F'innews: Researchers in the Wild
May 27th: SF meet up (tomorrow!), Our take on AI moderation, Recap of research week (~4 minute read)
Back in March, we took our monthly meetup to Seattle, spending time with clients, reconnecting with familiar faces, and continuing the ongoing discussions around the evolution of our field as AI's capabilities mature. While we go to big conferences and industry events, these micro moments together are so meaningful.
If you’re in the Bay Area on Thursday (tomorrow!), we’d love to see you! We’re hosting our next meetup in San Francisco on May 28th, 6:30-8:30pm. Whether you caught us at the Learners Research conference (more on that below) or this is your first time joining us, come for a drink and a real conversation.
PS. if you’re having issues with the link, try copy and pasting link into your browser
https://luma.com/ou51m2m8
PS. If you’re an east coaster, stay tuned for details on our June NYC meetup!
AI Moderation: A Quickly Evolving New Tool in the Toolbox
We’ve been following the development and playing around with several AI Moderation Tools for a while now. There’s a lot we love about them - scalability to reach numbers, open input from participants, ability to tie together with quant. There are major benefits of speed and immediacy of feedback. And in a world where stakeholders need answers and direction now, this makes research more valuable and impactful.
Three (3) watch-outs that we’re ensuring don’t get lost as we continue to experiment with and adopt AI moderation:
Honoring and digging into the messiness that is the real human experience.
People are inconsistent, may be confused, and often don’t have the words to explain their thoughts or behaviors.
An AI moderator may want to move on when things get jumbled in a conversation, however this is often very enlightening as people try to unpack their thoughts or are having an aha moment in the midst of the Q&A. Humans are much better at finding insights in ambiguity.
Picking up on the non-verbal cues.
While some AI tools are starting to build this into their platform, there’s lots of room for presumption. A furrowed brow can mean many things - frustration, confusion, thinking deeply about a topic, being confronted with information for the first time, etc. As users of these tools are moving at lightning speed, the aggregation of facial and body cues needs some caution to avoid misinterpretation.
Recognizing the relevancy of the edge cases.
AI seeks to create themes, based on consensus and history. However, that one person who had an emotional response to a new idea because it had the potential to make their life exponentially happier or the individual who has actually trialed something and can share their real experience should not be ignored or buried in the numbers.
AI Moderation is a breakthrough for our work and presents exciting new opportunities, creating a new space for all of us to explore; in conjunction with the deeper and more open methods.
Anecdotally, I heard someone share their experience about using AI to talk to AI about AI, and sure that’s cool… but we can’t forget to keep people at the core of what we do.
Recap of Research Week
A few of us recently attended Learners Research Week in San Francisco. The theme that kept surfacing, across sessions, conversations, and vendor pitches alike, was influence - how researchers earn it, use it, and protect it as AI reshapes the work around us. Two F’inners wrote about their experience at the conference below:
Influence was the name of the game at Learners San Francisco. Whether through reimagining the research report, improving speed to insights, or knowing your audience, the same throughline kept coming up: how do researchers better leverage their influence to impact decisions?
One framing that's stuck with us is rethinking where the weight of a research project sits. On the average study, the bulk of our time goes into analysis, and socializing happens at the end. What if socializing was the main event? With AI shortening the path to insights, researchers have more time and space to spend on the part of the job that actually moves decisions.
That's not an argument for cutting corners on analysis. It's an observation that researchers tend to under-invest in distribution and translation. In our experience, the work that changes a decision usually isn't the final readout. It's the pre-reads with key stakeholders, the side conversations that test a finding before it lands, or the one-pager that gets forwarded to people who weren't in the room.
That's where we're putting more energy at F'inn; making sure the work keeps moving after we hand it over. If you've found ways to socialize results and shift decisions inside your own org, we'd love to hear them.
Operating in ambiguity
There was an omnipresence of AI in the air. Vendors of all colors offering new AI tools that are changing the way we conduct research and make critical business decisions. We were invited to discuss what this looks like for us now within our organizations, and imagine what this future will look like in the coming months and years; AI automating our workflows and analysis, agents handling tasks that used to take us days, if not weeks. But one thing rang true through it all– the researcher’s intuition, institutional knowledge, and the ability to build trust within organizations remains invaluable.
Everything about our products and services lives within the informational context of months and years of hard work and problem solving. These ideas live as artifacts, but more importantly they live as passing conversations; late night sessions spent thinking through problems alone, and then together. They live through other people valuing and trusting your perspective, and you valuing and trusting theirs.
In a world that won’t slow down, it’s our job as researchers to protect this contextual tribal knowledge, to keep memories alive and pass them down like oral traditions since the beginning of time. To be the absolute experts of the people you’re building the world for. Because there’s no one better suited to give them a voice than the ones who never stop listening.
If you attended Learners / want to continue the conversation, we're picking it up tomorrow, 5/28 in SF! (RSVP here)
Or leave us a comment below - we'd love to hear what's on your mind.