Behind the Curtain: The State of the Expert Network Industry

Every few years, a service that used to run quietly in the background of institutional research starts getting written about in trade press, and expert networks are having that moment right now. Here's what's actually happening underneath the headlines.

Sizing a market that resists being sized precisely

Ask five research firms how big the expert network industry is and you'll get five different numbers, and that's not really a knock on any of them. Estimates for the global market in 2025 range roughly from $3 billion to $5 billion, depending on what's counted (call-based consultations only, or the broader category that includes surveys, panels, and adjacent research formats) and whose methodology you trust. What's more consistent across nearly every estimate is the growth rate: most trackers put annual growth somewhere in the low-to-mid teens percent, with a slower stretch in the early 2020s followed by a clear reacceleration since 2023.

Put plainly: however you draw the line around what counts, the line has been moving up and to the right, and it's been moving faster over the last two years than the two before that.

Who's actually paying for it

The client mix has shifted meaningfully over the past decade. Consulting firms remain the single largest source of spend industry-wide, using expert calls to plug specific knowledge gaps under deadline pressure. Private equity is close behind, and arguably still the segment that shaped the industry's DNA: investors expect diligence to include a handful of operator conversations, not just a data room review, and expert networks are how that expectation gets fulfilled on a tight timeline.

The more interesting shift is who's newly showing up. Corporate strategy and innovation teams have gone from a marginal client segment to one of the fastest-growing, using expert calls the way investors always have: to pressure-test a market-entry decision or a competitive read before committing internal budget to it. That's a genuinely different buying motion than deal diligence, and it's part of why total client counts have grown considerably faster than total revenue. A lot of new logos are still figuring out how often they actually need this.

The industry is splitting into two generations

For most of its history, this business was dominated by a handful of large, first-generation players, most founded in the late 1990s or 2000s, built around a large sales force and an even larger expert database. That model still works, and those firms still carry real scale.

But a second generation of networks has been chipping away at share for several years now, and the pattern is fairly consistent: rather than trying to out-database the incumbents, they specialize. Some focus on a single vertical, deep coverage of healthcare or semiconductors rather than breadth across everything. Some focus on a region. Some lean harder into a specific format, structured surveys and panels rather than one-on-one calls. The through-line is that "bigger" stopped being the only way to win once buyers got sophisticated enough to know exactly what kind of expertise they needed, and started shopping for that specifically rather than defaulting to whoever had the biggest network.

Compliance stopped being a back-office function

The other real shift, less visible from the outside but arguably more consequential, is how central compliance has become to how these firms compete. A decade ago, conflict-of-interest screening was table stakes; everyone did some version of it, and it wasn't really a point of differentiation. That's changed. As regulatory scrutiny around material non-public information has intensified, and as clients themselves have gotten more sophisticated about what good compliance actually looks like, the rigor of a network's screening process has become something buyers diligence before signing a contract, not just a checkbox they assume exists.

That's a meaningful shift in what the product actually is. The value on offer was never just access. It was always access plus a layer of protection around that access, and the protection layer is doing more of the work now than it used to.

What this means going into next year

None of this is likely to slow down soon. The forces driving growth, specialized markets, tighter diligence timelines, a widening pool of professionals willing to consult, aren't cyclical. They're structural. What's more likely to change is who's capturing that growth. The first-generation giants aren't going anywhere, but the ground is shifting under them, and a market that used to reward scale above everything is starting to reward specificity, speed, and demonstrable rigor instead.

For a firm entering this space now, that's actually good news.