START TIME: 8:00 am US Pacific Time
Balancing AI & EI: How Emotional Intelligence Elevates Artificial Intelligence | Shelly Singh
Shelly highlights the vital role of emotional intelligence (EI) in market research, even as AI revolutionizes data analysis with its speed and pattern recognition. While AI excels at detecting trends and automating tasks, it lacks the ability to interpret human emotions, context, and social nuances. She shares real-world examples showing how human insight uncovers motivations AI can miss and presents a framework for balancing AI’s power with EI’s depth. Shelly’s key message: AI should enhance—not replace—the empathy and intuition that drive truly impactful research.
Supporting, Not Supplanting: AI’s Role in Modern Qual | incling
In a world saturated with AI chatter, it can be hard to know what role it should play, especially in qualitative research. In this presentation, we’ll share how we’ve integrated AI into our online community platform to ease and speed up the process of qualitative analysis. But we’ll also take stock of what AI should do, and how it can support analysis without compromising the depth or quality of insights. We use AI for what it does best: speed, scale, and structure. Instant transcription, translation, thematic summaries - tasks that once took hours now take minutes. For example, analysing 20 short participant videos used to require over six hours of manual transcription and summarising. Our AI now delivers the same results in under ten minutes. But while AI can help you move faster, it can’t tell you what matters. It can’t read between the lines, spot emotional cues, or shape a compelling story for clients. That still takes human skill. This session will show how we use AI as a smart assistant: saving time, helping researchers adapt, and freeing them up to focus on what truly adds value.
AI Assisted Moderation: Strengths, Gaps, and Applications | Karin McCutcheon
Karin shares insights from her firsthand experience implementing AI-assisted moderation in qualitative market research, exploring both the rationale behind its use and how it works in practice. She’ll examine key advantages and limitations and contrast this approach with traditional methods such as IDIs and quantitative research.
Networking Break - Mycroft Technologies
From Skepticism to Success: Navigating Client Hesitation About AI-Moderated Qualitative Research | Amy Basile
One of the biggest hurdles in adopting AI for qualitative research is client skepticism toward AI-moderated approaches. Drawing on her experience implementing Outset.ai across a range of industries, Amy shares strategies for overcoming resistance and helping stakeholders recognize the value of this emerging methodology. She’ll present insights from a comparative study on participant engagement in traditional IDIs versus AI-moderated interviews, highlighting cases where AI delivered comparable, or even superior, results. Common concerns around depth, nuance, and rapport are addressed head-on, with practical guidance for building client confidence in AI-assisted research.
Goodbye 42-item Survey: 5 Projective Open-ends to Uncover Magnum's Brand | Glaut
Aaker’s Brand Personality, reimagined: 5 open-ended questions. 300 AIMI (AI-moderated, voice-based interviews). This updated approach replaces rigid surveys with a conversational approach, capturing emotional depth and nuanced brand insights through a personalized and engaging experience. It’s faster, richer, and built for scale, without fatigue. You can test it here: http://bit.ly/4kCMVJh