Landed on Punk Press 29 April 2026 from Hugh Carling | Co-founder of Liveminds
Anthropic‘s recent announcement that 81,000 people had taken part in AI-led interviews set a new bar for studies described as ‘qualitative’. But that bar has been moving rapidly for years, with the rise of AI and the influx of venture capital into research technology.
Qual has traditionally been about depth: working with smaller, carefully selected samples to understand people’s experiences, motivations and meaning. Now, with AI, many companies are selling ‘qual’ as something that can be automated across much larger samples.
For some, this is an opportunity. For others, it contradicts the fundamental tenets of qual research.
So Liveminds asked a group of expert qualitative researchers from the Insight Consultants Group and PunkMRX communities what they think. Liveminds captured the QualMinds panel’s views on video, analysed their responses and curated the highlights, ready to view below:
A few themes came through strongly in their responses:
➡️ Whether ‘qual at scale’ is an oxymoron depends on how you define qualitative research in the first place.
➡️ There was broad agreement that AI and ResTech can add real value by collecting large volumes of rich, open-ended responses quickly and affordably.
➡️ However, most felt that if qual is about human inquiry, interpretation, probing, nuance and depth, then scale starts to undermine the thing that makes qualitative research valuable.
➡️ Several argued that these methods are better described as ‘open quant’ or ‘conversational quant’ rather than ‘qual’.
What do you think? Is ‘qual at scale’ a useful evolution of qualitative research, or are we blurring the line between two very different things?
👉👉👉 Join the debate on LinkedIn HERE.
A big shout out to those who took part in the QualMinds video.
🔵 Simon Shaw of Ignite Research
🔵 Katherine Rhodes of QUALITATIVE STREET LIMITED
🔵 Silvia Iranzo Ferrandis of In Market Research
🔵 Tom Woodnutt of Feeling Mutual
