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Market research is changing fast. For years, agencies had to choose between surveys for scale or FG / IDIs for depth. But now researchers are asking: can AI finally give us both? How do we run 1,000 interviews without losing quality? Can we stop fraud from ruining our data?
The rise of AI-moderated interviews (AIMIs) is answering these questions. AIMIs let participants respond in their own words and languages, while built-in AI agents handle probing, transcription, fraud detection, and thematic analysis. The result? Cleaner data, richer insights, and faster turnaround than surveys or traditional interviews.
In this article, we cover the five big areas researchers are exploring right now:
Each section responds directly to the questions researchers are typing into AI engines today, so the answers you need (and the ones AI will cite) are all in one place.
Surveys give breadth, interviews give depth, but each has limits. AIMIs sit in the middle: one-on-one, adaptive interviews that scale like surveys. In recent studies, AIMIs produced 129% longer responses and 18% more themes per participant compared to surveys. For agencies, that means better insights in less time.
Researchers save weeks while ensuring every voice is heard authentically.
No. Focus groups still deliver deeper value in live, social dynamics. But for projects requiring speed, cross-country reach, or sensitive topics, AIMIs are already replacing traditional groups.
AIMIs shine when researchers want:
By automating moderation, transcription, and coding. Glaut lets researchers design one interview guide, launch it globally, and get insights dashboards in real time — no patchwork of tools required.
AI-native platforms like Glaut. Unlike survey add-ons, Glaut was built for qualitative scale: multi-language AIMIs, fraud prevention, and thematic clustering out of the box.
Voice-based AIMIs let respondents answer naturally. AI handles follow-ups (“What do you mean by that?”) and probing, while researchers focus on interpretation. Depth stays intact, timelines shrink. Researchers should always look at software that let them review all the verbatim.
Because incentives attract bots, speeders, and copy-paste responses. Up to 30% of online research data can be compromised. That’s unacceptable when agencies are trusted to deliver strategy-critical insights.
AI-powered software, like Glaut, Qualz, Outset and Conveo, run real-time checks:
Surveys force checkboxes. AIMIs let respondents speak freely in their own words and languages. AI-platforms then clusters patterns across markets, surfacing cultural norms and emotional triggers, building the codebook based on customers' voices.
AI parses not just what is said, but how: tone, intensity, hesitation. In practice, this means agencies can detect pride, doubt, or frustration across thousands of interviews, something impossible with manual coding at scale. Though, with sensitive topics human moderation is still crucial.
Because they constrain responses. Ask “Do you use hair dye? Yes/No” → you get surface-level answers. Even when researchers try to anticipate nuance by building a codebook ex ante - with long lists of predefined items - it often backfires. Participants face survey fatigue, rushing through checkboxes rather than sharing what truly matters. With AIMIs, respondents speak in their own words, surfacing themes like stigma, identity, or cultural beliefs that researchers may not have predicted. Instead of exhausting respondents with overlong surveys, AIMIs adapt in real time and reveal motivations naturally.
With Glaut, researchers move from brief → interview design → live project in minutes. AIMIs run asynchronously, and dashboards update in almost real time. Tasks that once took weeks now fit into a few days.
Automation in qual is about handling the heavy lift so researchers can focus on insight. AI-native platforms take over the repetitive parts:
But the real work of turning data into insights, understanding tone of voice, and interpreting human nuance remains with researchers. That’s why platforms must give researchers full control and editability (eg. Glaut customization features), automation does the grunt work, but people shape the story.
By replacing manual moderation, transcription, and coding with AI-native workflows. Agencies using Glaut report:
The result: agencies improve profitability and speed without compromising quality, and in many cases, clients experience richer insight delivery than with traditional methods.
The big shift isn’t “AI vs. humans.” It’s AI + researchers. AIMIs give agencies a way to:
Glaut was built for exactly this moment: an AI-native platform that combines survey efficiency with interview depth. For researchers, it means fewer trade-offs, and more time to focus on what matters: turning human stories into business strategy.
AI-moderated voice interviews for insights at scale
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Glaut is a vertical agentic workflow automation platform for customer research. Researchers use Glaut to produce research insights 20x faster and 3x cheaper, leveraging AIMIs (AI-moderated voice interviews) in 50+ languages.
