How AI moderation is redefining honesty in consumer research
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. To view the full session recording click here.
How can AI moderators make respondents more comfortable?
Caroline of Human Dot Plus and Ester Marchetti of Bolt Insight discuss how AI moderators can be implemented into the research process to ensure respondents feel more comfortable and lose the fear of judgement.
Session transcript
Joseph Rydholm
Hi everybody and welcome to our presentation “How AI moderation is redefining honesty in consumer research.” I'm Quirk’s Editor Joe Rydholm. Thanks for joining us today. Just a quick reminder that you can use the chat tab if you'd like to interact with other attendees during the discussion and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenters and we'll get to as many as we have time for at the end. Our session today is presented by Bolt Insight, enjoy the session.
Ester Marchetti
Hi everyone, I'm Ester Marchetti. I'm a co-founder and head of innovation at Bolt Insight and today we'll explore how AI moderation is not just a trend but a pivotal shift that's redefining honesty, empathy and depth in consumer research. And I'm joined today by Carol, managing director of Human Dot Plus. Carol, over to you.
Caroline Brethenoux
Thank you very much, Esther. Very happy to be here. I'm very excited to share as well one of the case studies that we have had in our strong and lasting partnership with BoltChatAI. We are Human Dot Plus, we are a next gen insight and innovation company, tapping into different methodology to make sure we understand emotions, drivers, desires and triggers that helps us understand the why behind the what and really what shapes people's behavior.
Ester Marchetti
Wonderful, Carol, thank you so much for being here. So, at the heart of consumer understanding lies conversation. I hope you'll agree with me. Not just what people say but how they say it and what they truly mean. So why honest responses are the holy grail of qualitative research. It's because that really makes us understand why they are doing what they're doing. But there is an honesty paradox. People want to be truthful, but they fear judgment.
As a former client, consumer connection was everything. I loved speaking to people visiting their homes, championing real consumer closeness because it was not just about insight, it was about empathy, nuance and the everyday realities behind behavior. There was that real-world perspective when I would go and meet some of the consumers I was serving as a client. Going into their lives, understanding their reality, their setup, how their kitchen was laid out, was so eye opening in understanding how well they will relate with the product that I was working on. And also, I was trusting interpreters and translator to bridge the gap between data and emotion to help us as brands stay really human.
So, great qualitative research was so vital to really understand and feel with consumers, but there were some problems sometimes because it was not always possible for all projects. There are some problems that market research faces because despite this intention, there are some challenges when it comes to interviews and I'm going to go through some of this with you.
Social disability bias. Often people tailor their response based on what they think their interlocutor would like to hear. They try to filter what they say through what is socially acceptable or expected rather than what they really believe or do. And that leads to filter, less authentic insights, especially in an interview where they feel watched or evaluated. There is a fear of judgment when topics are personal, taboo or emotionally charged. They might hold back out of fear of being judged and this might be conscious or it might not. And this discomfort really limits their willingness to share openly, especially in a face-to-face setting. And there is some limited consistency at scale. Human-led interviews can vary in tone, in approach and interpretation from one moderator to another. They're also resource heavy, which makes it difficult to reach large diverse sample consistently, especially across markets or sensitive topics.
So, given that, why and when can AI help? Imagine an interviewer that doesn't judge, that doesn't get tired and that asks just the right follow-up questions every time. That's what AI can do, it is not really at all about replacing humans is about removing barriers. What are the areas in which AI can help support what we do as humans. For example, by providing real anonymity. We know that when the AI is on the other side of the conversation, people, they feel less scared, they don't feel judged as much, and so they're able to open up sometimes more when the topic is taboo. It helps with scalability. By offering thousands of in-depth interviews, not only a handful, it can provide a synchronous flexibility when it gives people some place to think and reflect before responding and doesn't get fatigued. So, it can provide some consistency when analyzing thousands of hours of transcripts.
So, when we launched BoltChatAI we were thinking about an end-to-end qualitative engine for qualitative at scale. From dynamic discussion guide to global recruitment to AI-led interviews in local language. It’s qual-at-scale reimagined and the way it works, it can really help you every step of the way from the start when based on your prompt, so your target audience definition and your research objective, it can create a discussion guide, a conversational one, tailored to your objectives and available also in 50+ local languages to the recruitment of engaged participants that will be connected for a one-to-one in-depth 30-minute interview that has been moderated by AI. So, our AI moderator conducts these one-to-one interviews with hundreds of participants in multiple countries and local languages. So, at scale, with quite a sophisticated method in which the AI has been trained based on real human conversations, so it knows how to interact with respondents and how to probe deeper. And then finally to the report. When analyzing all of those transcripts, BoltChatAI generates bespoke reports in less than 24 hours.
Based on what I was mentioning before, our AI moderator can really help and support the human researcher in quite a different way. On one side, this is not a generic chatbot, it's not just a technology that anybody can replicate, but it was trained on hundreds of real interviews by experienced moderators. It combines really AI precision with qualitative intuition. So, it's methodologically rigorous and emotionally intelligent. It also has a dual agent moderation. So, an AI moderator that will follow the discussion guide and an AI referee that will check every single answer that respondents give and then telling the AI moderator to probe deeper when the response is too short or not specific enough or has not been understood, that reacts to what the respondents shares, but in terms of text, voice, videos and more and pictures as well. And then has a two-way discussion to really uncover deeper insights that probes deeper at several levels. Also, when it detects some stronger emotion from the respondent that we need to dive deeper into. And that is fundamentally centered on a human in the loop. So not only it has been trained on human chat, but we keep training it every day, every week with new conversations, with rigorous human quality-check, made by experienced researchers. I also have a video here to show a bit more of the respondent experience.
[Video plays showcasing the respondent experience.]
Since taking these vitamins, I definitely say my body feels more healthy. I used to feel quite fatigued in the morning and like I said earlier, I used to get headaches quite often.
So, my last purchase, I actually went in store to Boots. I'm very lucky that I actually live quite close to my local store. So, it's sort of now in my routine. Whenever I notice that I've only got two or three tablets left, I will actively make the choice to go down to my local shop and I will purchase a new bottle of the daily vitamins that I use.
Ester Marchetti
So, in terms of use cases from early-stage idea testing to quote collection, market exploration, trade storytelling and understanding of creative, our clients are using BoltChatAI to make better, faster decisions with higher quality across the innovation and marketing life cycle.
So, just something to think about for a moment. We have seen hype cycles before, but this time AI is not a gimmick, it's utility-driven, it's constantly improving, it's already embedded in our daily work life and in everything that we do. At the moment, we are in a surging real-world adoption moment, but soon there will be AI agents and autonomous workflow coming and actually agentic moderation is already a thing and it was embedded into what BoltChatAI does from day one with our AI moderator and AI referee.
Companies are working towards AGI is plausible, still speculative, but we can really think about AI improving more and more and being able to handle more tasks independently. So really, this is only the beginning of this journey and really if some of you have seen the movie Her, we are not that far from those moments. Something that really stopped me in my track when I saw this information that you can see on the slide here, where the key use case for using generative AI is changing from just more utilitarian task of generating ideas to really providing emotional support and connection. Even therapy and companionship coming up at place one, followed by organizing my life and finding purpose. So, the way respondents and people are engaging with AI has already changed. And so, we can expect them to be more and more comfortable with engaging with AI and at BoltChatAI, we disclose from the start that is going to be an AI moderator interviewing them and that really helps people to open up with that fear of judgment.
So, AI alone gives you speed, but AI with a human gives you imagination, moral judgment, intuitions. That's why it's so important when tools like ours or what Human Dot Plus does when tools are built with human and AI at the core. When we built our AI moderator, the point was not to replace human, but it was to extend human empathy at scale. This moderation doesn't just ask question, it listen, it empathizes, it plays back what respondents say and creates a connection and helps them open up more as they don't feel that on the other side there will be a judgmental person, but they feel there will be a neutral entity that will help them open up and connect. So, it can really help unlocking honesty and nuance, even with some targets and topics that might be taboo. So, I want now to give the stage to Carol, so you can explain a bit more about the journey of Human Dot Plus with BoltChatAI, over to you.
Caroline Brethenoux
Thank you so much, Esther. So, we have had since the first day actually that we met with BoltChatAI kind of an alignment on purpose because we are all about really understanding people and it's all about, yes, AI as our superpower, but at the end, it's about really leading with that human intelligence, that empathy to really understand people where they are.
So, this is just an example of one of our latest partnerships. We were working, at Human Dot Plus, with a cancer center actually in New York with a very specific task to understand Black and Hispanic populations in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, especially when it comes to cancer, their cancer journey, their drivers and barriers to consider cancer centers and even to really understand what access to cancer, what cancer excellence means for them.
So, we did a lot of work through our own AI-powered property data, really tapping into what was the spontaneous peer-to-peer chatter already online about cancer, their emotions mapping, their triggers in terms of seeking care, etc. But we felt that we were missing a little bit of the piece of our inside journey that was really understanding and probing people. In our methodology, we usually don't recruit anybody, we don't ask any questions, we really go into it about discovery, but sometime they ask some hard question where we need to actually ask people.
Now when we want to ask people actually health care is a very difficult topic because even when we recruit people, there is the biases that Ester was talking about and especially when it comes to health care in the U.S. and Hispanic and the Black community especially being so distrustful of the system, sometimes they don't really want to tell you exactly how they feel because they don't want even their opinion to shape a system that works against them.
So, what was really interesting was to be able to work with BoltChatAI to remove all of these different barriers because the interaction that our respondents had through the platform was really consistent. The fact that it was as well through those AI moderators, remove some kind of, I would, say biases in answering and we got some amazing data, some amazing insights and that really helped us to actually use all those different quotes to compliment all of our insight journey and to really shape the strategy that we were leading with.
So, this was an amazing case study for us because that was removing all the different barriers that we usually see. On top of that, those cultural barriers of the difficulty to engage in health care topics through the lens of the cultural background of Hispanic and Black communities. So, what we really appreciated, for example, was the ability to be very iterative in the process. So many times in our methodology that we use, we like to drill into our data set to really understand the why and keep on iterating those whys. And this is where really we saw the strength of the BoltChatAI platform with all of those moderators that has all of those probing type of capabilities that helps us to go even deeper so that people could really open up in a way that they felt really safe. And especially when it come to cancer, it's a very emotionally charged topic. So, to feel safe, to be emotionally vulnerable in those conversation was really the key for us to unlock. And I have to say that's with BoltChatAI in the platform, we really managed to get to that space and get those really insightful conversations.
In terms of synergy and scalability, what was really interesting for us is the fact that it's very difficult to recruit people that are at the very specific stage on their journey. So here we're looking at people who had a cancer diagnosis or who had somebody in their family that had a cancer diagnosis who were from the Black and Hispanic community, who were living in New York fundamentally, but also New Jersey and Connecticut. So, it was very important for us to find the right solution that could help us to get to those conversations that matter. And at the same time, to be able to do that in absolutely no time, just a couple of days at maximum because we were just running against the clock. And this is where I think for my entire team, the BoltChatAI platform blew our mind in this ability to get as granular as we usually have our standards, really looking for that emotional and very deep rich conversation, but in just a couple of days.
So here you have some of the key quotes and they were too many to actually put on this slide, but I would just read one of them from a male African American that was age 56 that was saying “My cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer and it got me pretty hard. She owned her own business in hair styling and used to let me work there when I was younger… She recently passed away because of it so now I get breast screening when I'm supposed to so I don't put my family through the heartbreak we’ve have already experienced losing my cousin.” So, this ability to get really close and personal with people and to really open up about cancer was really a differentiated factor for us.
And, of course, what was really interesting through the platform is this ability to really guide the conversation and get the answers to some of the big questions that we had on that brief and that project. So, one of them was really understanding that journey, but as well as what motivates that journey towards treatment and seeking care. Especially within that overall mistrust and the difficulty of access of the health care system in the U.S., really we could understand how trust and the human connection were actually the way to unlock that kind of connection and that access to care for Hispanic and Black communities.
Another important insight as well for us was really to understand what do people decode as accessible care and when we talk about personalized care. Because when you talk about access, usually people think about like health insurance, but for us to be able to understand that access is actually about being able to speak my language, being able to sit down with me, being able to understand me as a whole person and to treat me not as a diagnosis, not as a case, but as an entire person with her own story was very important.
So that's why I can't rave more about our partnership because it gave us a lot of beautiful insights that were really important for us in our discovery and in shaping the strategies to really create impact with our client.
Ester Marchetti
Thank you so much, Carol. It was such an incredible project to work on and thank you so much for your partnership. So, just a couple of things before we close. I just wanted to mention also our new features, our dynamic persona. Because when we created this tool, we created it basically because as a former client, it's a tool that we wish we had.
I know when I was a client, it was not just about one project. Insight was about cumulative learning. And so, without some of our features like dynamic persona, meta-analysis, we can’t reactivate all research, track shift, build a living strategy grounded in real conversation. With persona. for example, we can really drive continuous understanding. So, you can ask your persona why they behave the way they do, compare across demographic, test live messages. So BoltChatAI can really turn your research into a living conversation with your audience. And each new project adds to the ecosystem. So, with every iteration, your insights stack becomes sharper, faster, more powerful. So, we compound intelligence as we go still maintaining that incredible depth.
So, to close, can AI truly connect? It's a fair question, I think, but empathy doesn't mean feeling emotion. It means really creating space where others feel safe to share. And it's exactly what AI does best. It never judges, it never interrupts and always listens. The future to us is that this is only the beginning and AI is really evolving into a trusted listener. With scale, consistency and sensitivity, it is really helping us get to truths that were previously out of reach so that quadrangle of speed, cost effectiveness, quality and scale at the same time. The future is not just tech-enabled but is more humane than ever.
So, I'm going to close saying that we are proud to partner over with over a hundred global brands already redefining how they do qualitative. So, if you're curious to explore what this looks like for your team, let's chat.