Every marketing team runs on research: Buyer profiles, competitive analysis, audience insights, content hooks. This is the intelligence work that feeds strategy and happens every day. It just rarely gets called research.
Taylor Radey says it’s time to reframe that perspective.
At MAICON 2026, Radey, Director of Research at SmarterX, will share the tools, prompts, systems, and processes she uses to turn AI into a research engine for modern marketing and give attendees a framework to build their own.
Her argument is simple: most marketers are already doing research. They just aren't treating it like a discipline, and that means they're missing a big opportunity to leverage AI.
AI isn't just making research faster. It's changing how much research teams can afford to do, which can have a meaningful impact on business decisions.
Pay Attention to Input
When marketers think about AI, most go straight to output: drafting content, building workflows, automating repetitive tasks. Radey sees a different problem.
"For a lot of people, that's not actually where the bottleneck is," she said. "It's upstream: the intel that feeds the work. And today, that research is ad hoc, it's inconsistent, it's different every time depending on how much of a hurry you're in."
That inconsistency has consequences. When the research feeding your strategy is thin, everything built on top of it is thin, too: The positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation.
When Research Gets Cheap
The shift Radey describes isn't incremental. Deep research tools, AI-powered data analysis, and agentic AI are reducing the time and cost of research that used to require weeks, months, even years.
"Research that used to take me a week — a market scan, a competitor analysis, reading through a few hundred customer reviews — I can mostly do in an afternoon now," Radey said, thanks to AI.
But the speed gain is only the surface. The deeper change is behavioral.
"When research is fast and cheap, you stop rationing,” Radey said. “You can check the smaller segment, or the second competitor, or that hypothesis you have."
At SmarterX, she said, the team now does significantly more research and makes more data-driven decisions than ever before without any additional cost in time or expense.
"It's strategic decisions made quarter after quarter with less intelligence and insight,” she said. “That's what teams are leaving on the table."
What Radey Will Explore at MAICON
Radey's MAICON session, “AI Workflows to Research Anything Better,” will walk through four research workflows that every modern marketer relies on and show how each is being reimagined with AI:
- Buyer research that turns sparse public information into a defensible, useful profile in a fraction of the time.
- Competitive intelligence that replaces one-off analysis with continuous monitoring teams actually have time to maintain.
- Audience and customer insights that synthesize what a market is saying across every channel.
- Content research that surfaces the framings, hooks, and points of view that actually break through.
She'll share her full playbook — tools, prompts, systems, and processes — so attendees can take proven frameworks and adapt them to their own work.
What You’ll Gain from Radey’s Session
Attendees won't just leave with Radey's playbook. They'll build their first repeatable research method during the session itself, using a framework designed to scale across tasks and teams.
Once marketers see themselves as researchers, a whole set of capabilities opens up, capabilities that can sharpen strategy, not just speed up execution.
Join Us at MAICON 2026
Taylor Radey will present at MAICON 2026 as part of a lineup focused on real-world AI strategy, implementation, and leadership.
Follow her before MAICON 2026:
- Read the SmarterX 2026 AI for Business Report Radey led.
If you are responsible for research at your company, this session is for you. It will provide a practical approach to the AI tools and their impact on research.
Join us at MAICON 2026 to hear Radey and 50+ other AI and business leaders.
