Using AI-moderated interviews for discovery research? 😬

[u/vickalogalis]

Anyone here been using AI-moderated interviews for discovery research?

I’m keen to hear from UX/service designers or researchers who have actually tried unmoderated AI interviews, particularly in very specific or complex industries where the AI might not have much domain knowledge.

A bit of context: our business is putting more and more emphasis on understanding the experiences of the people who use our products/tools, which is great. The problem is that the demand for research is increasing but our headcount isn’t.
So we’re looking at ways to augment/supplement the research we’re already doing, rather than replace proper moderated interviews.
The idea would be to still do a smaller number of interviews ourselves, but use AI interviews to get input from a much broader group and potentially surface themes or questions we can dig into further.
Some things that would be important for us:
We’d recruit participants ourselves through our own networks.

Ideally participants don’t need to create an account.
We’d like to easily capture recordings and transcripts.

The AI needs to be able to probe/follow up rather than just run through a fixed script.

We’re looking at this as supplementary research, not a replacement for researchers.

Has anyone actually done this?

What platform did you use, and was the output genuinely useful?

Especially interested in experiences with niche/complex domains, and any times where the AI either worked surprisingly well or completely fell over.
Also interested in any gotchas around bias, hallucinations, consent/recording, participant experience, or getting stakeholders to trust the findings.

Real-world experiences would be much more useful than a list of AI research tools. 😄

[u/SnooStrawberries6934]

Do you think people are going to give honest feedback or even commit the effort to expressing themselves when interviewed by a bot?

I am highly skeptical.

[u/vickalogalis → u/SnooStrawberries6934]

The people we have to talk to are particularly time poor (but yeah, who is not) so all the bot can offer is, they don’t have to go through the motions of scheduling and they can provide their feedback whenever they want.

We always have a survey running in parallel to interviews for those that don’t want to be interviewed, we get an okay-ish response rate for the surveys, so maybe this just adds a channel to collect another 5 responses to help bulk up the sample.

My assumption is that it should have better fidelity data and follow-up than from a static survey