Anthropic developed an AI tool that conducts automated, adaptive interviews to gather qualitative user feedback. This moves beyond analyzing chat logs to understanding user feelings and experiences, unlocking scalable, in-depth market research, customer success, and even HR applications that were previously impossible.
After testing a prototype, don't just manually synthesize feedback. Feed recorded user interview transcripts back into the original ChatGPT project. Ask it to summarize problems, validate solutions, and identify gaps. This transforms the AI from a generic tool into an educated partner with deep project context for the next iteration.
Contrary to expectations, job candidates found it easier to talk to an AI interviewer. The lower pressure of a non-human interaction allowed them to relax, be more open, and talk more freely about their experiences, leading to better outcomes.
While AI efficiently transcribes user interviews, true customer insight comes from ethnographic research—observing users in their natural environment. What people say is often different from their actual behavior. Don't let AI tools create a false sense of understanding that replaces direct observation.
A study with Colgate-Palmolive found that large language models can accurately mimic real consumer behavior and purchase intent. This validates the use of "synthetic consumers" for market research, enabling companies to replace costly, slow human surveys with scalable AI personas for faster, richer product feedback.
Expensive user research often sits unused in documents. By ingesting this static data, you can create interactive AI chatbot personas. This allows product and marketing teams to "talk to" their customers in real-time to test ad copy, features, and messaging, making research continuously actionable.
A primary AI agent interacts with the customer. A secondary agent should then analyze the conversation transcripts to find patterns and uncover the true intent behind customer questions. This feedback loop provides deep insights that can be used to refine sales scripts, marketing messages, and the primary agent's programming.
The company developed an AI that conducts highly technical expert network interviews, automating a high-friction manual process. This enables new, scalable content creation like monthly channel checks across dozens of industries—a task too repetitive for human analysts to perform consistently at scale.
Instead of manual survey design, provide an AI with a list of hypotheses and context documents. It can generate a complete questionnaire, the platform-specific code file for deployment (e.g., for Qualtrics), and an analysis plan, compressing the user research setup process from days to minutes.
A key strategy for labs like Anthropic is automating AI research itself. By building models that can perform the tasks of AI researchers, they aim to create a feedback loop that dramatically accelerates the pace of innovation.
Anthropic's data reveals users are moving beyond AI as a creative partner and are now delegating entire tasks. This "directive automation" behavior jumped from 27% to 39% of conversations in just nine months, signaling rapidly growing trust in AI for autonomous work completion.