The more powerful AI gets, the more human research has to become. That is not a comfortable position for a technology company to hold. It is the one we hold anyway.

On Tuesday 23 June, our CCO Lasse Telling joins Dr. Elaine Rodrigo, Chief Insights & Analytics Officer at Reckitt, on the LIONS Insights & Strategy Summit stage at Cannes Lions. The session is part of TMRE, in partnership with GetWhy.

Elaine is one of the clearest voices in our industry on human empathy as a discipline. Not a soft skill. The thing that decides whether insight changes a decision or dies in a deck. She has spent her career making sure organisations understand people as they actually live, not as a category assumes they do.

Consumer understanding rarely fails for lack of data. It fails in the gap between how organisations decide and how people actually live.

Internal assumptions shape the agenda. Category logic narrows it. Staged validation moments arrive too late to change anything. Meanwhile, real behaviour is formed somewhere else entirely, in everyday routines, constraints and contexts that never make it onto the planning calendar.

Elaine and Lasse will look at what changes when AI-led interviews close that distance. Drawing on Reckitt’s perspective, the conversation moves through three questions: Why does consumer understanding so often arrive too late, or stay too narrow, to shape better decisions? How can AI-led interviews bring real consumer voices into the organisation at speed and at scale? What happens when teams move from internal assumptions to a deeper understanding of how people actually live?

Cannes Lions is the most recognised international festival of creativity. There could not be a more fitting place to have this conversation. This is where the best work in the world is fuelled by the deepest human understanding.

That is the case Lasse and Elaine are making. AI is not here to remove the human from understanding. It is here to bring more human voices into the decision than ever before. To let empathy scale without thinning out. It is the same belief behind our Research Agent: help an organisation be more human, not less.

That is what Be More Human means to us. Not a slogan. A standard.

How Reckitt Gets Closer to Real-Life Consumer Behaviour with AI

Tuesday 23 June, 12:10–12:35 (25 mins). LIONS Insights & Strategy Summit, Le Majestic Hotel.

Speaking: Dr. Elaine Rodrigo, Reckitt. Lasse Telling, GetWhy. Stream: Insights & Trends.

If you are at the festival, register for the session here.