💰2025 Research Budgets + 🛠️ The Future of Research Ops

This week: AI Summaries of Reviews; The 2025 Research Budget Report; The future of research ops with Kate Towsey: "AI won't replace researchers - but will redefine their roles". Check out our Research Lunch Club member interview from 🇺🇸 NYC, our video pick on How UX Researchers Shape the Future of Play, plus the latest job opportunities in research. And finally - join Research Lunch Club, now live in 33+ cities, before we send out our THIRD round of matches NEXT WEEK!

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People of Research
June 19, 2025

🎤 Community Highlights

👋 We love seeing researchers connect through Research Lunch Club! 

🍴 Here’s a moment from a Research Lunch Club lunch in London 🇬🇧 with Tanya Sengupta a Senior Behavioural Researcher and Tiia Ladvelin an Occupational Psychologist catching up IRL through Research Lunch Club! 

www.linkedin.com/posts/research-lunch-club_researchers-london-community-activity-7338486972685991940-SLwV?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABQ5BlwBWb_TJrbDb2iVRgyLr9WnD4CpUWM

Fancy meeting new researchers? Building a few bridges over lunch? and growing your research network?

🚀 Research Lunch Club is matching researchers across 30+ cities worldwide this May - connecting members in trios from fields like AI ethics, cognitive science, ethnography, and UX research. Whether you’re in New York or Sao Paulo or Sydney, there’s a seat at the table.

Be part of our thrid round of matches next week! - it’s like networking, but tailored, fun and over lunch!

🔬 Research Lunch Club Member Interview

This week’s interview is from Research Lunch Club - where researchers meet in person for monthly lunches in their city.

This week, we’re spotlighting Tiberiu Gavris, a Product Designer with expertise in UX Research, Prototyping, and Visual Design, based in #NewYork 🇺🇸 .

Research Lunch Club Meet our Members #9

📰 Article Picks

🔗 AI Summaries of Reviews: Taylor Dykes and Katie Sherwin from NN/g explain that while AI-generated summaries can help shoppers by extracting key themes from e-commerce reviews, their effectiveness hinges on trust and proper design. They detail that for AI summaries to be valuable, they should complement traditional review elements, present both positive and negative feedback, offer product-specific insights, and clearly link to original customer reviews. Highlighting examples from Walmart, Amazon, Best Buy, and Etsy, the authors stress that vague or unverified AI summaries can be counterproductive, whereas well-implemented ones, like Amazon's clickable themes, enhance user understanding.

🔗 The 2025 Research Budget Report: Reporting for User Interviews, Liz Steelman analyzes data from 180 research budget stakeholders, revealing that most research budgets are stable or growing, with only 17% shrinking. The report details that headcount (32%), tools (19%), and participant recruitment (20%) form the bulk of expenditures, and while over half (51%) of participants are satisfied with their budgets, this satisfaction and perceived impact are higher when Research teams, rather than just the C-Suite, are involved in setting them. The report provides benchmarks for spending, identifying tools, exploratory research, and headcount as the hardest costs to justify.

🔗 The future of research ops with Kate Towsey: "AI won't replace researchers - but will redefine their roles": Jonathan Richardson shares insights from ResearchOps catalyst Kate Towsey, who posits that AI will augment rather than replace researchers, fundamentally redefining their roles and the function of ResearchOps. Towsey believes AI can handle repetitive tasks like initial data analysis and report generation, enabling teams to focus on strategic insight and leveraging human intelligence more effectively, using AI as a tool to "spice up" research. The article also touches upon the thoughtful use of synthetic users, referencing NN Group's stance, as a supplement to traditional research methods.

📺️ Video Pick

💼 Job Picks

Are you a hiring manager looking to share research opportunities with a global network of over 2,000 researchers in more than 60 countries? We'd love to hear from you! Just drop us an email ✉️.

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👋 About us

We’re People of Research & Research Lunch Club - a global hybrid community uniting researchers across the industries, from UX Research to Behavioural Science. We connect, collab and grow. People of Research was created by @faysel.

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