Global reach is easier, real insight is harder

We’ve never had more research tools at our fingertips. AI-generated summaries. Automated translation. Remote research platforms promising global reach in 48 hours. These tools have dramatically reduced the barriers that once made global research slow and expensive.
But faster research doesn’t mean better insights.

In conversations with product, design, and strategy leaders, we hear a consistent tension: research can now be conducted faster and more cheaply than ever before, yet insights often lack the depth or nuance needed to ‘stick’ within organizations and drive truly differentiated products and experiences.

There is a meaningful difference between speed and depth, between translation and cultural interpretation, between data on a page and lived context. AI can help close the first gap. It struggles with the second. And it can’t touch the third.

The future of global research isn’t about choosing tools over presence. It’s about knowing when speed is enough and when being there is necessary. Because when it comes to understanding people across cultures, being there still matters.

What you gain going the local way

We’re all experts in our own environments. We understand the unspoken rules of our communities; how people communicate, what behaviors are considered normal, what feels aspirational, and what feels out of place. We know how language is actually used, not just how it’s translated. We read tone, context, and subtle cues without thinking twice.

When we try to understand people in entirely different cultures, languages, and social contexts, it’s easy to miss what’s really happening, even when we’re asking the right questions. That’s why global research is strongest when it’s grounded in local expertise.

Cultural interpretation, not just answers

Local researchers and strategists bring more than fluency, they bring cultural context. They understand when a participant is being polite rather than honest. They recognize when hesitation signals discomfort, not confusion. They can interpret what’s implied, not just what’s said.

During a recent project with Google, we conducted research in the US, EU, and Seoul to better understand attitudes towards emerging wearable technology and personal privacy. We worked alongside a local research partner whose instincts shaped the project before sessions even began.

She advised against our default approach of mixed-gender, mixed-age co-design groups, a format we planned to use in our US research to generate productive friction. In Korea, she explained, those same dynamics would suppress honest participation, particularly on sensitive topics like surveillance and personal boundaries. Therefore, we restructured entirely.

But the more telling moment came during one of the sessions. Midway through an activity, she caught something the rest of the team missed: a participant’s body language and facial expressions signaling tension between a clear personal use case and an equally clear moral objection. That tension never surfaced in her words until it was drawn out and in turn became one of the most important signals in the research.

No transcript would have caught it. No AI summary would have flagged it. It took someone who knew what to look for.

The right participants, not just available people

Global panels are optimized for speed and scale, but the process of connecting with participants is impersonal. Local partners start from a different place entirely. They’re embedded in the communities you’re trying to learn from. The people they reach aren’t cold contacts; they’re neighbors, parents at the school gate, members of local organizations and community groups. That pre-existing relationship creates a level of trust you can’t manufacture. And trust changes everything: who agrees to participate, how comfortable they feel, and how willing they are to go beyond surface-level answers and share what they actually think and feel.

On a global research and strategy program with Meta, we needed to recruit teens, parents and guardians, and teen well-being experts across five markets (US, UK, Ireland, Brazil, and Japan). So we partnered with local NGOs, schools, and community leaders — organizations that already had relationships with the people we needed to reach.

The result was stronger participants and better research. Because we met participants through trusted local networks, they came to our co-design sessions more open and comfortable. And our local partners didn’t just recruit, they consulted on how we structured the sessions, flagging cultural sensitivities and recommending adjustments for such vulnerable audiences. A global panel may have been able to find the people, but it couldn’t have built the trust that made the research successful.

Presence, not observation

The third dimension of the local way is the hardest to operationalize but the most transformative. It means getting decision-makers out of conference rooms and Zoom meetings and into the lives of the people they’re designing for.

That looks like going to people’s homes. Visiting retail environments. Riding public transit. Seeing how products live in context. It means designing research experiences for not just researchers, but for the people who will act on the learnings: product managers, designers, engineers, marketers, and executive leaders.

When stakeholders are present in the field, not watching a recording weeks later, but physically in the room, something shifts. They stop waiting to be convinced by a deck. They arrive at the insight themselves.

On a project with a home projects app, we conducted in-home research with homeowners in New York and Atlanta, exploring the emotions and personal stories behind how people care for their homes and how it feels to invite a stranger in to work on them. The goal was to give the brand team a direct line to that emotional truth.

So we brought them along. Including the VP of Brand.

They sat in living rooms and listened to homeowners talk about what their homes meant to them. They heard stories they never would have encountered in an executive summary. And when each session ended, we all piled into a rental minivan and talked through what we’d just experienced and what it meant for the goals of our work. By the time we got to synthesis, leadership wasn’t waiting to be convinced. They’d already felt it.