Skip to content 
Balancing AI experimentation with human expertise
The insight industry is at a critical inflection point. AI tools are developing faster than most teams can evaluate them, yet the pressure to stay relevant means organisations cannot afford to stand still. How do you move fast enough without compromising quality, ethics, or trust?
In this episode, Jonathan speaks with Eddie O’Brien, a senior insight leader at Sage, to explore how one of the world’s leading cloud business platforms is approaching this challenge. Eddie shares the principles guiding Sage’s AI strategy, the practical use cases already delivering value, and his candid view on where the guardrails still need to be in place — particularly around synthetic data, AI personas, and digital twins.
The best insight leaders sit in the grey area, they're not moving so fast with AI that they lose rigour, and not so slowly that they become irrelevant. That balance is the skill.
Key highlights
- Why the best insight leaders sit in the grey area between moving too fast with AI and moving too slowly to stay relevant and how to find that balance in your own organisation.
- How Sage is using AI to improve knowledge management, data synthesis, transcript analysis, and faster decision support with practical examples you can apply today.
- Why human insight still matters, especially when validating outputs from synthetic data, AI personas, and digital twins, and where over-reliance creates risk.
- How AI is reshaping the insight operating model, with client teams and agency partners working more like integrated squads than traditional buyer-supplier relationships.
- Which future skills will matter most: insight engineering, facilitation, scenario planning, and stakeholder influence and how to build them now.