TL;DR
- Most organizations already own the intelligence they need to make better decisions. The problem is connecting it, trusting it, and using it before the moment passes.
- Insights leaders are under pressure to move from research delivery to strategic advisory, while still fielding the daily flow of requests.
- Fragmented intelligence, broken trust, and manual processes mean great research rarely reaches the right person at the right time.
- Join Evan Williams and Natalie Delgado for a live conversation on what the research reveals, and what it actually takes to drive client-centric decisions.
Your organization probably knows more than it thinks it does.
Research has been commissioned, studies completed, and consumer understanding built up over the years. The data exists, and the work has been done. When a senior stakeholder asks why market share is moving or where the growth is, though, the answer still takes days to surface, arrives without context, or never makes it to the decision at all.
It's an access problem, not a data problem, and it's one Stravito set out to understand properly. We commissioned independent researcher Natalie Delgado to spend time with 14 insights leaders and managers across FMCG, Retail & Apparel, Quick-Service Restaurants, and Consulting, with no brief to validate a point of view. We wanted to hear what's actually getting in the way, what would need to change, and what good looks like to the people living it every day.
Those findings are what this webinar is built around.
The gap between intelligence and decision
The clearest pattern in the research is tension. On one side, organizations are pushing insights teams to move faster: stakeholders want answers that are clear, directive, and ready to act on. On the other hand, the systems most teams rely on haven't kept up. Research sits scattered across SharePoint folders, legacy platforms, inboxes, and personal drives, so when someone needs an answer, they search, skim, ask a colleague, and sometimes commission entirely new work, not because the intelligence doesn't exist, but because they can't reach it quickly enough to trust it.
The expectations around speed have also shifted in ways that make this harder to manage. Business users now hold internal tools to the same standard as the consumer apps and AI assistants they use every day. When an insight platform feels slow or incomplete, people revert to shortcuts, and those shortcuts mean decisions get made without the full picture.
Why activation keeps failing
The research surfaced three barriers that showed up across organizations, regardless of size, industry, or the tools in place.
- The fragmentation problem. Business intelligence, consumer understanding, and market research sit in different systems owned by different teams. Pulling them into a coherent answer under time pressure is more work than most insights managers have room for.
- The trust gap. Teams are wary of relying on intelligence they can't verify. If there's any doubt about whether something is the latest approved version, the safer move feels like commissioning something new, which means the organization keeps paying to recreate knowledge it already owns.
- The last-mile problem. Even when the right intelligence exists and someone finds it, it doesn't reliably reach the person making the decision when they need it. Insight travels when it's pushed, not just when it's stored.
What it actually takes
The organizations seeing the strongest results aren't the ones with the most research or the most advanced tools. They're the ones treating existing intelligence as something to activate rather than accumulate.
Moving from intelligence as storage to intelligence as decision infrastructure is at the heart of what Evan and Natalie will dig into during the webinar. They'll cover what the research reveals about where insights functions are right now, where the real opportunities are, and what it takes in practice to connect what your organization already knows into answers that reach the right people faster.
Watch on demand
How Insights Leaders Drive More Client-Centric Decisions: A live conversation with Evan Williams and Natalie Delgado.
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