AI-Moderated Interviews: Expanding Reach Without Replacing Human Insight
By Christine Odishoo, Senior Vice President
Ask any researcher: uncovering deep qualitative insights takes time. But what if your next round of customer interviews could unfold while you sleep – spanning languages and time zones? That vision is quickly becoming reality through AI-moderated interviews. These tools are expanding the boundaries of qualitative research, offering speed and scale that were once unimaginable. Yet even as these tools promise unprecedented reach, the real question isn’t whether they can replace human moderators – it’s how humans can best use them to go further, faster, and smarter.
GBK Collective Partner Jeremy Korst and academic partners Professor Stefano Puntoni and Professor Olivier Toubia explored this broader transformation in their May-June 2025 Harvard Business Review article How Gen AI is Transforming Market Research, highlighting how generative AI can make current practices faster, cheaper, and easier to scale. Building on those ideas, this article dives into the emerging world of AI-moderated interviews – how they can support research today, where we see this technology heading next, and why human moderators still matter.
The Role of AI in Moderation: Reach, Scale, and Speed
Traditional human-moderated qualitative IDIs (in-depth interviews) – while highly valuable – take time and are labor-intensive, particularly when it comes to large-scale or multi-country studies. AI-moderated interviews offer efficiencies that weren’t previously possible with humans alone, opening the door to new opportunities that were previously impractical due to time, budget, or logistics. The most exciting opportunity we see for AI-moderated interviews is the ability to add a bonus phase or as a way to extend the research scope into new customer audiences or geographies, without going over-budget or extending beyond key milestone dates.
Think of it as a reach multiplier:
Faster timelines: Interviews can happen asynchronously, without the delays of scheduling. Discussion guide edits can also be scaled up quickly and in multiple languages after the initial pilot. Researchers – armed with powerful AI-enabled tools that come with AI moderation platforms – can more quickly provide reports, increasing speed to insights and enabling business leaders to take sooner action.
Broader country scope: Multi-language capabilities let you connect with global audiences at scale and further streamline the process without the need for translators.
Cost efficiency: Lower per-interview costs mean you can justify research phases that might otherwise be skipped or expand the reach of what’s possible within your budget.
For marketing leaders, adopting AI moderation as a bonus phase or expansion means:
Greater Agility: Quickly pressure-test ideas or concepts before a major investment
Increased Confidence: Validate assumptions across more audiences without blowing up the budget or timeline
Balance: Keep human depth where it matters most, while using AI to stretch scope
Why Humans Still Matter
While AI-moderated interviews can accelerate research, they lack the nuance that only humans can bring. While the AI can be instructed to probe on certain topics or if the responses aren’t sufficiently deep – skilled human moderators can read tone, pick up on unspoken cues, and adapt mid-conversation to probe deeper. That depth and flexibility is critical for topics that require careful probing or where rapport building is essential (e.g., complex topics that require deep category knowledge or unearthing emotional themes from a functional space). That said, AI moderation may have advantages for certain topics – emerging evidence (Zhu, 2025) suggests that respondents feel less social pressure and more openness to discussing some sensitive topics when the interviewer is less human-like.
Additionally, while some participants have expressed their appreciation for the convenience that comes with taking an interview anytime they wish, we’ve seen others become visibly frustrated and impatient when being interviewed by a “robot”, particularly when technical hiccups happen. Human moderators are therefore critical for high-stakes audiences where the interview experience matters (e.g., executives, niche professionals, or loyal customers).
AI-moderated interviews also must be kept shorter (consumers have less patience for them so we recommend a maximum of 20-30 minutes) and we lose out on the interplay between participants that are important for some business objectives like creative ideation. (As of the writing of this article, AI-moderated focus groups are not yet available, though we anticipate that group discussions will be possible in the future.)
Put simply: AI expands what’s possible with humans alone, delivering breadth, but humans are still critically important to deliver depth and nuanced understanding.
A Hybrid Approach
We can also consider a hybrid approach, combining both AI and human moderated interviews to take advantage of the unique benefits of each, for example:
Conducting a small number of human-moderated interviews first, followed by additional AI-moderated interviews to expand the reach while keeping costs low
Conducting AI-moderated interviews first to gather initial, broad insights followed by a deeper dive with a human moderator on specific topics of interest
AI moderation also creates new avenues to layer qualitative interviews onto quantitative (survey-based) research to double-click on key topics, delivering richer insights than surveys alone without the risk of considerably exceeding budgets or extending timelines.
The Right Fit: Human, AI, or Hybrid
At GBK Collective, our philosophy is simple: we focus on business objectives, not on tools or methods. Research methods are never the end goal; they’re the means to uncover insights that matter for your unique needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution – we align our research design with our clients’ objectives, selecting the approach that delivers the most meaningful outcome.
While these decisions are nuanced and require expertise to unpack, below are a few starting questions that you may want to ask yourself when deciding on the moderator approach for in-depth interviews.
While the above questions relate to in-depth interviews specifically, keep in mind that human-led moderation can take many other forms that may be a better fit for your objectives – including focus groups, online discussion boards, and ethnographies.
A Balanced Future
Because this is a rapidly evolving space, we’re continuously testing emerging AI solutions, evaluating their strengths and limitations, and integrating them when they genuinely add value. At GBK Collective, our role as your strategic insights partner is to stay ahead of the curve so we can advise you on the best approach for your objectives – today and tomorrow.
In short, AI-moderated interviews are not about replacing the human touch. They are about expanding the reach of research, making the process more agile and scalable—while keeping depth, nuance, and human judgment at the center.
So, where will you go next? Reach out to the GBK Collective team and let’s figure it out.