Why AI built for research is built different 

Whether you’re loving all the AI news, or hating it, it’s impossible to avoid. 63% of research teams and agencies have already adopted AI. It’s our reality that AI is molding the research process, reshaping the researcher’s role, and rewriting what it means to deliver value to stakeholders. 

But you’re not throwing participant data into ChatGPT to generate your charts or asking Gemini to find your sample. AI built for research is a little more specific, and secure. AI thrives when it’s given a specific task, reducing the chance of hallucinations or external information leaking into your results. This is just one thing that differentiates AI built for research.  

So, what does it look like? Forget the future, what’s available now? Let’s explore the practicalities of AI built for research and the features that will give you a leg up with increased speed to insight at every stage of the research process. 

Discover more: Register for our webinar, Adapt to thrive: AI and the market researcher

Research HX

Before we jump to the AI tools, it’s useful to know where they live. Each of these powerful features is part of Research HX, our solution built specifically for research, by researchers who’ve all ‘been there, done that’ and get what you need from your tech.  

• End-to-end integration across tools and systems streamlines processes, reduces complexity, and accelerates delivery. 

• Automation saves your workflows from time-consuming tasks like data preparation and analysis, cutting traditional research time by more than half. 

• AI power to unlock new possibilities for your research. Which is what we’re going to explore now. 

Find out more: Explore Research HX 

Getting started with your research: AI Survey Scripting

We all know how it usually goes, you draft a survey in Word, you circulate it, get conflicting feedback, you update it, circulate it again. Finally, you get to a point where you can script the survey. Depending on the complexity, this can take a while. By the time it’s built, it’s probably changed again, and so on it goes. 

However, we can flip the script (pun intended) with “AI Survey Scripting”. Once your Word document is final-ish you can upload it directly to the tool to create a structured survey draft in seconds, with the tool recognizing different question types and layouts. 

Now you’ve gone from document to consistent framework in hours, not days. Scripting is streamlined with fewer errors and a cleaner, more consistent framework for your research.  

This tool is continuously evolving to meet researchers’ needs, with the published tool in early stages of development and expanded versions available from next year.  

AI in data collection

AI Open Assist 

AI built for research and enrich your surveys to draw out deeper open-ended feedback. 

Open assist is built into Decipher (our survey tool and part of Research HX). When you need to get richer answers for certain questions, build this in and it will probe respondents to provide more information based on the answer they’ve started with. 

What does this look like in your survey? 

Scripted Survey: “How do you feel about x brand?” 
Participant: “Good” 
AI Open Assist: “What exactly makes you feel good about x brand?” 
Participant: “I love the brand ambassador” 
AI Open Assist: “What do you love about the brand ambassador?” 

In short, you get an answer you can actually work with. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, AI Open Assist gets you past the dry outer layer into the useful flesh of… well… onion… If the results make you cry, we take no responsibility. 

Video and audio questions 

You can now make it really easy for participants to answer open-ended questions. In their own words, using a simple in-built video or audio only question type. That means at any point in your survey where you need rich human narratives; you can now insert a video question and go deeper.  

With the advancement of AI for data analysis (including AI-powered transcription and summarizing open-ended feedback), open-ended questions can be used in large, structured quant studies. AI built for research can help transform these responses into scalable insights that combine the depth of qualitative with the rigor of quantitative research. 

Automated sampling: Sample marketplace 

Researchers can spend days juggling vendors to buy survey samples. And just when you think you’re done dealing with vendors, you throw a bunch of bad data out and start all over again. 

With Sample Marketplace built into Research HX, you can source, compare, and genuinely launch in minutes​. Setup, linking, and billing are all in one place, reducing the headache of procurement. Sample Marketplace is filled with only trusted vendors to improve data quality and server-to-server integration to battle the bots you’re saving time and reducing errors with automated sample sourcing. Leaving you with plenty of time to tackle bigger, and bigger projects. 

AI powered analysis 

AI Summaries, Video and Audio Summaries 

Automatically analyzing open-ended responses has breathed new life into qualitative research. Using predefined prompts to surface topics and insights in Visualizations, tedious manual work is reduced, and the application of qualitative collection methods becomes viable for ad hoc and small projects.  

Unlike manual coding, AI can process responses instantly to extract topics or create a summary from verbatims to help teams surface insights faster.​ Explore the data with different selection types. 

And remember, this can be done with video and audio questions too. The decadence of qualitative is in your hands. 

Read more: Qualitative research, upgraded: Quantitative scale with AI  

Text analytics with Narrative HX 

We’ve covered AI analysis at the respondent level, so let’s zoom out and look at the whole study. With Narrative HX you can maximize your analysis by turning unstructured data into ​actionable insights. 

Narrative HX uses AI to analyze unstructured text, in over 50 languages (like verbatims or media transcripts) without lengthy setup or pre-defining categories. Surface themes, sentiment, and trends in a fraction of the time to relieve the burden of manual model building.​ This AI tool helps you build complex text analysis models in minutes, without special training or the requirement to be a hard-core coder or engineer. 

AI powered quality assurance and analysis: AI Computes 

Back to the respondents for a moment. Available in both Visualizations (analysis and data visualization within Research HX) and Decipher, AI Computes can be used to extract information from open ended questions.

Process respondent verbatims, flag PII for removal, translate most languages, and assign sentiment and topics. Use AI Computes to enhance verbatims to make them searchable, usable, and then actionable. 

Again, reduce your manual work, keep all your data within one secure solution and empower your teams to expand possibilities with AI built for research.  

Reports that drive impact

Getting your research in front of key stakeholders is one thing. Getting them to remember the impact of your insights is another. And this is what you want, so that you become an indispensable resource. This is the part that every researcher cares about. How to show RIO, drive impact, and democratize your data. 

One research agency speaks about how they used dashboards to empower a client to keep finding the answers they needed. Classic working smarter, not harder. Your data keeps giving without the need for a researcher to always be hands-on. Plus, stakeholders feel engaged in the process, embedding research further in business decisions. 

“Instead of spending an additional three months to support the project once it was delivered, I was free to focus on more strategic issues at the agency.” Says Angel Roberts, VP, Finance & Operations at Trifecta Research, “It instantly became four times faster to create the initial trending report and the client was empowered to handle almost all the follow-up requests by stakeholders.” 

Read the full Trifecta case study here. 

Automated report generation: Visualizations 

Automated PowerPoint reports. Yes, we’ll say that again. Automated PowerPoint reports. 

Streamline report creation, going from hours to minutes, and customize slides by question type and tags. Create and save customized templates for each stakeholder and benefit from integration with data collection, meaning reports can be generated in a few easy steps with less chance for human error and disjointed data when transferring between platforms. Spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on analysis and storytelling for your stakeholders. This is one of the human skills that even AI built for research can’t replace, and where talent can differentiate you from your competitors.  

Agentic researchers: Research Agent in Visualizations 

We saved the best for last. A data visualization assistant in your pocket (or in this case, in the Visualizations solution) to help you nail this critical step. 

Research Agent is an AI-powered assistant that uses visual analysis to review and summarize research report slides. It helps you get information on how to refine design, layout, and insights with natural language input and outputs. 

​How does this work, you might ask? Select a slide and ask a series of questions, using pre-determined prompts, or your own, and the agent processes the content and gives you answers. This could help you work in industry best practices or evaluate how effectively your dashboard is communicating a clear narrative. The agent can even conduct a quality assurance review by identifying typos, missing elements, and layout issues.  

This gives you a personalized assistant to make your work better, your story stronger and your reporting more compelling. All withing a secure environment, no feeding external LLMs your precious data.  

Currently, Research Agent is only available to admin users as we gather feedback. But, watch this space. 

But this is just the beginning. Agentic AI built for research is on the horizon. We believe that integrated, task-specific agents will revolutionize the researcher’s role, and that this is starting to be realized. With true agentic power in the future, researchers will be able to tap into agents to automate even more of their processes, saving hours. 

Final word

Researchers are gold, and like how other precious metals are also important, they can’t be replaced, and nothing is quite the same; however, researchers will have more time for strategic tasks and human connection.

These same aspects have been vital to human survival for hundreds of thousands of years (300,000 if we want to be specific). Understanding how humans interact with the world is the reason market research was invented in the first place and until machines can feel, they won’t be able to do this better than humans. This foundation isn’t going anywhere, but a little help along the way and fewer tedious tasks are always welcome. 

Want to find out more? Visit our solution page to book a demo with one of our experts to see how these tools could help you and your research.