AI has reduced research hiring, juniors worst hit: Study
A new study has found Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reduced or slowed research hiring, with junior researchers and execution-heavy work facing the greatest impact.
A new study has found Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reduced or slowed research hiring, with junior researchers and execution-heavy work facing the greatest impact.
For its latest study, unitQ interviewed 160 research, design and insights professionals.
"42% of them said AI had reduced or slowed hiring or contributed to roles going unfilled. 28% said early-career researchers will feel the impact before anyone else, and more than half pointed to execution-heavy work as the first thing to be handed off", the study said.
unitQ further found that rather than replacing researchers outright, AI is automating the executional layer first — running interviews, transcribing, coding open-ended responses — the hands-on work that early-career researchers typically cut their teeth on.
"One respondent called the result an "expertise drought": automate that apprenticeship today, and a team may stop producing seasoned researchers without noticing until they're gone", the study, conducted using unitQ Research, an AI research platform for teams, found.
Quality Dimension
The study also focused on quality dimension, and found that AI is letting more teams run more research, faster — but greater volume does not guarantee greater insight.
As per the unitQ study, among research and insights professionals, 40% warned of deskilling or of shallow, homogenized output, the kind of 'research slop' that falls apart under scrutiny. Speed without judgment, several respondents cautioned, produces confident answers that are wrong.
"The obvious headline is that AI augments a researcher's work. The more accurate one is that it also quietly removes the rungs of the ladder they climb," said Christian Wiklund, Co-founder and CEO at unitQ.
"That's avoidable, but only if teams get real tools to hand the executional work to, instead of just cutting the roles that used to do it", Wiklund added.
The study also points to where the value goes. Among research and insights professionals, 51% said the people who thrive alongside AI are the ones fluent enough to direct it and to recognize when it's wrong. That describes the judgment researchers have always been hired for, now separated from the manual work that used to fill their days.
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