From Slop to Salience: Delivering the Last Human Mile

By Oscar Yuan, Chief Strategy + Growth Officer at Material

This article was originally published in the 2025 TMRE Next Era of Insights Report

The insights industry is transitioning its relationship with AI from a phase of wonder and amazement at AI’s power and potential to an era defined by a more critical evaluation of its outputs, an increasingly discerning eye towards its applications and higher standards. With outputs in hand, we’re beginning to ask ourselves, did AI achieve what we truly needed it to? Where did it add value, and where did it fall short? Here at Material, it’s increasingly clear to us that the more AI we leverage, the more human intelligence we need to complete the last mile.

If we believe that insights are meant to drive business decisions, influence stakeholders and shape strategy (as we know it does), then how we deliver those insights matters immensely. We would be naïve to believe that good data alone, even with the help of AI, could seduce, inspire or delight a business decision maker the way a seasoned executive storyteller could. This last revelation, that data can only go so far, will define our industry in the next era of insights.

The Transformation of Insights

Our industry for decades has been focused on the collection, analysis and presentation of data. Now, with blinding speed, those tasks are much more easily accomplished with the help of technology. The collection and collation of data is headed towards a commoditized utility that can be handled by AI.

The result? Researchers are scrambling to justify their value but also are liberated to focus on how the information is applied and shared, which arguably, is more important. What good is data if it’s not applied and shared?

What data is applied and shared is not always obvious – it’s rarely the data that is the most precise, or the most plentiful. It is often the data that is the most eye-opening, most surprising, or the most emotionally resonant. And AI, we have found, is not great at telling us those things. This last mile – translating the insights into the stories that travel and influence, is a uniquely human task. This is where the focus of our industry will shift – from data collection and analysis to storytelling and influence.

Certainly, we’ve been talking about storytelling and activation for years as strategic skills for insights professionals, but we have always tended to fall back on our ability to collect good data. AI just forced our hand.

From Slop to Salience

“AI Slop” is a term we hear a lot these days. It refers to the mass amounts of content – largely correct and reasonably good, but completely undifferentiated and unmemorable – that AI generates. The more “AI Slop” that is generated, the more human discernment is needed to pick the few elements that will resonate and polish them into the insights that will influence an organization.

Getting from slop to salience requires an understanding of how an organization makes decisions, what the culture is like and how the people communicate. Distilling this type of organizational intelligence is still a uniquely human skill. And in the world of AI, this skill – largely overlooked before – will become the hallmark of standout insights professionals of the future – the ones that are able to generate insights that travel across an organization, insights that the CEO repeat and insights that everyone down to the factory floor worker knows.

The Polyglots that will Lead this Transformation

The question naturally arises – what will be the skills required of this new generation of standout insights professionals? Who will they be?

At Material, we have found that the most successful insights professionals – the insights professionals of the future, if you will – are the ones who can effortlessly integrate various disciplines together to tell a holistic story, a story that influences and travels. This is not just about pulling together qualitative and quantitative data: it can involve weaving in elements of social psychology, behavioral science and cultural observations. These are professionals who can start with an AI data foundation and then enrich and transform it with elements and a scaffolding that is uniquely human. We call them polyglots.

We are committed to building an organization of these polyglots who can navigate and synthesize different types of data sources, research and theory, rational and emotional principles into a compelling narrative. We believe these multilingual (in data terms), multidisciplinary individuals will define and lead the next generation of insights. They understand how to use AI as a starting point and leverage that starting point to craft the last, most important, most human mile.