HeyMarvin Reveals 94% of Leaders Say Research Should Drive Decisions, but Only 27% Consistently Use It

HeyMarvin, the AI-native customer insights platform, released The State of Modern Research 2026: Closing the Listening Gap, a new report based on a survey of 309 research professionals, leaders, and research consumers. The findings expose a contradiction many organizations face: companies are investing heavily in collecting customer feedback, but that feedback rarely plays a role in the decisions that count. HeyMarvin calls this the “listening gap.”

94% of respondents say their leadership believes research is important, but only 27% reference it in almost every major decision

The listening gap is the distance between leadership’s intention to use customer research and their organization’s ability to surface it when decisions happen. For most companies, that distance is wider than they realize, and it’s costing them.

“Companies spend billions trying to understand customer needs,” said Prayag Narula, CEO and co-founder of HeyMarvin. “Yet they’re still making their most important product and business decisions without the right insights. The fix is building infrastructure like AI systems and agents that make it easy for everyone in your organization to access information about customers’ needs and pain points.”

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Key takeaways from the report

• 94% of respondents say their leadership believes research is important, but only 27% reference it in almost every major decision
• Organizations that actively centralize their research in an accessible insights repository reference research in major decisions at a rate 25 percentage points higher than those that don’t
• 93% of research professionals are using AI, but those with an active repository see significant AI time savings at more than three times the rate of those without one (51% vs. 16%)

The work has scaled, but the infrastructure hasn’t

Teams ran nearly four research methods in the past 12 months across an average of more than six software tools. Yet fewer than half (48%) actively use an insights repository to centralize their findings, and only 35% run a primarily always-on research function. Top-down mandates to listen to customers have outpaced the structures organizations have built to deliver on them.

Leadership and practitioners are both right about the problem

The report shows 73% of leaders say reviewing existing research is a formal requirement before major decisions. Only 37% of individual contributors agree. Senior leaders cite fragmented systems; practitioners cite a culture where decisions move too fast for research to catch up. Only 30% of researchers say executive leadership regularly accesses customer insights, and that number falls to 16% for the engineering teams building the products customers use.

93% use AI, but most are leaving value on the table

Nearly every respondent is using or experimenting with AI, and 72% report saving 25% or more of their time on at least some tasks. But most reach for general-purpose tools rather than purpose-built research AI. The organizations with an active insights repository see significant AI time savings at more than three times the rate of those without one (51% vs. 16%), which means infrastructure and AI effectiveness rise and fall together.

Buying decisions don’t match team priorities

Ease of use for non-researchers ranks last in tool evaluation criteria, cited by just 25% of respondents. Cost leads at 44%. Directors, who hold the budget, are three times more likely than individual contributors to identify as gatekeepers of research access (36% vs. 12%). The people closest to the data want to democratize it, but the people with the authority to do so more often keep access closed. For companies that say customer understanding drives their strategy, that’s a significant contradiction.