researching products through ChatGPT, comparing options inside a single conversational flow, and arriving at purchase decisions before they see your ad, visit your site, or talk to your team. Here's what that means for consumer research-

The traditional funnel- awareness, consideration, purchase- is collapsing. Discovery, evaluation, and decision are happening simultaneously, inside tools your brand doesn't control.

So, the question is- If your customers are using AI to make decisions about you, are you using research to understand how they're doing it?

Most organisations are still designing research around the old journey- surveys that ask ‘how did you hear about us’ and attribution models that track clicks. But the real shift is upstream. It's in how people frame their questions, what criteria AI surfaces for them, and which brands show up in a conversational search they never told you about.

Consumer research that doesn't account for this is already outdated.

We'd love to hear from marketers and researchers navigating this shift. How are you adapting your research methods to capture AI-mediated decision-making? Are your insights teams tracking how your brand shows up in AI-generated recommendations?