Scheduling and inviting participants

Once your AI interview is published, participants join through a link and the AI conducts the sessions. This article covers how to set the study up to run at the volume you need and how to get participants into it.

SETTING THE WINDOW

Meeting Start Date and Meeting End Date define when the study is open. Participants can join at any point inside that range, so someone in a different time zone joins whenever suits them.

Give yourself a wider window than you think you need. Sessions cost nothing while the study sits open, and a short window is the most common reason a study finishes under quota.

SETTING CAPACITY

Max Session Per Study is the total number of participants who can complete the interview using the study link. Once the limit is reached, the link stops accepting new participants.

Set this to the sample size you actually need. Sessions run in parallel, so there is no queue and no pacing constraint beyond this number.

SETTING SESSION LENGTH

Duration is the expected length of each session, and the AI uses it to pace the interview so all research goals are covered in the time available.

This makes Duration and your goal set interdependent. A 30 minute session with four goals gives the AI room to probe properly. The same duration with ten goals, several set to Deep, means the later goals get compressed or cut short.

If the guide is long, either raise the Duration or reduce the depth settings. See Preparing your discussion guide for upload.

GETTING PARTICIPANTS IN

Three routes, and they can be combined.

Direct invitation. Enter participant email addresses in the Participants section and each receives an invitation email with the study link. Add a Meeting Description so they know what to expect before they open it.

Sharing the link. After publishing, the Share tab holds the study link. Copy it, generate a QR code, post it to Facebook, X or LinkedIn, or send it by email. Enable Short URL under Link Settings shortens the link first. The Heading and Description fields set the text that appears alongside a shared link.

Decode Audience Cloud. Share With Audience recruits participants through Decode rather than you distributing the link yourself.

SCREENING PARTICIPANTS

The screener does more work on an AI interview than on a live session, because nobody is meeting the participant before the interview starts.

Set up qualification questions in the Screener section, with each answer option set to either Qualify or route to the Screenout Page.

Screened-out participants do not count against Max Session Per Study, so the screener protects your quota as well as your sample quality.

TRACKING PROGRESS

The Results tab shows the state of the study. The status card breaks Total Responses down into completed, live and dropped, so sessions currently in progress show under live.

Completed sessions appear in Files as they finish, with recordings and transcripts available immediately, so you can start reviewing while the rest of the study is still running. Reading the first two or three sessions early is worth the time, because a goal that is too broad or a depth setting that is wrong is far better caught after three sessions than after thirty.

AFTER FIELDWORK

Close Study ends the study.

Because every session covered the same goals at the same depth, themes across sessions are directly comparable, and the session count on each theme tells you how widely a pattern holds. See Understanding your AI interview results.