AI-assisted market research
(AI market research)Market research that uses AI somewhere in the process — from analyzing real survey responses to generating entirely synthetic ones — covering a wide range of actual methods.
A broad term covering very different actual methods.
"AI-assisted market research" covers a wide range of genuinely different approaches: AI used to analyze open-text responses from a real survey, AI used to summarize interview transcripts, and AI used to generate entirely synthetic respondents who never existed as real people — thepanelist's category. The term alone doesn't tell you which one you're looking at.
Why the distinction matters
These approaches carry very different evidentiary weight. AI analyzing real human responses is still fundamentally real-respondent research with a faster analysis layer; AI generating the responses themselves is a different kind of instrument entirely, with different, more limited claims to honestly make about its output.
Where thepanelist fits in this category
thepanelist sits at the fully-synthetic end of this spectrum — it doesn't collect or analyze real respondent data, it generates grounded synthetic personas and their answers directly. We say this plainly rather than let the broader "AI market research" label imply more real-respondent grounding than the tool actually has.