The evolution of research: from human to AI

Research has always been a fundament of progress, driving innovations and expanding our understanding of the world and our customers. Traditionally, research has been a labor intensive process, which requires countless hours of collecting, analyzing and synthesizing data.

Back in the early days of research, human intellect was the only way of discovering insights. Collecting data, performing calculations and finding insights was all done manually and based on human intuition or experience. The process was often done manually with the human mind as engine, without the availability of tools to process large amounts of information. This way of doing research, with only human cognitive capabilities, limited the pace of progress and innovation. New ways of doing research were needed and thus computational innovations were born.

With the rise of computers from the big tech companies Microsoft and Apple, a more efficient way of calculating was available for researchers. For the first time, they were able to perform complex calculations rapidly, analyze much larger datasets and simulate models that extended the reach of human researchers. Research that normally took years was done in months, weeks or even days. With the combination and synergy between human and computational power, we were able to investigate problems that were previously unthinkable.

What are AI research assistants?

AI research assistants are often referred to as a set of tools that leverage machine learning, natural language processing, and other AI technologies to assist researchers in various tasks. If we look in the dictionary we could define AI interviews as follows:

A person who assists someone or a device or product that provides assistance

With the definition of an assistant known, we can define a research assistant as a person, device or product that provides assistance during research. With the addition of AI to this, we move the tasks this research assistant would do, to AI tooling that help us performing tasks during the research process. These tasks range from automating data collection and analysis to summarizing findings and even generating new hypotheses.

AI research assistants can index vast amounts of information at speeds not comparable to human researchers to identify patterns, and provide insights that might never be found by humans.

The goal of using AI research assistants in your research

The main goal of AI research assistants is to ensure the research process is easier, faster and potentially consisting of less human bias. Since the job is done by computers, AI research assistants can handle big amounts of data in a very fast pace. This helps human researchers to focus on the analysis of insights given by AI, the selection of the right people to speak to and to find the best solutions to their problems. With the use of AI research assistants, it is possible to get bigger amounts of data, against a higher pace and analyzed much faster than with research done without AI.

We can see it as the middle ground between qualitative (detailed and descriptive) and quantitative research (numbers and statistics). The benefit of having AI research assistants, is the fact that it's super efficient and there are major scale benefits.

We have a good example of the addition of AI research assistant where an AI research assistant is used for speaking to the respondents. With the AI research assistant, researchers, designers and product managers are able to speak to many users at the same time resulting in a much higher number of respondents, more insights and a lot more confident about the insights due to the large amount of data. We have written an article here about AI research assistant which is worth reading.

How do AI research assistants work?

AI research assistans exist in different forms and you are able to use them for different use-cases. How the AI research assistant work, depends on the use-case they are created for and the type of work you are willing to be performed by the AI research assistant. AI research assistants always perform task with some form of Artificial Intelligence. So, to understand how AI research assistants work, you need to understand how (generative) Artificial intelligence works. To gain a better understanding of how artificial intelligence works, please see the linked page below

We have written about AI research assistant and how artificial intelligence works on this page.

Benefits of AI research assistants

While humans cannot be missed during the research process and fully automation is still far away, there are big benefits to use AI research assistants during your research process. We have listed a few of them below:

Speed & efficiency

With human interviews, the interviews taken are mostly limited to a small number of your user persona's, most of the time between 10 and 20 (depends on the number of persona's). This is mostly the case due to the limited time available to take interviews during a project and the time it takes to analyze all results. Since AI interviews are conducted with no human interference, it's possible to scale your interview to an unlimited number of users.

Accuracy

AI systems can minimize human error and human bias in data analysis, leading to more reliable results.