The new ways to do AI-powered user / market research explored
Agent simulations, AI moderated conversations, automated panel recruitment and more. How AI is transforming user and market research. DoP Deep Dive.
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive these in-depth pieces of analysis you can upgrade below. New reports added every month.
At some companies, AI agents now outnumber humans in meetings.
In a recent piece published in the Washington Post, they revealed that people are increasingly sending their AI note takers to attend meetings on their behalf instead of attending themselves. In one meeting, there were 6 human attendees and 10 note takers.
On one hand, this is a reflection of just how much of a waste of time many people view meetings. And on the other, it’s a fairly dystopian prediction of the future of work: what happens when nobody attends and the meeting is conducted entirely by AI agents?
And this same principle of replacing humans with AI has started to crop up in another area: user and market research.
New companies have recently entered the space that will allow you to remove users from the process of user research entirely. Instead, these products use huge datasets from your existing human users to build synthetic replicas of them - and predict how they might behave. A study by Harvard Business Review suggests that over 80% of companies are now using or plan to use AI to create synthetic data to mimic real customer behaviors.
This has the potential to completely transform how product teams (and companies in general) do user and market research, for better or worse. And in this Deep Dive, we’re going to explore some of these new companies and technologies in more detail.
If you’re interested in how AI is transforming user research and how it might be able to augment your product’s existing user research processes, this Deep dive should help.
Coming up:
35+ different AI research products you can use to automate everything from user interviews to market analysis
How to create synthetic user replicas that behave like your real customers with 95% accuracy
How AI interviewers are now conducting entire research sessions - and why participants might prefer them to humans
New AI user research features in practice including: AI moderated conversations, multi-agent simulations behavioral predictions, highlight reels and more
Examples of the 21 page user research reports generated by AI you can download and review to see how powerful these tools are
What you’ll get in this Deep dive
This contains over 35 different examples of companies offering user and market research - along with a breakdown of their new AI features and capabilities.
Here’s a snapshot of some of the companies / features included:
How this analysis is structured
The deep dive includes a curated collection of user / market research products, categorized according to their core value proposition. Some of the main categories include:
AI-Native Market Research - products built from the ground up to use AI for conducting and analyzing market/user research.
Agent Simulation - tools that create and simulate virtual users or agents to model real human behaviors and decisions. These agents are typically based on representations of real users. We’ll explore examples together.
UX Research - focused on gathering and analyzing user experience feedback for products and interfaces. Products like Maze, for example, now include the ability to conduct AI moderated conversations as well as the ability to create research from scratch with AI.
Survey Platforms - software for designing, distributing, and analyzing surveys, often with AI enhancements. This includes standard survey platforms like Qualtrics but focuses on their new AI capabilities.
Categories explained
For each company featured, their AI features / capabilities are broken down into over 10 different types. Including:
AI moderated conversations - Automated interviews or discussions led by AI, mimicking a human moderator.
AI Probing - AI asks follow-up or clarifying questions to dig deeper into responses.
Multi-agent simulation - Simulating interactions among many AI agents to model group behaviors or market dynamics.
Behavioral predictions - AI forecasts how users or agents are likely to act in given scenarios.
As well as this, you’ll also get examples of real world companies that are using these products including companies like Microsoft, Canva and others.
A closer look at the companies and AI capabilities in detail
Now let’s take a closer look at how AI is transforming user research with a deeper exploration of some of the features in action.