Inside Good Work Matters: why we made a report about people, not tools

The story behind the interviews, and the recurring themes of curiosity, taste and critical thinking.

When we set out to make an annual report, the obvious move was a state-of-AI-in-research piece: benchmarks, adoption curves, a tidy maturity model. We made something else instead. We sat down with nine people who care deeply where strategic insight goes next, and we asked them about craft.

The conversations kept circling the same human qualities. Curiosity that refuses to settle for the first reading. Taste, the hard-to-teach sense of which finding actually matters. Critical thinking that treats a confident answer as a prompt for another question.

What the AI era changes

None of our interviewees were anxious that AI would replace them. They were anxious about something subtler: that the speed of automated analysis would tempt teams to stop looking. If the machine can produce a plausible theme in seconds, the discipline of going back to the data has to become a choice, and choices erode under deadline pressure.

The risk isn’t that AI thinks for us. It’s that it gives us such a good excuse to stop thinking.From the Good Work Matters interviews

Why people, not tools

Tools date fast. The questions these researchers wrestle with, how to stay close to the evidence, how to keep judgement sharp, how to make findings travel without flattening them, don’t. That is the report we wanted on the shelf in five years: a record of how thoughtful people held onto the craft while everything around it sped up.

You can read the full set of interviews, with Andy Crysell, Cath Richardson, Hanna Chalmers and others, in the flagship report.