Business
How User Interviews Can Be Accelerated with an AI-Powered Insights Platform
What’s actually eating your research timeline – and why the fix isn’t what most people expect.
Nobody skips user research because they don’t care about users.
They skip it because the last time they tried, two weeks of recruiting ended with three cancellations. The sprint didn’t wait. Someone made a judgment call, the feature shipped, and everyone quietly agreed they’d do it properly next time — which is what they said the time before that too.
Next time never really comes.
AI-powered research platforms are worth paying attention to right now, not because they make research feel futuristic, but because they remove the specific friction that makes teams abandon it in the first place. That’s a more boring claim than most vendor marketing would make – and probably a more useful one.
The Interview Itself Is Rarely the Problem
A 45-minute conversation with a user isn’t what kills research timelines. What kills them is everything around it.
Recruitment for a niche persona – say, a head of operations at a logistics company with 50 to 200 employees – can take three weeks on its own. Then you’re coordinating schedules across time zones. Then someone’s dog has a vet appointment and they reschedule, which cascades into your analysis window. Transcription, tagging, theming. Pulling together a synthesis doc that stakeholders will actually read. By the time that’s done, the decision you were trying to inform has already been made – or worse, you’ve held it up.
This is what researchers mean when they talk about the infrastructure tax. The research itself is a relatively small part of the timeline. The coordination surrounding it is enormous.
AI platforms specifically target that tax. Not the conversation, but everything before and after it. That’s a narrow claim but an important one, because it changes what you should expect these tools to do and what you shouldn’t.
What These Platforms Actually Do
The category is still early enough that a lot of what gets labeled “AI research” is just survey tools with a chatbot bolted on. Worth distinguishing that from platforms genuinely rearchitecting the workflow.
The more interesting approach involves synthetic personas – AI-generated user profiles built from demographic, psychographic, and behavioral parameters relevant to your target market. Rather than finding and scheduling real participants, you define who you want to hear from, and the platform constructs representative personas accordingly. Then it run automated interview sessions with those personas: the AI moderates, adapts follow-up questions based on what the persona “says,” and runs multiple sessions in parallel. What would normally take three weeks of logistics happens in under an hour.
The synthesis piece is where a lot of the time savings actually land. Traditional research often ends with a pile of transcripts that still need a human to code, theme, and interpret. These platforms produce structured analysis – hypothesis validation, theme identification with supporting evidence, pattern recognition across personas – as part of the output. You’re not starting from raw data.
One thing worth noting: synthetic personas sidestep a few real problems with live interviews. Politeness bias (participants saying what they think you want to hear) goes away. So does incentive distortion – the way a $75 gift card quietly changes how someone responds. Whether those tradeoffs net out positively depends on what you’re trying to learn, which brings up the more nuanced question.
Where This Works and Where It Doesn’t
Synthetic research is genuinely well-suited to a specific category of work: concept validation, messaging tests, pricing sensitivity, feature prioritization, early hypothesis pressure-testing. Situations where you want directional signal before committing resources, not ethnographic depth.
What it’s not designed for: longitudinal behavior tracking, use cases where existing behavioral data is sparse or nonexistent, or research where the texture of lived experience is the actual insight you need. A team building tools for people managing chronic illness, for example, should be talking to real people. The emotional specificity of that context matters in ways a synthetic persona can’t replicate.
Most teams who get this right don’t treat it as either/or. Synthetic research handles the high-frequency, lower-stakes validation work – testing messaging before a campaign goes live, checking whether a new nav pattern makes sense before engineering builds it, running a quick concept test before a sprint kickoff. Live interviews get reserved for the contextual, strategic work that actually needs them.
That division of labor is less philosophically interesting than the debate about whether AI can replace human insight (it can’t, fully), but it’s far more practically useful.
What Changes When Research Gets Cheaper and Faster
Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: when research is slow and expensive, it gets rationed. You do it on the big decisions – new product lines, major redesigns, significant pivots. Everything else ships on instinct.
That’s not negligence. It’s math. A two-week study doesn’t make sense for a microcopy change or a nav restructure or a pricing page tweak. So those decisions get made without data, and sometimes they’re fine, and sometimes they compound into a product that technically works but keeps missing the mark with users in ways nobody can quite diagnose.
Lower the cost and time of research to 30 minutes, and the calculus changes. A PM tests three different onboarding flows before the engineering ticket gets written. A founder checks whether a landing page angle actually resonates with their target segment before spending on ads. A designer validates a navigation pattern while the Figma file is still open. None of these are decisions that would have justified a traditional study. All of them produce better outputs.
Agencies feel this particularly acutely. Research has traditionally been a premium offering – something you include on the big retainers, not the smaller project work. Faster, cheaper tools change what you can viably include in a scope. That has real downstream effects on what you can charge for, what you can defend in a pitch, and what your clients walk away trusting.
The cumulative effect of running more validation – across smaller decisions, earlier, when there’s still room to change direction – is hard to quantify neatly. But teams that do it consistently tend to make fewer expensive late-stage corrections.
Starting Out: What the First Run Actually Looks Like
If you haven’t used one of these platforms before, the first session is usually less complicated than expected. You describe what you want to learn – the idea, the problem you’re testing, the assumption you’re trying to pressure-test. You define your target user in reasonably plain terms. The platform handles persona generation, interview design, execution, and synthesis.
Articos structures this as five steps: define the idea, generate personas, shape the interview questions, run the sessions, review the analysis. First time through, most people are done in 30 to 40 minutes. The output is a structured report – not raw transcripts – with themes, hypothesis validation, and supporting quotes from the sessions.
A practical starting point: pick something your team is already debating. A feature that’s been stuck in prioritization discussions. A pricing structure you’ve never properly tested. A headline you’re running on gut. Run a study on it before the next planning meeting and bring the output. That’s usually enough to shift how the team thinks about doing this regularly.
The teams that get the most value from these platforms aren’t treating it as a one-off. They block time – weekly, sometimes more often – to run a study the way they’d block time for a retrospective or a design review. Not because it’s a habit that feels productive, but because it keeps decisions connected to actual user behavior rather than drifting toward internal opinion.
Where This Is Headed
User research has been slow and expensive for a long time, and that’s shaped how teams think about it – as something you invest in seriously or skip entirely. The middle ground, where you validate things quickly and often on decisions of all sizes, hasn’t really existed at scale before.
That’s what’s starting to change. Not the underlying value of talking to users – that hasn’t changed – but the economics of doing it frequently enough to matter.
For teams that figure out how to fold this into their normal working rhythm, the compounding effect is real. More validation, earlier, on more decisions. Fewer expensive surprises six months into a build. More confidence in the things you ship.
It’s worth paying attention to, even if you’re skeptical. Especially if you’re skeptical – because the case for faster research isn’t that AI has solved the hard problem of understanding users. It’s that the logistics were always the part holding most teams back, and those are now genuinely solvable.
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Clive Palmer has asked a Federal Court judge court to disqualify himself from deciding the fate of his $12 million company swindle prosecution.
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By Carsten Brzeski, Global Head of Macro
German unemployment dropped by 14,700 in February, the best February performance of the labour market since 2022. At the same time, however, the fact that the absolute number of those unemployed remains
Block, the parent company of buy-now-pay-later firm Afterpay, has slashed 4,000 jobs from its global workforce.
The announcement was made by co-founder Jack Dorsey, and many Australians are feared to have been impacted by this decision.
Block Axes 4,000 People From Its Workforce
According to 9News, Dorsey made the announcement public via a post on X.
“Today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organisation by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000,” he said in his post.
Dorsey denied that financial woes are the reason behind the massive job cuts. Instead, they have been attributed to artificial intelligence (AI).
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he explained.
“I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now,” the Block co-founder revealed. “I chose the latter.”
Hours after announcing the job cuts, Block experience a surge in stock prices, according to a report by news.com.au.
How Will This Affect Aussie Employees?
9News notes in its report that the company has over 1000 employees based in Australia.
However, a company representative declined to reveal any information when asked by the outlet how many people in its Australian office will be affected by the job cuts.
The representative also declined to say how many employees of Afterpay will be affected by it.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., discusses the left’s outrage over President Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom on ‘The Evening Edit.’
A federal judge on Thursday denied a legal challenge to President Donald Trump‘s White House ballroom project, clearing the way for construction on the estimated $400 million expansion to proceed.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon denied the injunction sought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, saying the group was unlikely to succeed on the merits. The group sued the Trump administration in December to halt construction, arguing it skipped required reviews and failed to obtain congressional approval before demolishing the East Wing of the White House.
In his order, Leon wrote that the preservation group relied on a “ragtag group of theories” under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution.
He wrote that the challenge failed because “the White House office in question is not an agency” under the APA and because the plaintiff did not bring what was needed to challenge the president’s statutory authority to complete the project with private funds and without congressional approval.
TRUMP TRADE CHIEF DEFIANT ON SUPREME COURT RULING, VOWS TO RESTORE TARIFFS WITHIN MONTHS
President Donald Trump’s ballroom project, estimated at $400 million, cleared a major legal hurdle after a federal court ruling. (White House / Fox News)
Trump celebrated the decision on Truth Social, saying the ballroom would be entirely funded by private donors.
“Great news for America, and our wonderful White House! The Judge on the case of what will be the most beautiful Ballroom anywhere in the World, has just thrown out, and completely erased, the effort to stop its construction,” Trump said. “As everyone knows, not one dollar of Taxpayer money is being spent, but rather, all money necessary to build this magnificent building is being put up by Patriot Donors and Contributors.”
Trump said construction on the 90,000-square-foot ballroom – which he said could host inauguration events and state dinners – is “ahead of schedule and under budget.”
FEDEX SAYS IT WILL RETURN ANY TARIFF REFUNDS TO CUSTOMERS, SHIPPERS WHO PAID THEM
A judge ruled on Feb. 26 that a preservation group failed to show it was likely to succeed in challenging the White House ballroom project. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“It will stand long into the future as a symbol to the Greatness of America!” Trump added.
Leon left the door open for the preservation group to amend its complaint and seek reconsideration.
National Trust President and CEO Carol Quillen vowed to continue the lawsuit.
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A federal judge rejected an injunction seeking to halt demolition and construction connected to the White House ballroom project. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images / Getty Images)
“While we are disappointed that the Court did not issue the preliminary injunction, we were pleased that Judge Leon ruled that the National Trust has standing to bring this lawsuit, as we have asserted from the start,” she said in a statement. “We are also pleased that he encouraged us to amend our complaint—specifically, to assert that the President has acted beyond his statutory authority—and we plan to do so promptly. The judge indicated he will rule expeditiously once we do so, and we will await his decision.”
The ruling came after the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved the ballroom proposal last week, putting the project on the fast track ahead of further review March 5 by the National Capital Planning Commission.
Business
Anika Therapeutics, Inc. 2025 Q4 – Results – Earnings Call Presentation (NASDAQ:ANIK) 2026-02-27
Q4: 2026-02-26 Earnings Summary
EPS of $0.31 beats by $0.29
| Revenue of $30.62M (0.04% Y/Y) beats by $1.74M
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“India is in this situation where growth has surprised on the upside. So, the first half of the year growth has approximately been around 8% and inflation has been pretty low. Food inflation has come off quite a lot and also core inflation which is ex food and fuel has been low for now a couple of years.”
According to Nandi, the headwinds that weighed on the economy through 2024 and 2025 are now tapering off. With trade disruptions easing, wage growth expected to improve, and capital expenditure staying firm — particularly from states — the ingredients for sustained expansion appear to be in place.
He also underscored the policy environment. “Let us not forget that 2025 has been a year where there has been a lot of policy easing on the regulatory side, from RBI‘s perspective, even the budget has basically been pro-growth as opposed to pro-fiscal consolidation. So, the conditions are pretty good for growth.”
On inflation, the outlook remains constructive, provided monsoons behave. “We do not see major inflationary risks if we have decent monsoons and given that the core drivers behind lower underlying inflation still remain pretty much in place.”
Nomura expects GDP growth at 7.5% in FY26 and 7.1% in FY27, with inflation hovering around 4%. “So, yes, pretty much goldilocks continued.”
Bridging the FY26 Gap
When asked about the divergence between projections and official estimates, Nandi clarified, “So, our FY26 projection is 7.5%.”
He pointed to a combination of factors driving momentum in the current quarter. “The GST cut plus festive demand quarter means that a lot of consumption-related indicators have picked up in the last quarter. We also have urban wage growth picking up which we see in company results. Companies themselves have registered an increase in profit growth.”
Capital expenditure, particularly at the state level, remains supportive. A technical factor is also at play. “One of the reasons why real growth has been high in the last two quarters has been that the GDP deflator has also been low… GDP deflator is expected to fall further in this quarter.”
Taken together, these dynamics lead to an expectation of 7.7% GDP growth in Q3, compared with 8.2% in the previous quarter.
The Rate Cut Debate
With inflation cooling and growth resilient, the Monetary Policy Committee faces a delicate balancing act.
Nandi’s baseline view is clear: “Our baseline view is no more cuts.”
Yet he acknowledges the counterargument. “If you are achieving seven-percent-ish growth with low inflation, then the question is should you achieve a bit more by cutting rates further.”
He believes the Reserve Bank of India has room to act if needed. “RBI certainly has the bullets for a rate cut. There is nothing that should constrain the RBI at this point. The question is the application.”
For now, however, Nomura has stepped back from its earlier expectation of one more 25 basis point cut. “We earlier had one more 25 basis point cut but just given the way Indian macro situation is shifting, we have taken away that cut. So, currently we are at policy hold but… there is a risk of another cut.”
Rupee: Stability or More Volatility?
The rupee has seen bouts of volatility, though recent weeks have brought some calm. Nandi remains cautious.
“Our house forecast is rupee at around 90 level by the end of the calendar year.”
Trade tensions have eased from earlier extremes, but capital flows will be key. “If you have net FDI flows starting to recover and if you have the foreign portfolio money coming back, then probably you would have some support to the rupee.”
However, even inflows may not translate into full appreciation. “If foreign flows do come in and there is an appreciating pressure on the rupee, the RBI could say, hey, wait a minute, this is a great time for me to build up my reserves. So, you may not see that entire appreciation reflect in the market price.”
For now, he describes conditions as incrementally improving — though volatility remains part of the story.
Oil, Geopolitics and Inflation Risks
With geopolitical tensions simmering and oil prices volatile, the risk to inflation is under scrutiny. Nandi offered a nuanced view.
“The way oil price hits the economy is higher crude oil prices lead to higher petrol and diesel prices which then impacts inflation to the extent of the weight of petrol and diesel.”
But transmission may not be immediate. “Petrol, diesel prices in India have been constant for years now… If my pump price remains constant, then it does not really matter where crude oil price is up or down.”
Beyond oil, structural factors may be keeping inflation anchored. “We have a widening trade deficit with China, so a lot of cheap Chinese imports are coming into the market. There is also the case where you have digitisation, you have investment in infrastructure, so you have supply-side interventions also coming from the government.”
While base effects could cause temporary fluctuations, the broader trend appears stable. “It seems for now that inflation is broadly under control… as of now underlying inflation seems anchored at around 4%.”
In sum, India’s macro narrative remains one of resilience — strong growth, manageable inflation, and policy flexibility. Whether this “goldilocks” balance sustains over the next year will hinge on monsoons, global flows, and the fine calibration of monetary policy.
Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) has called for Sir Keir Starmer to resign as Labour leader following the party’s defeat to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election.
The transport and travel union, which is affiliated to the Labour Party, said the result reflected growing dissatisfaction among voters and warned that Labour’s recent political direction was costing it support.
Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary of TSSA, said the party’s positioning under Keir Starmer had alienated core voters and created space for the Greens to gain ground.
“It’s clear that the disastrous lurch to the right under Keir Starmer is haemorrhaging Labour votes to the Greens,” she said. “There’s an urgent need for a change in leadership, and Keir must announce his departure immediately.”
Eslamdoust argued that replacing the leader alone would not be sufficient to reverse Labour’s fortunes. Instead, she said, the party needed a broader shift in policy direction, returning to what she described as its “radical soul”.
She called for an expansion of public ownership across key industries, including water, energy and mail services, alongside a substantial rise in the minimum wage. She also advocated for the introduction of a wealth tax to fund public services.
“Only by embracing ‘Real Labour’ policies will we be able to win back support from the voters who switched from our party to the Greens in Gorton and Denton,” she said.
The intervention underscores growing tensions between parts of the trade union movement and Labour’s current leadership, particularly over economic policy and the party’s positioning on public ownership and redistribution.
Labour has not yet responded publicly to the TSSA’s remarks.
Paul Jones
Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media’s automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.
A 20-year-old named Jayson Joseph Michaels has been charged by the police after he allegedly planned to attack multiple political and religious locations in Perth.
Among the locations he reportedly targeted are the WA Parliament House and Muslim places of worship.
20-Year-Old Charged Over Alleged Terror Plot
According to 9News, police accuse Michaels of being motivated by white supremacist ideology. The police also claimed that the 20-year-old created a manifesto that outlines his intentions for the attack.
Michaels is also said to have maintained an encrypted group chat where he communicated his plans and intentions.
“[They contained] white supremacy ideology, anti-Muslim ideology, antisemitism, and quite frankly, abhorrent conversations about minorities and other races in this community,” WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch said at a press conference.
He added, “Most concerningly, there was a notebook that outlined preparations for a terrorist attack at significant locations.”
What Are the Alleged Plans of Jayson Joseph Michaels
According to the police, Michaels was planning on using bombs and firearms to carry out a mass casualty attack on different locations in Perth.
Aside from Muslim places of worship and the WA Parliament House, he was also targeting the building of the WA police headquarters, per ABC News.
Seven firearms have been seized from Michaels, along with a substantial knife collection. The police believes that the 20-year-old was radicalised online.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has reacted to the foiled terror plot, saying, “Allegations the man was planning to target the Muslim community through attacks on mosques — as well as attacks on the WA police and parliament — are particularly distressing.”
“There is no place in our country for any kind of racially or religiously-motivated prejudice or hate,” Albanese emphasized.
Migrant workers alleged they were subjected to abusive treatment in a Malaysian factory for Dyson.
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