Qual-at-scale insight communities: smarter, richer and more human
AI is transforming qualitative research, not simply by enabling more reach, but by unlocking deeper, richer insights that uncover real consumer motivations.
Angie Deceuninck
14 July 2025
4 min read
The rise of AI is reshaping industries worldwide and market research is no exception. From predictive analytics to automated surveys, AI is accelerating the speed and efficiency of gathering consumer insights. But when it comes to qualitative research, valued for its depth and nuance, the real potential of AI isn’t just about scale. It’s about going deeper.
Recently, ‘qual at scale’ has become a buzzword. The idea? Using AI to expand qual research methods, reaching larger sample sizes and analysing that data more efficiently. But is bigger always better?
True impact doesn’t come from just talking to more people. It comes from going deeper with them. AI shouldn’t just help bring quantitative scale to qualitative research it should enhance its richness and depth. By leveraging AI, we can uncover deeper layers of human motivation, behaviour and context. This ensures that scale doesn’t come at the cost of what makes qual research so valuable in the first place.
Scale is more than just volume
When people hear the word scale, they often think numbers: more respondents, more interviews, more data. But real scale isn’t just about quantity. It’s about depth.
Do we learn more by speaking to 500 people for 15 minutes each, or by spending 75 minutes with 100 people? The total time is the same, but the depth of understanding is completely different. Simply increasing the volume of conversations doesn’t guarantee richer insights. To truly understand people, we need to move beyond surface-level exchanges, go deeper. That’s where we find more meaning, more emotion, more context.
That’s exactly what supercharged insight communities enable. Whether structural or a pop-up, these AI-powered communities go beyond one-off interactions and support real, longitudinal dialogue. This approach captures more than what people say. It reveals how they think, feel and change over time, providing the kind of thick data that leads to real understanding.
Supercharged insight communities
Our supercharged insight communities, aka qual-at-scale communities, blend long-term relationships with rich, layered input to unlock deeper truths. The result? A more complete picture of your audiences and a clearer path forward.
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Relationships: more time, more trust, more truth
Traditional qual research often involves small, curated groups over a short period of time. While this can provide valuable insights, it limits both the diversity of perspectives and the strength of connection. Supercharged insight communities remove this limitation by enabling longer-term engagement with a broader group of people, so that insights reflect diverse backgrounds, mindsets and lived experiences. Spending more time – whether days, weeks, months and even years – helps build trust, encourages participants to open up and allows us to uncover deeper layers of understanding.
Because these communities grow and evolve over time, we gain more than just one-time responses:
- We can observe how behaviours and attitudes shift in real life.
- We can build on previous learnings, returning with new angles to explore further.
- We can co-create with participants, shaping and refining ideas together across multiple stages.
For example, when one of our clients launched a new breakfast spread, we sent it to community members and followed their experience over a period of three months. This long-term connection allowed us not only to observe how they interacted with the product, but also to uncover evolving use cases, emerging habits and what happened once the product was finished. In other words, the time we spent with our community members gave us a fresh lens on the product and helped reveal new opportunities for brand.
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Richness: capturing a 360° picture of people’s world
True understanding comes from seeing the full picture of people’s lives, not just isolated moments. Words alone often fail to capture the emotions, environments and context that shape people’s decisions. That’s why our supercharged insight communities combine a variety of research activities and formats, including video, images, text and audio, to build a 360° perspective on human behaviour.
- A creative toolbox: We blend approaches such as ethnographic research tasks, projective techniques, missions-based activities and storytelling exercises to go beyond what people say and capture what they think, feel and do in real-world settings
- A multi-sensory approach: Video and audio responses reveal tone, facial expressions and surroundings, enriching our understanding.
While blending methods leads to deeper insights, analysing this data traditionally takes time. This is where AI is a game-changer. It acts as a super-assistant, processing large volumes of human input quickly and intelligently. For example, our AI Visual Decoding Canvas analyses dozens of images and stories in a fraction of the time it would take manually. It identifies themes, patterns and outliers, even helping us spot what’s not being said, highlighting gaps and blind spots.
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Relationships x richness = depth
People don’t always say what they truly mean, and they may not fully understand what drives their decisions. That’s why we need more than snapshots. When strong relationships are combined with rich, layered input, we unlock something deeper.
Online research communities help map this full system of drivers, from individual mindsets to social dynamics and the context people live in. By embracing long-term relationships, gathering diverse input, and using new AI-driven tools, we can decode human complexity without losing the human story at the heart of it all.
The future of qual research methods: smarter, not necessarily bigger
As AI continues to transform the insight industry, we need to rethink what scale truly means. It’s not only about collecting more data, it’s about unlocking richer, more nuanced insights. Supercharged insight communities empower brands get closer to their consumers, not just by increasing the number of participants, but by deepening engagement and enhancing data richness.
In today’s fast-moving world, that shift matters more than ever. Brands are navigating constant change and countless opportunities. But unlocking those opportunities, requires more than fast answers. It requires a holistic understanding of the people you serve. It is this kind of multi-dimensional insight that enables better decisions, fuels innovation and helps you stay ahead in a world that never stands still.
That’s why the future of qual-at-scale communities isn’t just about more. It’s about more meaning. More depth. More human understanding.
Because in the end, we don’t build stronger brands by knowing more people, we build them by knowing people better.