Real Qualitative and AI
By Dwight Fletcher, CEO Spearfish
I just want to put in my two cents on the effects of AI on the foundational principle of our businesses at Spearfish, Aperture and ClearCase, which is that the differentiating advantage lies in personal interactions with real people, whether in group discussions, on-premise interviews, or conversational phone calls.
I’m writing this because I just watched a short video featuring a British anthropologist who was so excited about using robot personas to conduct focus groups. Simply by inserting his project profile requirement’s code into the bots, he was flushed with excitement because he was then going to interview them and get “answers” to his qualitative questions. He would then of course get a lightning-fast summary report back to his clients. This would be followed with a modest fee for his time only, since bots are not greedy for cash incentives, at least at the present time, and obviously no fee for the recruiting of real people was required.
To me, this proposition is critically ludicrous; however, it could have some value for gaining a lightning-fast version of the traditional trends reports, since the robots could gather all the available information from the internet and tidily summarize it. In seconds. Industry trends, sure. Anything beyond that, not feasible.
When a client needs reasons why their business is down, we speak directly with the people who are in the middle of the action for that specific business. No bots, only real people who either haven’t transacted with that business in a while or never intend to again. So, we get real people to tell us what’s really going on. And, if you talk to enough real humans in this way, you’re surely going to get a list of the real reasons behind their behavior and the resulting business slide. There’s really no substitute for that kind of reality.
AI can develop transcripts from videos (but, importantly, it will miss the body language) and do summaries that look impressive if only for their speed. But the real human synthesis is what we do, and it does take longer than two minutes.
In the end, we know that the clients with real intelligence will appreciate that it’s the hard work behind the scenes, not the shiny new toy, which delivers the silver bullet which can impact their business in the most meaningful way.
We appreciate all the many useful benefits of artificial intelligence for research, but with our core business there’s nothing artificial about real intelligence.