Every January someone asks me for a trends list, and every January I try to keep it to things that will actually change a buyer's week. Not "AI will transform everything." More like: what will your procurement team push back on, and what will your field partner get wrong if you don't ask.

Here's what I'm watching in 2025.

The short version

  • Buyers will pay for fewer, better completes instead of the cheapest CPI.
  • AI moves into questionnaire drafting, open-end coding and reporting, but not into replacing respondents.
  • Fraud is now a data risk that leadership asks about, so quality reporting becomes part of the deliverable.
  • Multi-country work shifts weight toward APAC, LATAM and Africa, where sample coverage is thinner.

Budgets move from volume to verified quality

For years the online sample market competed on price per complete. That era is ending, and not because anyone got generous. Teams got burned. When a tracker wave shifts five points and the "insight" turns out to be a bad traffic source, nobody remembers that the CPI was low.

Expect more RFPs that ask how a provider verifies respondents, what the removal rate was on the last three projects, and whether replacements are free. If your provider can't answer that in writing, that's your answer.

AI shows up in the workflow, not in the sample

The practical wins are already here: first-draft questionnaires, faster coding of open ends, auto-generated banners and toplines. Our own PMs use these tools daily. What I'd be careful with is anything that quietly swaps real people for modeled answers. We'll cover that separately in our piece on synthetic respondents.

Fraud becomes a board-level topic

Survey farms, click workers and scripted bots have been around a long time. What changed is scale and polish. The industry's response is visible too: seven research associations, including the Insights Association, ESOMAR and MRS, launched the Global Data Quality initiative in 2023 to align on benchmarks and guidance.

For buyers, the takeaway is simple. Ask for a quality report with every project, and ask what happens at the entry point, not just in post-field cleaning. That's the thinking behind QualityShield.

Emerging markets move to the center

Global studies used to mean the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan, with a couple of "rest of world" cells. Now a lot of brand growth sits in Southeast Asia, the Gulf, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria. Coverage there is uneven and fraud pressure is higher. A provider with real in-market sourcing, not resold traffic, makes a big difference. We field in 100+ countries for exactly that reason.

Privacy rules keep tightening

GDPR enforcement isn't slowing down, and US state privacy laws keep multiplying. For research teams this mostly means cleaner consent language, shorter retention windows and tighter vendor agreements. Boring, necessary work.

FAQ

Which trend will affect sample costs most in 2025?

Data quality. Stricter verification and fraud removal raise the cost of each usable complete, but they lower the total cost of a study because you stop paying for bad data and re-fielding.

Is synthetic data replacing real respondents?

No. It's useful for early exploration and questionnaire testing, but decisions still need real, verified respondents as the benchmark.