Is Your Team Using AI Well—or Just Using AI?

Is your team using AI for speed and rigor, or trading one for the other?

The conversation about whether to use AI for research and insights is pretty much over. It’s already in the room with us—shaping how we design studies, sort through findings, and package our data.  

The trickier question we face now is simpler: Is the time you're saving coming at the expense of the work that actually matters?  

To help teams figure this out, we teamed up with Emily Barnes, the founder of Carta Strategy and a Certified Askable Researcher, to launch the The AI Diagnostic for Insight-Driven Teams—a quick 15-question assessment to map your maturity. She pressure-tested the entire framework against 30 deep-dive interviews with research, product, and design practitioners and leaders across the US, UK, and APAC. 

This companion research report that digs into the data behind it. What we found is a gap between moving fast and doing good work. While 21 out of 23 practitioners we studied are saving real time day-to-day, only 5 have managed to build repeatable workflows with the shared standards needed to keep their insights reliable.

Who we wrote this for

• Insight leaders who want to evaluate their team's AI maturity without relying on tech-vendor marketing or guesswork.  
• Practitioners who need to bring others along for the ride. If you are trying to clear up stakeholder assumptions or argue internally for more resources, this report gives you the exact language you need to make a case that lands with leadership.  

What we're sharing inside

• The Complete Maturity Framework: The tool-agnostic model built to score teams across five operational levels and five critical dimensions.  
• The Speed vs. Quality Reality: A look at why saving time has become easy, but setting up processes to keep the insights tight is still incredibly rare.  
• Why Your Foundations Matter: A breakdown of how AI highlights your current habits—speeding up your output when your methodology is solid, but amplifying your worst habits if your process is weak.  
• The Truth About Guardrails: Why relying on informal team norms leaves your data exposed, and why human review remains the most critical safety net right now.  
• The Challenge of Influence: Why 13 of the 23 practitioners we studied had no stakeholder-facing influence at all, and how you can start shaping the corporate conversation instead of being shaped by it.  
• How to Use Your Score: Practical ways to take this data and use it to start honest conversations within your team, identify hidden assumptions, or request specific capability training.