IDIs give live dialogue with a small N. Glaut AIMIs scale depth to hundreds. Here’s how to decide which fits your goals.
When to use each
Choose Glaut AIMIs when you need:
• Rich depth at scale ( from dozens to thousands)
• Hard-to-reach audiences and global coverage
• Fast turnaround from brief to insights
• Consistency across interviews and fewer missed probes
• Better cost per interview with built-in fraud prevention
Choose Traditional IDIs when you need:
• Live, bespoke rapport with a specific moderator
• Very delicate or high-stakes conversations handled synchronously
• Co-creation or high-touch exercises that benefit from live facilitation
• Add-on ethnographic elements (in-context observation)
Often best together: Use Glaut to surface patterns quickly, then run a handful of IDIs to deep-dive edge cases or workshop solutions.
Humans behind the software:
a real team partners with you co-designing guides, reviewing edge cases, and improving the platform continuously based on your feedback.
Not always. Think of Glaut AIMIs as a way to extend the reach of in-depth interviews, not eliminate them. AIMIs deliver IDI-level depth at scale, with the added benefits of speed, consistency, and built-in analysis. But there are contexts where a small set of live, human-moderated IDIs remain the right choice, such as highly delicate topics, executive interviews, or creative co-creation sessions that thrive on live human rapport. In practice, many research teams use both: AIMIs to capture breadth and patterns quickly, and IDIs to deep-dive into edge cases or build live creative dialogue.
No. AIMIs never fabricate answers. The AI moderator’s role is to ask questions, adaptively probe, and transcribe. Every word of data comes directly from the participant, in their own voice or text. The AI moderates the conversation, ensures coverage of your guide, and applies consistency checks. Fraud detection agents catch low-effort, copy-pasted, or gibberish inputs. What you get is authentic respondent data - captured in full and instantly available for analysis - without the risk of moderator bias or transcription gaps.
Yes, down to the last detail. Researchers control the entire design process: research goals, screener, quotas, languages (50+ supported), interview guide, follow-ups, branching logic, and tone of moderation. You also decide how aggressive the AI-moderator should be with probing, what thresholds to apply for fraud checks, and how the analysis dashboard is configured.. You can pause, edit, or relaunch projects at any point, and nothing goes live without your approval. AIMIs are built to keep you firmly in control, with Glaut doing the operational heavy lifting.
We take security and compliance seriously. Glaut is fully GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001 certified, trusted by global firms like IPSOS and Kantar to build secure and compliant AI-native research.
