Qualitative research has always been the beating heart of deep consumer understanding. It’s where nuance, emotion, and the “why” behind behaviour come into focus, often in ways that quantitative methods can’t fully capture. And for many questions, traditional qualitative approaches remain essential.
But what happens when the question is urgent, budgets are limited, or you need feedback at a larger scale?
That’s where AI-moderated qual can offer something new. Not to replace traditional approaches, but to fill a gap between quant and qual. At element54, we’ve been piloting a hybrid model that blends AI-powered interviews with real people to accelerate time to insights and more affordably.
The Bottleneck in Traditional Qual
We continue to deliver traditional in-depth interviews and focus groups for many clients and they remain invaluable when:
- Deep human rapport is needed
- Complex stimuli or exercises are involved
- Exploratory understanding is still forming and needs human navigation
But we also hear the same pain points: timelines are long, sample sizes are small, and costs can limit access, especially for smaller scope studies.
Where AI-Moderated Qual Fits
We use AI moderators trained to conduct dynamic interviews that adapt in real time based on how participants respond. These aren’t chatbots. They’re structured yet conversational, and the best part: they allow you to scale depth.
- Interviews in as little as 24–48 hours
- Real humans (not synthetic sample)
- Mobile-first design for real conversations
- Broader reach—potential for hundreds of interviews in multiple languages
- Built-in theme extraction
- Ideal for quick, directional insight without compromising nuance
A Case Study: Loyalty Programs
We recently ran a study on loyalty programs using the Agile Qual platform. In under 24 hours, we collected 20 interviews (10 English, 10 French) and uncovered insights around:
- Desire for everyday rewards (e.g. groceries, pharmacy, fuel)
- Importance of mobile integration and real-time updates
- Frustration with expired points and unclear redemption rules
- Loyalty driven more by ease and habit than by point value
This was a case where the flexibility of AI-moderated interviews allowed the platform to pursue different themes for each participant to deeper follow-ups, something more challenging in a regular survey and traditional qual approaches would have taken weeks to deliver at scale.
A Smarter, More Accessible Layer of Qual
The value here is about access and agility. AI-moderated qual doesn’t replace human insight, it provides it in new places:
- When you need insight this week, not next month
- When your budget doesn’t stretch to full qual, but you still want depth
- When you need qual to keep pace with the rest of your agile workflow
And because this method still involves real people, the output reflects authentic human perspectives, just captured faster. We continue to deliver traditional in-depth interviews and focus groups for many clients and they remain invaluable when:
- Deep human rapport is needed
- Complex stimuli or exercises are involved
- Exploratory understanding is still forming and needs human navigation
Let’s Talk Fit
We’re excited by the role AI can play in reshaping how qual is used. Not replacing traditional depth but making qualitative insights more available when timelines or budgets are tight.
If you’re curious about where this might fit in your current process, let’s have a conversation.
Contact us at info@element-54.com.
