Vita Molis, head of editorial for the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, recently joined Alter Agents’ Devorah Rogers on the Change Agents: Inside Modern Insights podcast. Previously, Molis built and led the global research and insights function at TikTok, giving her a perspective that spans research, marketing, thought leadership and some of the biggest changes shaping those fields today.

Their conversation covered how thought leadership helps brands grow, what it takes for insights teams to have an impact across an organization, why good research often requires multiple methods and where AI fits into the work. They also explored a surprising finding about how people are using generative AI: curiosity and enjoyment may be bigger drivers than efficiency.

Tell us a little about your role at LinkedIn and the B2B Institute.

Vita Molis: I am the head of editorial for the B2B Institute. The B2B Institute is a think tank within LinkedIn where we are obsessed with understanding how brands grow. We partner with academics, research agencies and ultimately B2B brands to help unpack that.

One of our longest-running franchises is the Contrarian Marketer, and it’s actually how we got our start almost a decade ago. We’re trying to challenge the conventional wisdom of marketers coming to us and asking, “What is everyone else doing?”

The better question, we believe, is, “What is no one else doing?” That shakes out a lot of timeless marketing principles that just get overlooked. Ultimately, the Institute and our trends are meant to provoke, shape strategy and give marketers confidence to make bolder, smarter bets to help their brands grow.

Why does thought leadership sit at the center of that work? What value do you believe it has for companies and organizations?

Vita: We spend a lot of time with B2B brands making the case for thought leadership, but also for brand. That’s ultimately how we got our start when the Institute was born out of the agency team. There was a need to help B2B marketers think about brands and how important betting on the long-term brand is to driving growth. Thought leadership is certainly a node into that.

This came up in some recent qualitative research we’ve been working on. I was sitting in a great qual group over dinner, which is so good for informal chats like this, and one of the SMB marketers was talking about how LinkedIn serves as that ramp between brands and thought leadership and performance. They made the point that ultimately people buy from people, not brands. We’ve heard that quote not just from SMB leaders, but from our own CMO and many others.

It reminds me of a trend we have been studying called the “drip effect.” In the 1950s, there was an Israeli engineer who noticed there was one tree growing taller than the rest. He went to figure out what was happening and found this slow, rhythmic drip directly into the root system. It was slow and steady, and it was ultimately creating nourishment for this one tree. That later became known as drip irrigation.

It reminds me of the role of thought leadership and the role of the employee as part of that thought leadership. Think about your employees as that distribution system, as those small drips of value, insight and perspective. It’s that human signal over time.

When we look at our data, the collective connections of all the individuals working for a company tend to be five to 10 times larger than the following of the company page. That is a huge opportunity to engineer the flow through that drip irrigation system, if you will.

Measurement is always part of the brand and thought leadership conversation. As you engineer and systematize what that looks like for your brand, how do you start to really measure it? It’s about measuring the seep, ultimately, and not the splash. How do you create systems of measurement to look at how brand is converting over time and ultimately leading from brand to lower funnel?

How would you define thought leadership?

Vita: It’s ultimately a point of view. It is how brands help their customers think about the area of collective genius that they have and that they own.

For us, it’s really about studying marketing and identifying how we bring our expertise to the market to help educate. I think of thought leadership as an educational lever into the market.

On Change Agents, we like to talk about a key insight that changed everything. What is one that stands out from your career?

Vita: One that comes to mind is tied to research that we’re releasing now. It started more than six months ago when Derek on my team was working on a piece of research on generative AI. It was around the category entry points in tech and other verticals where B2B buyers are thinking about Gen AI. What are they looking for? What are the needs they ultimately optimize against?

As with all research, we tend to take a little bit of a wider aperture. We asked some demographic questions to better understand who’s using it and what their relationship with Gen AI is.

A few data points came out of there that were born into a trend we call “Alice in AI Wonderland.” It was a little bit of this upside-down, “What is happening here?” trend.

In the early days, there was all this conversation around AI driving more efficiency. That’s the goal. But what we actually found is that people spend more time using Gen AI for things they like versus things they dislike.

When you think about efficiency, you think about all these admin tasks and the grunt work that you don’t want to be doing. But actually, we found people are using it for the opposite.

It reminds me of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Everything’s upside down. What’s up is down, what’s down is up. But what led her to take that leap into the rabbit hole was curiosity. Where did this white rabbit come from? Where is he going? It wasn’t about efficiency.

We’re seeing that same thing with AI. The way to actually message it is to portray it more through this joyful and curious lens versus removing all the drudgery and grunt work and focusing on efficiency plays.

You’ve been effective at expanding the remit and impact of your teams. How do you get insights a seat at the corporate table, and what impact has that made?

Vita: If I think back to my previous role, I was stepping onto the client side for the first time at TikTok. I thought my biggest challenge was, “How do I start a function and build a team and do all these things that were on the job description?”

It was something totally new and something I’d never even been part of on the client side. That was a huge undertaking, and the excitement of that undertaking was what ultimately propelled me, perhaps the curiosity for me to jump down that rabbit hole.

What I learned really quickly was that the role of research and insights, thought leadership, whatever we ultimately call these teams, wasn’t necessarily to just provide the insights. We actually are an alignment function.

Our biggest superpower is that we sit at the center of marketing or sales. You see research and insights or product in lots of different parts of the organization, but ultimately we’re a connector. We’re there to bridge the gap.

I work in the world of platforms and advertising. For us, that was about sales teams, marketing teams, product teams and leadership. How do we rally around the customer and have that customer and the customer need serve as the connector? How do we think about the strategy for that customer, and how do we orchestrate?

What ultimately moved the needle wasn’t one really impactful piece of insight that changed how we did our go-to-market strategy for a particular product. It was really about how we drive this orchestration of action across the business.

When I think of research and insights, I think of that connection, that strategy and that role as an orchestrator around customer need.

Given the complexity of the questions researchers are being asked today, what methodologies and approaches have you found most useful?

Vita: I think you’ve got the answer right in the question. It’s not about one study.

I’m a custom researcher. I’ve had to learn first-party data analysis in addition to the different third-party methodologies I’ve got under my belt. But for me, it’s always about a multi-method approach to really understand the behavior, the attitudes, the emotions and the attention, coming back to the customer as the center of it all.

To get to the customer truth, it’s going to take a few different bites of the apple to really unpack and get to the core insight. That’s always where my head goes.

If budget is unlimited, which it never is, we want to have components of quantitative, qual or neuro and first-party behavioral measures to ultimately put it together.

Beyond just the methodology itself, as researchers we’re looking for studies to play across different reports. When I think about attacking a particular study, I think about the stacking on the report and the stacking in the research study.

What I mean by that is that in one particular research study, you might seed pieces of ideas for multiple different reports that you ultimately want to drive change in. The same goes for first-party data analysis. You’re always hypothesizing as researchers and trying to find those beginnings of the strand, but in order to put it all together into an insight, you need lots of strands in that multi-method approach.

How are you thinking about AI and the impact it has on research?

Vita: It wouldn’t be a conversation nowadays without AI surfacing. First of all, I think we’re all reading the reports and seeing that marketing is probably the first function embracing AI and experiencing more disruption across the different functions. Research, as a subset of marketing, is further along in a lot of ways.

We have felt that disruption of AI, and that makes sense. We have lots of very structured tasks throughout research that are suited for automation. I think about survey design, analysis and synthesis.

I’ve seen a lot of early gains when it comes to those parts of the research journey, analyzing open ends and synthesizing large data sets. But we’re just at the beginning when it comes to the full potential of leveraging AI.

We see that as we’re all exploring synthetic data and what the practicalities are there. I’ve seen some early-stage use cases where there are data sets that are well trained from human research studies, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near truly understanding how reliable and scalable those approaches are. It’s early days.

Beyond AI, what other trends are on your radar?

Vita: The bigger piece of AI is that we’re all looking for efficiencies. Whether that’s in research or in marketing, the economic climate we’re in means budgets are being squeezed. We spend a lot of time thinking about those trends and how they impact marketers and B2B marketers specifically.

Events come to mind as an opportunity area. We call this the “B2B bottle episode.”

If you think about a bottle episode, it’s a TV episode filmed on one single set. It usually has a small cast, it’s done in a shorter time frame and it focuses on character development, with the characters being bottled up in that one location.

For B2B, events are that. They have that behind-the-scenes kind of feeling. I think events and that in-person connection are so important, but they’re also really underleveraged because events can be treated as a content generator.

It’s not just about the destination or the individuals you’re going to see in the room. If you bottle that up, you can draw reach that compounds over all those digital touch points.

Think about Salesforce and its Dreamforce event. That’s not a once-a-year kind of spike. They engineer and capture the keynotes. They capture customer success stories. They create these assets of depth and deploy them across a breadth of different channels to drive activation.