Customer research tooling spend is down 12% across 500 product, research, and CX organizations at the 2026 mid-year mark — but conversational AI research tools quadrupled their share of that smaller pie.

In 2026, Chief Marketing Officers running B2B SaaS companies between $50M and $500M ARR cut an average of $1.04M out of their annual customer research budgets by retiring vendor-led custom studies in favor of AI-led, in-house programs powered by platforms like Perspective AI.