Can AI drive Innovation in Qualitative Research? Here’s What We’ve Learnt.

By: David Bleines, Camille Stengel & Natalie Lai (Nesta)

As an innovation-driven organization, we continuously explore how emerging technologies can provide new and improved ways for people to solve problems.

A key aspect of our work involves understanding how individuals experience the world—whether it’s the challenges driving our missions or the broader context in which they live, such as the potential impact of AI on citizen science.

At the core of this effort is qualitative research, which helps us uncover people’s real experiences, perspectives, and priorities. This insight is critical in designing effective, people-centered solutions that can truly make a difference.

In collaboration with BIT, Nesta has been experimenting with AI-powered interview platforms and AI-driven chatbot interviewers to explore their potential for scaling qualitative research like never before.

Initially, these platforms were tested for internal purposes, but our experiments opened up a larger conversation about the real-world implications of using AI-driven tools to gather insights at scale and what this could mean for the future of qualitative research, particularly in data collection.

AI-powered tools offer the potential to capture a broader range of experiences. One of the most exciting features is their ability to reach a larger and more diverse audience in a short amount of time.

In a traditional, human-led qualitative study, interviewing hundreds of participants could take months. However, with AI-powered chatbots, we conducted nearly 200 interviews in just a few weeks—a scale and speed previously limited to quantitative research…

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