Leveraging AI & Synthetic Data
Attending Quirks Chicago 2025 helped me understand AI newfound and evolving role in the insights industry. I was relieved to hear that we and robots can work in harmony together to achieve great things. Like a calculator is to a mathematician, AI is primarily an efficiency tool in the research toolbox to speed up the time and effort needed to synthesize loads of data and summarizing a lot of existing insights within. It is NOT in a place where it is in of itself generating and replacing consumer-derived insights, the big ‘ahas’ and surprises that reveal themselves in qualitative or even quantitative research
Similarly, synthetic data (AI-generated participants to take quantitative surveys) is highly experimental at this stage and being used to supplement real data or to test studies before launching to a real (more expensive) sample). It’s not ready to replace real data, as it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know and can miss the ’surprise factor’ of real respondent data – results have sometimes shown synthetic participants picking different reasons from real ones.
5 Scenarios to Leverage AI & Synthetic Data
- Help to transform surveys into the right speaking style or tone that fits the brand voice
- Uncover macro trends (e.g., usage, preferences)
- Quick survey testing to spot issues before full launch
- Quick-turn data when you need ‘good enough’ insights fast
- Test hypotheses
2 Tools to Test
- Use a video analyzer that can distill themes from loads a video content, saving immense time from manual analysis and creating video reels around themes
- Try machine moderation for more straightforward question/ answer type of studies that don’t require dynamic probing. Like our human-driven Booth®s, multiple conversations can happen at once
At KNow Research we’re also investigating more text-based platforms and methodologies where participants can comfortably and anonymously engage in conversation with other participants (like in a Reddit forum) in a way that reveals how consumers talk about a certain topic in a real authentic way. Platforms at Quirks showed they can make it seamless to integrate quant and qual questions into their text platform, including prompts for video and photo uploads that makes it user friendly for participants to upload content and answer prompts within one thread.
We feel optimistic about our role as humans to mine the rich powerful consumer insights and stories through both traditional research and in learning how and when to adopt and utilize AI-powered platforms for quick-turn and interactive research. And we’ve just launched our Insight Engine offering to help brands with thought leadership repositories find new themes within their data more efficiently with AI.
Let us KNow if you’d like to learn more about the evolution of our AI Playbook or how we can build you a custom Insight Engine, please reach out admin@knowresearch.com
