AI isn’t the hard part, humans are! by Tara Prabhaker
If you think AI is a tooling problem, you’ve already lost. Most organisations treat AI adoption like a product rollout: ship the tool, run the training, measure usage. In qualitative research, that approach fails—because the real barrier isn’t capability, it’s culture.
Hear how Kantar led the cultural change needed to move traditional qualitative researchers into an AI‑first world without breaking trust, quality, or professional identity. The provocative claim: AI isn’t the hard part. Humans are. And if you treat adoption as a rational decision, you will miss the functional, social and emotional forces that determine whether people try AI once—or build it into how they work every day.
See a practical framework for diagnosing and designing change across three layers: Functional – workflow truth, not workflow fantasy Social – respecting the craft cultureEmotional – psychological safety as infrastructure
Delegates will leave with practical ways to make change work in real teams—across mixed reactions, different speeds of openness, and the tension between global scalability and local reality—without becoming punitive, prescriptive, or lost in “AI hype.
Tara Prabhakar
Tara Prabhakar is Global Head of Qualitative at Kantar, where she has led the global transformation of qualitative research to operate effectively in an AI‑enabled environment. She has driven the development and adoption of AI‑enabled qualitative capabilities by bringing together product, technology, data science and commercial teams, shifting ways of working from siloed hand‑offs to shared ownership of delivery and adoption. In her role, Tara has led global change programmes that balance scalable consistency with strong local autonomy, enabled safe experimentation with AI across live client work, and established incentives and operating models that reward early adoption rather than penalise resistance. Her leadership experience is grounded in making AI work in practice—under commercial pressure, with real teams, real clients and real delivery risk