The Evidence Premium: Why Research Tooling Sets Agency Pricing Power

Clients now arrive with AI-generated hypotheses of their own, so the agency that only reports what a client already suspects gets priced as a vendor, not an advisor. Research tooling is where defensible recommendations get manufactured: primary capture plus behavioral observation, run as a repeatable engine rather than one-off studies. The margin gap opens between agencies that can show the evidence trail and those that assert conclusions.