Assuming that everyone were the same, how generic and, dare I say, boring would life have been?
Then, treating our customers with surveys that are generic and standardized leads to boredom.
Surveys feel safe. They’re cheap to run, and they give you clean-looking numbers that executives love. With a few clicks, you can send a form to thousands of users and walk away with a tidy spreadsheet full of percentages and charts. For teams under pressure to “get data quickly,” surveys almost feel like a superpower.
But the truth is, surveys lack emotional engagement and fail to tell the real story.
Where Surveys Fall Short And the Blind Spots You Don’t See
Every survey comes with the researcher’s (whether you are the CEO or a UX researcher) bias baked in. The choice of questions, the answer options presented, and the way the survey is delivered shape the data you get back.
- Design bias: You only ask about what you already believe matters
- Mode effects: Email vs in-app vs phone surveys yield different responses purely because of context
- Self-report bias: People often answer in socially desirable or simplified ways (“Sure, I always read the help articles…”)
These factors create an illusion of certainty, which can lead to blind spots, but the underlying data may be built on assumptions, misunderstandings, or polite half-truths.
Most importantly, surveys rarely uncover unknown problems. The ones you didn’t think to ask about in the first place.
If you scroll through Reddit’s UX and product research threads, you’ll notice the same theme again and again: interviews uncover, surveys quantify. Most practitioners use surveys as the follow-up step and not the place to begin.
Here’s a typical example from a UX researcher discussing how teams should combine methods:
Unlike interviews, surveys tell you what is happening, while interviews tell you why. And when you’re building products, designing experiences, or making choices that affect entire customer journeys, the “why” is everything.
What Interviews Reveal That Surveys Never Will
Interviews are one of the most powerful tools for uncovering insights, giving you what surveys never can: stories.
With interviews, you can go even deeper and ask about specific moments or what made them think about something. Interviews help to uncover the –
- customer’s worldview
- customer’s decision-making process,
- customer’s frustrations, their motivations,
- customer’s workarounds,
- customer’s language they naturally use
But even though they are one of the most preferred methods to uncover the truth, not every company can afford to do them.
Why Interviews Aren’t Perfect Either
Interviews aren’t easy. If they were easy, every company would run them constantly. Just like surveys, they have cons and pros.
Before we get too excited about interviews, here are the parts that get tricky.
- Resource intensity: Recruiting, scheduling, running, and analyzing interviews takes time
- Smaller sample size: You trade scale for depth
- Interviewer bias: How you ask questions shapes the answers
- Analysis complexity: Coding qualitative data into themes requires skill, staff, and accuracy
If surveys scale but don’t go deep, and interviews go deep but don’t scale, how do you combine them to get the best of both worlds?
How AI Changes the Game in Online Interviews
Surveys are great for patterns, interviews are great for understanding people, but they rarely work together. AI interviewing combines the strengths of both, providing clarity at scale and reshaping interviews across various industries.
Let me explain.
Most companies fail not because they lack data but because they lack the right kind of interpretation. And with the current business development landscape, AIs can give you something that humans can’t do alone.
With the right AI interviewers and agents, you can scale faster and get the information today, even if it is needed tomorrow.
How AI Interviewers Help at Scale
The biggest threat to product discovery nowadays is speed. Teams need answers yesterday, so they cut corners and rely on whatever data source is easiest. AI interviewers let you scale qualitative research without flattening it into survey checkboxes.
AI interviewers …
- never gets tired
- never rushes a user
- never forgets a follow-up question
- never brings personal bias into the conversation
- never stops probing until the full story unfolds
… and return insights overnight with complete transparency, and your team can work on more strategic decisions instead of juggling scheduling, coordination, and transcription.
The Full Story is Visible After the Surveys End
Surveys will always have their place. They help you measure, validate, and quantify. But if you rely on them alone, you end up building for the version of the customer that fits inside a checkbox.
Real understanding comes from hearing people in their own words. That’s the part of the story teams often skip, because traditional interviews take time, coordination, and resources that many companies simply don’t have.
This is where AI changes the equation.
AI interviewers don’t replace human researchers. AI interviewers scale the work that your team, with or without a researcher, does. They make qualitative insight accessible at the same speed and scale as surveys, without compromising the depth that actually drives good decisions.
The companies that win are the ones that learn faster, not the ones that send more surveys. If you want to build a customer-centric product faster, join the Prelaunch AI Interviewer waitlist to get ahead of the game.
