The Researcher’s Playbook for AI-Moderated Interviews

AI-moderated interviews add real qualitative depth to enterprise research that needs to run at scale, but only on the right study. Run it on the wrong one and you trade research quality for speed. Knowing which is which, and being able to defend that call to stakeholders, is where most teams get stuck.

In this practical session, Laura Pulito, Vice President of Research at Recollective, walks through how to make that decision and what to weigh before running an AI-moderated interview. She covers how to judge when AI moderation adds clear value, when human moderation is the stronger fit and how the researcher’s role changes when AI handles the active probing.

Laura will also share how to keep research quality high when AI is doing the interviewing: writing objectives that produce the conversation you intended, setting guardrails your stakeholders can stand behind, testing a design before launch and reading the outputs closely enough to reach real insight. It’s built for researchers who want to adopt AI on their own terms, keeping human judgment and curiosity central to the work.

What you will learn:

• Decide with confidence when AI-moderated interviews will strengthen a study and when a human moderator is the better call
• Move from automated summaries to genuine insight your team can act on
• Get to the “why” behind an answer with far more participants than you could interview live
• Protect research quality with clear objectives and guardrails that hold up to stakeholder and governance scrutiny