How Human-in-the-Loop Gets the Most from AI: A Case Study
By Fathom
- article
- Artificial Intelligence
- Text Analytics
- Survey Analysis
- Data Analytics
AI-driven summarization tools offer speed and convenience, but when it comes to truly understanding open-ended survey data, speed alone isn’t enough. Without accurate, response-level thematic coding, critical nuance is lost, and valuable insights remain hidden. Thematic coding provides the analytic rigor needed to unlock advanced analytics and uncover patterns, trends, and insight that summarization alone misses.
How Fathom’s Human-in-the-Loop Text Analysis Unlocks New Value from Open-Ended Survey Data for Emerald Research
Emerald Research partners with some of the world’s largest tech companies, whose customers require strategic insights into product experiences and behaviors that directly influence critical business outcomes.
Traditional text analytics methods, including some advanced AI-driven solutions, often fail to provide the level of nuance needed to answer key questions like why customers churn, which needs remain unmet, or which experiences drive satisfaction and revenue.
To overcome these challenges, Emerald Research leveraged Fathom’s human-in-the-loop approach to text analysis. Fathom transforms unstructured, open-ended survey data into structured, actionable insights through a unique combination of advanced AI and human expertise. Summary insights are then layered over accurate coding, to streamline analysis and reporting. This process ensures that every response is efficiently and accurately thematically coded, unlocking the full potential of open-ended feedback.
Emerald Research was then able to draw clear connections between customer experiences and business outcomes by integrating coded data with telemetry data. Emerald launched Emerald Apex, an AI-powered predictive methodology, powered by Fathom text analysis. This solution links customer feedback with predictive analytics, helping Emerald:
- Forecast future trends and behaviors, integrating unstructured data
- Perform segmentations and brand lift studies, using qualitative themes
- Pinpoint product experiences driving 3x revenue, based on open-ended responses
- Target product improvements correlated to delivering greater strategic value to clients.
None of this would be possible with summarization alone. And it’s only possible because of Fathom’s human-in-the-loop approach. Human researchers possess vast amounts of highly specific contextual knowledge about the industry, company, product, and strategic considerations at play — all of which shape the research questions they pursue.
Fully automated tools oversimplify thematic groupings and miss subtle but critical differences that humans are uniquely attuned to parsing and understanding. That’s why the most powerful insights innovations—like what Emerald is doing with Fathom—rest on combining humans and AI to unlock net new value. While others work to “automate the researcher away,” Fathom centers the researcher and empowers them—supercharging their strategic intuition and innate curiosity with the power and rigor of ethical and secure AI.
From Efficiency to Impact: The Power of Advanced Text Analytics
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