At Headway, building with the voice of the user is a CEO mandate: every employee, not just researchers, stays in real contact with the patients and providers the company serves. The catch: therapists are seeing full caseloads, parents are juggling care for their kids and the research team is small. Lexi Breitz, Ph.D., director of research at Headway, expected AI-moderated interviews to feel cold, and worried providers would refuse to open up to a machine. Instead, clinicians got candid on sensitive topics, hard-to-reach parents participated on their own schedules and when the CEO needed provider voices for a strategy session, her team delivered them in under 12 hours. In this session, Lexi and Ria Shah of Listen Labs share how a small insights team scaled qualitative research across the company without adding researchers.
Key takeaways:
- Why participants often open up more to an AI moderator, especially on sensitive topics.
- How to reach busy, hard-to-schedule audiences like clinicians and parents on their own time.
- How a small insights team lets cross-functional partners run their own studies, with researcher guardrails.
- How to turn around decision-ready qualitative insights in hours instead of weeks.