Editor’s note: Jay Zaltzman is the president of Bureau West. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared under the title “AI for Qualitative Researchers – What You Need to Know.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a computer or machine’s ability to mimic human capabilities. This includes tasks like learning, problem-solving and decision making. AI can be implemented in many areas ranging from self-driving cars to facial recognition software.
AI systems are typically trained on large amounts of data. The data can be used to teach the system how to perform a specific task like recognizing faces or translating languages. In addition, AI systems can learn from experience. This means that they can improve their performance over time as they are exposed to new data. AI systems can make decisions on their own, meaning that they can be used to solve complex problems without human intervention.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot which was a big step forward in AI capabilities. ChatGPT can generate human-quality text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content and answer questions in an informative way.
ChatGPT is considered a significant development because it demonstrates the potential AI has in a broad range of sectors. ChatGPT can be used to create virtual assistants that can help people with tasks like appointment scheduling, making travel arrangements and providing customer service. The underlying ChatGPT capabilities could also be used to help with marketing research.
AI can perform marketing research tasks faster and more efficiently. AI algorithms can process and analyze large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do so. This enables marketing researchers to gain insights more quickly and to make data-driven decisions with greater speed and accuracy. In addition, AI can identify patt...