AI-moderated research is a powerful way to conduct multi-modal (combining different formats such as text, video, and audio) qualitative and quantitative research studies at scale. Instead of a human researcher hosting every single session, an advanced AI agent, trained as an expert researcher, conducts the interview, test, or session directly with participants.
The AI moderator dynamically manages the entire experience end-to-end by:
- Screening participants before they join the study.
- Asking both quantitative and qualitative research questions while following your study guardrails and research goals.
- Probing for deeper insights and asking for clarification based on participant answers.
- Showing stimuli (images, concepts, copy, or prototype screenshots) and asking participants to react to them.
- Ending the research session by thanking the participants.
Why teams use AI-moderated research
AI moderation makes it easier to run research by reducing the manual work involved in traditional 1:1 interviews. Here’s why product, design, marketing, and research teams use it:
- Speed: Run dozens of sessions simultaneously and gather insights in hours rather than weeks, including outside of regular working hours or across international time zones.
- Scale: Talk to a larger pool of participants than a human researcher could moderate 1:1, increasing your sample sizes.
- Consistency: Every participant experiences the same core flow and receives highly comparable, objective follow-up questions.
- Coverage: Say goodbye to manual note-taking. Full transcripts, video recordings, highlight reels, and automated summaries are generated instantly, making insights easy to review and share with stakeholders.
What AI-moderated research is (and isn’t)
Below is a quick breakdown of how AI-moderated research fits into your workflow:
It is:
- A structured conversation hosted by an AI moderator agent and guided entirely by your specific research plan, tasks, and questions.
- A natural participant experience that feels like a live interview (voice and video enabled) with personalized, contextual follow-up questions.
- A powerhouse for high-volume qualitative data. It rapidly generates transcripts and summaries alongside structured data at speed.
It isn’t:
- A complete replacement for human research. Human-moderated sessions are still best when you want to go even deeper into a topic, or when stakeholders need to observe in real time. AI-moderated sessions, on the other hand, help you get similarly rich insights across more participants at scale.
- A basic, rigid survey tool. Unlike standard quantitative survey tools, it seamlessly blends deep qualitative dialogue with quantitative metrics into a single research experience.
- An unguided, open-ended chatbot. The AI moderator adheres to your predefined research goals and guardrails without wandering off-topic.
AI-moderated research works together with traditional research methods by helping teams collect qualitative insights at a larger scale. It can provide more context than surveys while requiring less time and effort than conducting individual interviews.
Learn more about Typeform’s AI-moderated research tool Research Flow.