PREDICTION: How AI changes qualitative customer/user research?

Two very strong trends that will surely impact how qualitative research is done:

1. Automated interview pipelines: AI handles the customer/user interviews through chat or telephone automatically.

2. Automated thematic analysis: AI either applies a pre-existing taxonomy to qualitative text containing people’s feedback or other experiences, or creates one using inductive logic and then applies it to data coding and analysis.

An expert human *probably* still does better than AI at both tasks, but not enough not to warrant replacement in MANY use cases. Companies want convenience, scale, and cost-effectiveness and using people just doesn’t scale, so applying the “principle of least effort”, human work will increasingly be replaced in these domains.