While AI handles quantitative analysis, its greatest strength is synthesizing unstructured qualitative data like open-ended survey responses. It excels at coding and theming this feedback, automating a process that was historically a painful manual bottleneck for researchers and analysts.
Instead of focusing on AI for generating final assets, Amazon applies it to solve specific workflow bottlenecks. For one campaign, they used a custom AI tool to curate millions of customer reviews, identifying the most poetic ones in a fraction of the time it would take humans, thus using AI for insight discovery.
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 running a survey, feed the raw results file and your original list of hypotheses into an AI model. It can perform an initial pass to validate or disprove each hypothesis, providing a confidence score and flagging the most interesting findings, which massively accelerates the analysis phase.
Most people use AI to perform tasks like writing copy. A more powerful application is using it as a strategic brainstorming partner. Ask it high-level questions about cultural trends and consumer behavior (e.g., 'Why did this artist pop?') to generate novel insights for your strategy.
The most effective use of AI in content is not generating generic articles. Instead, feed it unique primary sources like expert interview transcripts or customer call recordings. Ask it to extract key highlights and structure a detailed outline, pairing human insight with AI's summarization power.
Instead of manually sifting through overwhelming survey responses, input the raw data into an AI model. You can prompt it to identify distinct customer segments and generate detailed avatars—complete with pain points and desires—for each of your specific offers.
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.
Use an AI agent to systematically analyze sales call transcripts. By automatically extracting and categorizing data like competitor mentions and objections into a structured format (e.g., a spreadsheet), product marketers can quickly identify trends and prioritize their roadmap and messaging.
The most effective way to use AI is not for initial research but for synthesis. After you've gathered and vetted high-quality sources, feed them to an AI to identify common themes, find gaps, and pinpoint outliers. This dramatically speeds up analysis without sacrificing quality.
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.