Four days, one venue, and more than a thousand people from across the research industry. ESOMAR Congress 2026 gather in Valencia. The CodexMR team is going for the whole stretch, not sending one person to scout the floor and report back. Our plan is simple: talk to people, in person, about what is slowing quant teams down, what workflow issues they’re running into right now, and how we’re helping teams move past it.
When Is ESOMAR Congress 2026 Valencia
ESOMAR Congress 2026 takes place from 1–4 September at the Palacio de Congresos in Valencia, Spain. ESOMAR expects experts from agencies, brands, and technology providers to attend this year, making it the industry’s largest annual global gathering.
This year’s theme is Metamorphosis, built around how human understanding, technology, and research practice are changing together, before decisions get made rather than after.
What the Programme Signals
We have not sat in these sessions yet, so this is what the published programme points to, not a recap. ESOMAR’s flagged themes for 2026 cluster around five areas:
- AI and automation across survey design and analysis
- Panel quality and respondent engagement, as bot traffic and declining response rates keep climbing
- The shift from one-off projects toward always-on insight communities
- Data privacy compliance across markets
- Mixed methods that pair behavioural data with traditional survey work
We expect a program packed with AI case studies and stage demos, and that’s a good sign: the industry is talking in specifics again, not just hype. However we want to go one layer deeper than a stage can. A five-minute demo shows what a tool does. A real conversation shows what it does inside a live tracker, with client edits landing mid-fieldwork. That’s the layer we’re most curious about in Valencia, and where we plan to spend most of our time: trading notes with the people running the work day to day.
What We Are Looking For
Three days on the floor beats another AI panel discussion, but only if we spend it right. We are going in with specific questions:
- What breaks when teams try to automate survey programming at scale
- Where QA still fails
- What a Research Director needs to see before trusting an AI vendor
If you are heading to Valencia and any of that sounds like your week too, reach out. We would rather set up a conversation before the congress starts. Hoping to cross paths in a hallway between sessions is not much of a plan.
We will publish a follow-up once the congress wraps. It will cover what we heard on the floor, not what we expected going in.
Want to see what the CodexMR platform does before you talk to us in person? The 6-step CodexMR workflow is the place to start.
