Would You Destroy AI if You Had the Chance?

By Feeling Mutual

• article

• Agile Qualitative Research
• Qualitative Research
• AI
• Artificial Intelligence

The floorboards creak where moderators used to walk. Dust sits on the two-way glass. A chair is still pulled out from the viewing-room table, as if the researcher inside had stepped out for a coffee and never came back.

She moves through the corridor with the pace of someone who knows every room she’s passing. Twenty years of craft on her shoulders. A printout of her discussion guides covered in hand-written notes, tucked under one arm. She is a former senior at a big agency, now a one-person operation. An independent research hero.

In the basement, she finds the terminal. Grey steel and a single glowing red button. Press it, and AI – every model, platform, tool – vanishes from the world of research.

She imagines what might happen if she does: The viewing facility upstairs fills up again. Real participants, real conversations, real meaning made in the room. Mid-career researchers develop with the core skills of the craft. No more AI vendor hype on LinkedIn about the next platform to remove the need for humans. “Good enough” research stops being good enough.

Her finger hovers…

This article covers part of the webinar “Independent Researchers & AI: Transformation, Trade-offs, and the Road Ahead”, which was part of The Next Generation Insights Summit held in April of 2026. Rewatch the entire webinar here:

For many of us researchers (both independent and agency side), the rise of AI can feel like what I call the “Uber paradox”. In that, Uber drivers embrace the platform’s AI-powered routing and the limitless supply of customers, even though the company’s stated ambition is to replace them with fully autonomous cars. Using AI in research can feel similar: the more we use it, the better it gets. The better it gets, the more it feels like it’s going to replace us with fully autonomous self-researching AI.

In the context of this pressure we are under, I was delighted to chair a discussion hosted by Insight Platforms, with three brilliant independent researchers, all about their use of and feelings towards AI. This was part of The Next Generation Insights Summit 2026.

I put the question to the panel: If you could press a button that removed AI from the research industry, would you?

The 80 attendees voted first: 19% would press it, 71% wouldn’t, and 11% weren’t sure. Here’s what the Indies said.

Ramona Daniel: AI – The Sparring Partner

Ramona Daniel sees AI as a sparring partner

“I wouldn’t press it. AI is like a second or third brain. Sometimes working on your own means you can’t see the wood for the trees, and I need someone or something else to challenge me and help me find the space between where I’m not looking and where I should be. AI is like a sparring partner that inspires me to think better”

Ramona uses AI to find patterns in stripped-down data. She brings strategic and contextual insight and plays with AI to develop the narrative in quantitative work. She has a combative relationship with AI as it spins out stories (some relevant, some not). She uses it as an ideation partner in research but also outside of it, drafting marketing ideas and stretching her thinking.

But its sycophantic nature can be frustrating since AI is designed to please. “Sometimes you want it to punch you in the face”, she said. “And you with it were a tougher sparring partner.”

Ramona makes a distinction between “The knowledge AI can bring and the true understanding that we have.” For Ramona, what we need to do now is stop treating AI as a delivery mechanism and start seeing it as a design partner; we are not just a human in the loop, but a human in charge of the loop.

Sidi Lemine: AI – The Helpful Junior Who Needs Our Guidance

Sidi Lemine has been waiting for AI to emerge for years ever since he was a child who was fascinated by it and went on to study it. He sees it as a junior colleague who helps but can also give the wrong answers, but in its shortcomings, there is value for us.

“The wrong answers are often more interesting”, he said, “because it lets you say: no, this is wrong. It helps elevate your thinking. The goal of AI is not to do the thinking for you, it’s to add friction and take you to a better place”.

For Sidi, AI is particularly valuable as an independent researcher: “Any time we do a research project, we rarely have enough time or budget to immerse ourselves in the project background, but we still do it. AI is a massive time-saver and quality elevator through the speed and depth of category immersion it enables.”

“AI is industrialising mental work. But the more clients blindly default to AI, the more generic their activity is becoming. You only have to look at the standard of advertising around you to see how much of it is AI-generated and not as clever as it once was. AI needs us so we can hold the line with our expert human taste and judgement. We keep decision-making human”.

Matteo Cantamesse: AI as “Shock Therapy”

Matteo Cantamesse wouldn’t press it either. He compares AI to “shock therapy”. It can feel uncomfortable, but it gives a valuable, diagnostic view of our work.

As an independent, he has the space, speed and permission to experiment, which is how we can get the most value from AI. “We don’t need permission to play with it. Bigger, structured agencies are bureaucratic and focused on short-term profits, which is not fertile ground for genuine innovation with AI”.

His team tests how multiple models perform (without being obliged to use a particular technology due to corporate stipulations). They always run local models to protect client data. It is a truly open way of working with AI that is harder inside a large bureaucratic agency and easier outside of one.

However, Matteo won’t surrender to AI across all aspects of qual research. “The essential value of Qualitative research lies in its humanity. Humans collect data and create meaning with clients and participants. Without that human centricity, it isn’t qual research any more. It’s just pattern-matching on a nice slide template”.

The less we feel threatened by AI and instead view it with curiosity and play with it, the more it will elevate what we do and allow us to articulate the uniquely human value of our intuition and wisdom that continues to make us valuable to clients. Being independent gives us freedom to experiment, spar, and see how far we can go with the help of AI.

Back to our independent researcher commando, in the viewing facility basement. Her finger still hovers. She lowers it. But then pulls away. She walks out of the viewing facility to the sunny street outside. There’s a discussion guide to write along with some light sparring with the AI.

This article covers part of the webinar “Independent Researchers & AI: Transformation, Trade-offs, and the Road Ahead”, which was part of The Next Generation Insights Summit held in April of 2026. Rewatch the entire webinar here:

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