Source: Featured Blogs - Forrester
Forrester documents a methodological shift where companies are replacing human moderators with AI agents to run customer research interviews, trading depth for volume and speed. This matters because it redistributes who controls the research narrative—an AI moderator asks predetermined or dynamically generated questions without the intuition, follow-up sensitivity, or ability to read room dynamics that human researchers provide. The result is potentially flattened insights: customers describe what they think they should say rather than what they actually believe. Teams treating research as a scalable data extraction problem (how many interviews, how fast) risk losing the texture that justifies doing qualitative work at all.