“Gawd Save the Panels”

Stefanie Francis
APRIL 8, 2026
Linkedin

We've spent years squeezing market research panel companies on price, blaming them for the quality we stopped paying for, and leaving the front door wide open for bots to walk right through. In this article Stefanie Francis names it directly: the data quality crisis in consumer insights isn't something that happened to us — we engineered it. The good news? We can un-engineer it. But only if we stop treating human participants like a commodity and start treating panels like the infrastructure they actually are. AI needs to be part of this industry's future. But humans have to remain the source.