The Tony Cowling Foundation is delighted to announce the winners of the Tony Cowling Foundation Innovation Award 2026, recognising some of the most exciting and forward-thinking developments shaping the future of market research, insights and data analytics.
Following an exceptional standard of entries from organisations around the world, the winners were announced at the ESOMAR Congress in Valencia on 2 September.
This year’s awards demonstrated the extraordinary pace at which artificial intelligence is reshaping the industry – not simply by making existing research processes faster, but by opening up entirely new approaches to understanding consumers, developing ideas, testing decisions and applying insight within organisations.
Gold – Human8 & The Coca-Cola Company
Future Digital Twins, and the Timing Problem Nothing Else Solves
The Gold Award was presented to Human8 & The Coca-Cola Company for their pioneering work exploring how future digital twins can help businesses understand not only the consumers of today, but how people’s needs and behaviours may evolve in the years ahead.
Grounded in conversations and evidence from real people, together with cultural understanding and qualitative expertise, the approach uses AI-powered digital twins to explore ideas and possible future scenarios.
Rather than attempting to predict the future with certainty, the innovation gives organisations a new way to stress-test strategies and investigate plausible futures before committing significant resources to product, brand and portfolio decisions.
It represents an important shift in the role of insight – moving research further upstream and allowing it to contribute to decisions about what tomorrow’s consumers could want before tomorrow arrives.
Silver – Brand Genetics & Unilever
Insight in the Foothills of the Singularity
The Silver Award went to Brand Genetics & Unilever for an innovative exploration of how the relationship between human expertise and artificial intelligence could evolve.
At the centre of the project is Lovelace, a custom agentic AI innovation platform designed to source and synthesise expert knowledge and support the creation of high-quality innovation concepts.
The work proposes a compelling model of human and AI collaboration. AI can take on intensive knowledge retrieval, synthesis and initial ideation, while researchers concentrate their expertise on observing real consumers, understanding context and nuance, exercising judgement and determining which ideas truly matter.
Rather than asking how AI can replace the researcher, the project asks a more important question: where can human expertise create the greatest value when AI dramatically expands what is possible?
Bronze – Wortya
Filter, Not Oracle: The Honest Case for Synthetic Users and Digital Twins
The Bronze Award was presented to Wortya for addressing one of the most significant questions facing AI-powered market research: when can synthetic respondents actually be trusted?
Wortya’s Behavioural Validity Evaluation Study involved more than 11,000 synthetic interviews across six commercial large-language models and three countries, with the findings validated against real consumer transaction data.
Its conclusion – that synthetic users should be treated as “filters, not oracles” – provides an important and evidence-led contribution to the rapidly developing synthetic research sector.
The research shows that synthetic respondents can be highly useful for some applications while being much less reliable for others, highlighting the continuing importance of robust methodology, validation and human evidence as these technologies develop.
Regional Europe – Verve & Leeds Building Society
Designed for Every Customer Moment: How Leeds Building Society and Verve Reimagined Communications Through AI-Powered Insight
The Regional Europe Award was presented to Verve & Leeds Building Society for applying AI-powered insight to a highly practical business challenge: helping ensure customer communications are clear, appropriate and genuinely understood.
Using Verve Intelligent Personas & Simulations (VIPS), the team developed AI personas grounded in Leeds Building Society’s own customer insight and regulatory frameworks.
The approach enables communications to be tested rapidly against evidence-based customer personas, including the particularly important challenge of communications designed for vulnerable customers.
It provides a powerful example of insight moving beyond individual research projects and becoming embedded directly into everyday business processes, with potential applications across financial services and many other regulated industries.
Innovation that is changing the role of research
This year’s winners show how AI is doing more than making research faster; it is changing how insight is generated, applied and trusted.
Together, the projects explore future consumers, human-AI collaboration, the reliability of synthetic research and the integration of insight into everyday business decisions.
They reflect TCF’s ambition to identify breakthrough ideas, give them visibility and connect innovators with the partners, expertise and investment needed to create real-world impact.
Congratulations to all our 2026 winners and finalists for helping shape the future of the research and insights industry.
