What Is AI Moderator?

AI Moderator lets you run qualitative interviews at a scale that is not possible with a human moderator. Instead of a researcher conducting each session, an AI conducts them from your discussion guide, so a study that would take weeks of scheduled interviews can run in days.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT FROM A SURVEY

The AI is not reading questions from a list. It works from research goals, which are topic areas rather than fixed questions, and it forms its own questions in the moment based on what the participant has just said.

That means the conversation goes where the participant takes it. When someone gives a vague or incomplete answer, the AI follows up. When someone raises something interesting, it explores it. You get the depth of an interview rather than the flat answers a survey returns, because the participant is talking rather than selecting options.

You control how far this goes. Each goal carries a Conversation Depth setting: shallow for context, moderate for supporting topics, deep for the goals your research question rests on. See Write the discussion guide.

WHY IT SCALES

Nothing to schedule. Participants join through a link whenever they are free, inside the date range you set. There is no calendar to coordinate, no time zones to work around, and no rescheduling.

Sessions run in parallel. Twenty participants can be interviewed at the same time. Sample size is limited by Max Session Per Study, not by researcher availability.

No researcher in the room. Sessions run unattended, so fieldwork happens while your team works on something else.

This changes what qualitative research can answer. Six interviews tell you what six people think. Thirty tell you which of those reactions are patterns, and that gives more detailed insights.

WHY IT IS CONSISTENT

Every participant is taken through the same research goals at the same depth. There is no drift between the first session and the twentieth, and no variation between one moderator and another.

Consistency matters more as sample size grows. When a theme appears across twenty sessions, you know it appeared because participants raised it, not because the questioning changed partway through fieldwork.

WHAT PARTICIPANTS EXPERIENCE

Participants open the link, accept the consent note, pass the screener if you have set one, and join. The AI greets them and speaks in the voice and language you chose. The goal names run across the top of the screen so they can see where they are in the interview.

Where you have attached a stimulus to a goal, the AI introduces it at that point and asks questions about what it detects in the file. Participants can also share their screen, and the AI asks questions about what they are showing.

WHAT YOU GET BACK

Every session is recorded and transcribed automatically, with no notetaking and no write-up.

Results use the same structure as any qualitative study in Decode: recordings with transcripts, per-session analytics, highlights, themes, and study-level analytics including the AI Summary and Theme Analysis Panel. Because the AI covered the same goals in every session, themes across sessions are directly comparable. See Understanding your AI interview results.

WHERE IT FITS

AI Moderator does not replace live moderated research. It covers different ground. See AI Moderator vs live human moderator and When to use AI Moderator.