What the Modern Research Workflow Looks Like in 2027

Research has always changed alongside the way companies build products.

This year, that change feels bigger.

Product teams are moving faster.
AI-moderated interviews can run across time zones without a researcher clearing their calendar.
Customer conversations are happening across sales calls, support tickets, surveys, interviews, and social channels.
And people across Product, Design, Marketing, and leadership can increasingly find answers to customer questions themselves.

We first coined the Modern Research Workflow in 2026.
Today, the seven stages of research are still familiar.

The stages haven’t changed. What happens inside them has.

That’s what we explore in The Modern Research Workflow 2027: the shifts already changing how teams understand their customers, and what to prepare for next.

The report builds on research we conducted earlier this year for The State of Modern Research 2026, surveying 309 researchers, research consumers, and leaders across 15+ industries. We returned to that data, alongside conversations with customers and research experts throughout 2026, to understand where the workflow is heading next. The statistics throughout this article come from there.

[Download The Modern Research Workflow 2027 →]

Research is becoming everyone’s business

Most people doing customer research today don’t have “researcher” in their title.

A product manager might dig through past interviews before deciding what belongs on the roadmap. A designer might look across usability sessions for recurring friction. A marketer might search customer conversations for the language people use to describe a problem.

More people want to understand customers because more people make decisions that affect them.

For researchers, that means their expertise can reach much further than the studies they personally run. The repositories they maintain, the standards they establish, and the judgment they bring to difficult questions can shape how an entire organization learns from customers.

Last year, we looked at the modern research workflow through the researcher’s lens. For 2027, we’re widening that lens to everyone who touches research.

Customer understanding is moving earlier

For the past few years, much of the conversation around AI and research has focused on speed.

Transcribe an interview faster.
Summarize a conversation faster.
Find themes across a study faster.

Now, teams are bringing customer understanding closer to the beginning of the work.

When we asked which capabilities they plan to adopt in the next one to two years, 52% of respondents chose AI-generated competitive or market intelligence. Another 48% plan to use real-time AI analysis during live interviews, 43% plan to use AI-supported research assets, and 41% plan to use AI for research design or question generation.

That changes how a research question begins.

Before commissioning a new study, a team can look at what customers have already said. Before a roadmap takes shape, recurring problems can surface across existing conversations. Before writing a discussion guide, past research can help sharpen the questions worth asking.

Teams can start with more context and spend their time filling the gaps that still matter.

As Alexis McNutt Unis, Customer Research Lead at OnePay, puts it, the goal is to use tooling to speed up the logistical work so there’s more time to slow down and talk to a customer, and hear and see them.

The interview is changing, too

The customer interview has traditionally asked a lot of one conversation: gather information, build rapport, probe interesting answers, read emotion, notice hesitation, and follow the unexpected thread.

Teams now have more choices for how those conversations happen.

30% of respondents regularly run AI-moderated interviews. That’s slightly higher than the 25% who regularly run traditional depth interviews, and higher than the 22% who run moderated usability testing.

And plenty of useful customer conversations are already happening outside formal studies. 29% of respondents regularly analyze sales calls, 28% mine support and customer-service conversations, and 27% run social-listening programs.

Together, these methods give teams a much wider view of what customers are saying.

They also give researchers more choices about where to spend their time. Some questions benefit from reaching dozens or hundreds of people. Others need a researcher who knows when to probe, when to sit with a pause, and when one unexpected comment is worth following.

As Owen Sanderson of IA Collaborative says, “Judgment’s expensive.” His point gets at one of the biggest shifts in the modern workflow, researchers can spend more of their time on the decisions that require their expertise.

Customer knowledge is showing up where people work

For years, the answer to scattered research was a centralized repository.

That still matters. But simply having somewhere to store research doesn’t guarantee people will use it.

Most stakeholders aren’t going to open a research platform every time they have a customer question. They’re already working in places like Slack, Figma, and Claude.

MCP connectors are beginning to bring customer knowledge into those places. Teams can ask questions and find relevant customer insights without repeatedly searching through old reports or jumping between tools.

The difference between having research and being able to use it shows up in the data.

Organizations with an active repository are four times as likely to reference research in almost every decision.

As Mahad Bullo, Senior Staff UX Researcher at Included Health says, “I want us to be at a point where research is just part of how this company thinks and moves.”

That’s a useful picture of where the workflow is heading. Customer understanding becomes easier to reach at the moment someone has a question or needs to make a decision.

Check out Marvin MCP.

Research has to show what happened next

What happened because of an insight?

Did it change a product decision?
Did the team build something differently?
Did it save time?
Did the outcome improve?

Those questions are becoming a bigger priority for research teams.

When we asked respondents to rank five priorities for the next 12 months, 85% ranked better measurement of research impact and ROI first. Yet only 47% currently have established KPIs for research impact.

That gap is changing the final stage of the workflow.

Teams are beginning to keep a running record of what research influenced, what shipped afterward, and what happened as a result. Automated check-ins, impact logs, and live dashboards can make that story easier to follow over time instead of reconstructing it at the end of a quarter.

For research teams, that creates a clearer connection between the work they do and the decisions that follow.

What should teams do now?

The report closes with four practical priorities for teams preparing for 2027.

Start with the customer knowledge you already have and make sure people can actually use it.  
Pilot new research methods deliberately and compare the results with how your team works today.  
Establish clear rules for where human review and judgment belong.  
And keep track of the decisions and outcomes research influences.

These are changes teams can start making today.

More people are asking customer questions.
More conversations can become useful sources of customer feedback.
Research can happen across more teams and tools.
And what a company already knows about its customers can travel much further than it could before.

For researchers, that makes judgment, context, and the ability to connect what customers say to what a company should do increasingly valuable.

For everyone else, getting closer to customers can become part of the way they work every day.

The Modern Research Workflow 2027 maps out that shift across all seven stages, along with five methods moving into the mainstream and four ways to prepare your team.

[Download The Modern Research Workflow 2027 →]

If you are new to Marvin and want to see it in action, book a free, personalized demo →

You can also visit the Marvin Resource Library → for more guides, ideas, and research resources.