Rethinking qual: how AI is changing market research forever

When we launched Bolt in 2019, our vision was clear: to offer our clients a seat next to their consumers, enabling empathy in decision-making. We wanted to eliminate the guesswork and help businesses make more accurate, data-driven, strategic decisions.

 

In 2022, we launched BoltChatAI to take this mission even further. Our goal was to bring the consumer’s voice, the actual conversation, into the heart of organisations.

Not just for researchers… but for marketers, product teams, innovators and leadership at every level.

 

Too often, the industry has treated AI as a surface-level fix, an add-on or an automation layer to speed things up. But we believed it could do more than that. We saw the potential for AI to fundamentally change how researchers explore, learn and make decisions.

 

I was working brand-side at one of the leading global FMCG companies, leading projects that demanded speed, scale and real human understanding. But the tools available were either too slow, too surface or too rigid to keep up. I left to build the platform I wish I’d had, something that combined the depth of qual with the agility of tech.

 

BoltChatAI is our AI-moderated qualitative-research-at-scale platform. It runs live conversations with consumers around the world, asking questions, probing further and summarising responses in real time. That means teams can go from idea to insight in hours rather than weeks.

 

We’ve since run studies in more than 50 countries, working with some of the world’s biggest brands. What we’re building is global by design and grounded in cultural nuance.

 

AI in research shouldn’t just be fast. It should be smart, flexible and designed to reflect how people actually think and speak. That’s why our platform doesn’t simply follow a script. It learns from each answer, adjusts in real time and delivers responses with depth and relevance.

 

The Bolt team are, at heart, researchers. We’ve built the platform around the real needs and pace of qualitative work, from how conversations unfold to how insights are applied. Keeping the human touch is essential when integrating AI into the research process.

 

Today, platforms such as ours can do far more than just moderate conversations. They’re helping researchers test early-stage creative and advertising ideas, run concept investigations with specific consumer groups, and explore new markets before making investment decisions.

 

They are used to identify emerging growth spaces, enrich quantitative studies with deeper context and refine trade stories with authentic, human language.

 

Many researchers use AI to collect quotes and insights for brand storytelling, or to better understand the sentiment behind social listening trends, helping to uncover not just what people say but why they say it.

 

 

And the possibilities keep expanding. We’ve added tools for UX testing, meta-analysis and dynamic persona creation, where user profiles are generated from live study data. Researchers can also upload external datasets to be analysed alongside live responses, making it easier to triangulate findings, compare themes and deepen overall understanding.

 

This is not about replacing researchers. It’s about giving them tools that help them focus more on interpretation, impact and action.

 

Ultimately, what matters most is not the technology itself, but what it makes possible.

 

For respondents, it offers a more natural and engaging way to take part. They can answer via text, voice, video or photo responses, making it easier for them to share and communicate with researchers, putting them in the driver’s seat.

 

For clients, it delivers insight that is clear, robust and ready to guide decisions. For researchers, it means going deeper and working faster without losing the human nuance that sits at the heart of good qualitative work.

 

We’ve worked hard to make the experience intuitive and transparent. Researchers can build chat guides, launch studies, adjust questions mid-field and explore themes across different markets.

 

They can compare sentiment across segments, spot patterns and pull out powerful quotes, all within a space designed for the way research actually works. We believe simplicity should enhance rigour, not undermine it.

 

We’ve also made ethics a central priority. Every participant gives clear, informed consent. Client data is never used to train our models. Privacy, transparency and accountability are built into the platform from the ground up. These aren’t just principles we talk about, they’re part of the way the system is designed to function.

 

At Bolt Insight, we’re not just building a product. We’re helping shape a better way to do qualitative research. We believe AI should make research more human, not less. More curious, more inclusive and more adaptive to the complexity of real life.

 

We’re proud of how far we’ve come, but we know this is just the beginning. As the technology evolves, so will the ways we learn from people. And we’ll be there to help researchers stay in control and keep insight at the centre of it all.

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Hakan Yurdakul is driving the commercial evolution of market research by embedding AI into the core of insight generation. Prior to co-founding Bolt Insight, Hakan spent over 15 years at Unilever, leading global brand development and digital transformation across multiple categories. His work has consistently translated consumer understanding into award-winning products, campaigns and innovations that have delivered real commercial outcomes.