"Marketing research is now having its own AI moment-but it's not just about faster surveys or automated analysis. Something bigger is happening: We're rethinking who we even get feedback from. Should we still spend thousands recruiting panels? Or are AI-generated "societies in a box" accurate enough to replace them? This question might sound like science fiction, but it's the future every research team will soon face."
"Researchers usually split insights into two categories: Quantitative, which answers the "what": What customers are doing, buying or clicking. This category usually features large-scale surveys with hundreds or thousands of respondents. The other is qualitative, which explores the "why": Why customers churn, why messages resonate or why products flop. This comes from interviews and focus groups-rich but slow and manual."
Marketing research is entering an AI-driven phase that goes beyond faster surveys and automated analysis. Practitioners are reconsidering who provides feedback and whether expensive recruited panels are necessary when AI-generated "societies in a box" may approximate respondent populations. Quantitative methods measure what customers do at scale, while qualitative methods probe why through interviews and focus groups. Qualitative research has been limited by expert availability and slow timelines, especially in niche markets. AI enables training an AI researcher in minutes using existing documents and interviews, generating personalized questions, engaging participants asynchronously in multiple languages, and analyzing responses in real time. This capability promises human-like insight at AI speed.
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