How Maersk and Lala Scale Customer Insights Adoption

For a long time, the fundamental trade-off in qualitative research was straightforward: you could have depth and rigor, or you could have speed and scale.

AI changed that.

Today, enterprise teams can run hundreds of video-based consumer interviews in days, across any market, in any language. The depth-versus-speed trade-off is effectively eliminated. But solving that problem revealed a new one.

When you can generate enormous amounts of rich, qualitative data quickly, the question becomes: How do you make sense of it all? How do you ensure that the people who need these insights — in marketing, product, sales, strategy — can actually access them, understand them, and act on them? How do you prevent a growing library of studies from becoming a growing archive that no one reads?

Speed and scale are only meaningful if insights get used. That's the adoption challenge. And it turns out, it's also the biggest opportunity in enterprise insights today.

Building an experience layer for human insights

At GetWhy, we've been working closely with enterprise clients to make insights more impactful. The result is what we call the experience layer: a set of capabilities designed to transform how insights are consumed and distributed across large organizations.

The first is a research agent, a ChatGPT-style interface for your insights library. Any colleague can type a question in plain language and get an answer drawn from across all of your research, with the sources shown. They can refine by segment, region, or time period without involving the insights team.

The second is GetWhy Stories which turns research findings into formats people actually engage with. Instead of a lengthy report, insights become articles, podcasts, video showreels, and interactive boards that can be browsed, shared, and experienced across the organization.

Grupo Lala: What happens when customers speak for themselves

“It’s a tool to create empathy with stakeholders inside the company, because they are listening to the consumer. I'm not the one saying that the product is bad. The consumer is telling them.” - Liliana Palomeque Castellanos, Head of Innovation Insights and Foresights at Grupo Lala

Grupo Lala is the number one milk brand in Mexico with an ambition to grow into the number one nutrition brand in the country. To get there, they need to understand not just what consumers buy, but why. Why do people choose one dairy format over another? How are lifestyle changes and generational shifts affecting the category? What does nutrition mean to different kinds of consumers?

Before working with GetWhy, Lala's research process looked like most traditional research: four or more weeks for recruitment, three or more weeks for fieldwork, another three weeks for results. By the time insights arrived, the decisions they were meant to inform had often already been made.

One of the first studies Lala ran with GetWhy focused on older consumers, a segment that rarely gets dedicated research attention in the dairy category. Within days, they were watching real customers talk about what mattered to them: a preference for natural, preservative-free products; a shift toward sugar-free yogurt; changing expectations around where and how they buy.

But the bigger shift has been internal. When marketing and R&D teams watch real consumers explain their own choices, the dynamic changes. That difference in how findings land has made Lala's internal conversations more persuasive and universal.

Maersk: Building a 10,000-hour insights library that anyone can use

“It is much more consumable than a big, dusty, 50 page report which we would have had in the past and which sits there and doesn't get any engagement.” - Mireille Patoine, Strategic Customer Insights Lead at Maersk

Over seven years and 100+ studies with GetWhy, Maersk has built a library of more than 10,000 hours of qualitative data. We have interviewed their customers, prospects, and lapsed customers across markets and segments. That's an extraordinary asset. The challenge was making it accessible.

For Mireille Patoine, Strategic Customer Insights Lead at Maersk, the goal is to move from reactive to proactive.

"If your stakeholder is coming with a brief, you're probably too late,” she said. “You need to have had your foundational insights in place in order to answer some of those questions before they come to you. And that's what we've been able to do.”

Maersk's solution was to build a centralized insights library on SharePoint, powered by GetWhy's research agent and Stories. Colleagues land on a familiar intranet page and can immediately start asking questions or browsing insight boards.

In practice, this changes who can benefit from research. A marketing colleague preparing a campaign brief can type a plain-language question into the research agent — for example: “what are the decision-making criteria for customers buying intermodal services?” — and get an answer drawn from across multiple foundational studies, with the sources shown. They can refine by company size, region, or time period, and drill into the reasoning, all without involving the insights team.

The result is that Maersk's insights team spends less time re-presenting work that already exists, and more time filling gaps and answering questions that genuinely require new research.

Setting up the experience layer

The companies pulling ahead in this space aren't necessarily doing more research. They're making research matter inside their organizations.

That requires building an experience layer on top of customer data, ensuring that the people who need it can find what they’re looking for in a format that works for them. Organizations that invest in research without activation are sitting on an underused asset.

Format matters more than most teams realize. Consumer video clips, showreels, and audio create a different kind of persuasion than written reports. When a colleague hears a consumer explain a preference in their own words, it lands differently than reading the same finding on a slide.

The teams doing this well have made one shift above all others: from reactive to proactive. Both Maersk and Lala described the same transformation, moving from a model where insights respond to briefs, to one where insights are already present when decisions get made.

Quotes and examples in this article are drawn from two sessions at Quirk's Dallas: "Turn Human Insights Into Living Narratives" (March 10, 2026) and "Drive AI Qual Adoption Across the Enterprise: Lessons from Grupo Lala" (March 11, 2026). Join us for future sessions at Quirk’s.