The problem we set out to solve, and why it’s not solved yet
Ten years ago, we founded Attest because consumer research was broken. It was slow, expensive, and designed to miss the moment. By the time results landed, the question had moved on. The decision had already been made. We built Attest Measure to fix that, and it’s become a platform insight leaders trust to get agile, high-quality answers at scale.
But qualitative research never got the same treatment. It’s still dominated by agencies, long timelines, and high costs. 40% of researchers report that qual arrives too late to influence decisions, and 64% say they launched a product, price change, or campaign in the last year without any insight at all because they simply couldn’t wait. So when our customers have questions that need a qual answer, they either run a survey that doesn’t quite fit, or they don’t do any research at all.
The real cost isn’t just time or money. It’s the consumer richness you miss out on: the reasons behind a number, why a message didn’t land, why a customer chose a competitor. Quant tells you what happened. Qual tells you why.
Why now is the right moment for qual
AI has changed what’s possible, not in the vague, transformative way that gets thrown around a lot right now, but in specific ways that directly address why qual has always been hard to scale.
Traditional qualitative research is bottlenecked by the 1:1 nature of interviewing and the logistics of gathering people in-person for focus groups. AI removes that constraint entirely. Explore can run interviews simultaneously across your consumer sample, with consistent questioning throughout, which means you’re comparing like for like rather than navigating the natural variation between human moderators.
On the analysis side, AI can work across the entirety of a dataset at once, clustering themes, surfacing tensions, and flagging outliers that a manual review might miss. And because it’s asynchronous, interviews happen when participants are available, not when a moderator is free.
The result is consumer insight you can get in the moment it truly matters, while the question is live and while it’s top of mind for the people you’re talking to.
Introducing Attest Explore
Attest Explore brings end-to-end AI-moderated interviews into the platform. Design your interview, let AI conduct and moderate conversations at scale, and get synthesised findings surfaced automatically, ready to act on.
Three steps: Design. Interview. Summarise.
The simplicity sits on top of the same foundation that makes Attest Measure work: genuine research expertise, rigorous data quality, and a platform built for speed without sacrificing standards.
We’re not the first to put quant and qual under one roof. But most teams still don’t have the flexibility to think of both methods at the same time. Qual gets treated as a separate workstream, a separate budget, a separate agency relationship. By the time the qual findings land, the quant work has moved on.
Attest Explore changes that. You can run a survey, see a result that raises a question, and brief an AI-moderated interview study in the same platform, with the same team, and no agency handoff. That compression of the research cycle is meaningful. It means qual stops being something you plan for and starts being something you reach for when the question calls for it.
Where Explore works well
Explore is built for the kinds of consumer questions that quant can gesture at but not fully answer. A few examples of where it adds real value:
- You’ve run a survey and a result surprised you. You want to understand why consumers responded the way they did, in their own words.
- You’re exploring new categories or products, and have a hypothesis you want to refine before running a quant study.
- You’re developing a new product or messaging and want to hear how real consumers describe the problem you’re solving, before you build out a quant tracker.
- You need to understand the emotional drivers behind a purchase decision or brand preference, not just the ranking.
- You want to add consumer voice to a strategic presentation without commissioning a full agency study.
The first step in something bigger
Explore is a product we’re proud of. But it’s also the beginning of a vision we’ve been building towards: Connected Insights.
Most consumer research today is point-in-time. You ask a question, get an answer, and move on. The context from that study rarely feeds meaningfully into the next one. When quant and qual work together in the same platform, that changes. Research starts to compound. Each study leaves behind richer context that informs the next question you ask, and over time you build something more valuable than any individual project: a longitudinal understanding of your consumer that gets sharper with every piece of work.
That’s the direction we’re building towards. A platform that lets you connect what you already know, fill the gaps with the right method, and develop a view of your consumer that grows more useful over time.
There’s no shortage of promises right now about how AI will transform consumer research. We believe the potential is real, but we want to earn that story, not announce it. Attest Explore is us being practical first, opening up access to AI-moderated interviews inside the same platform where you already work, so that every insights professional can get the consumer understanding they need when they actually need it.
That’s what we mean by meeting the moment. And we’re just getting started.
