How AI Is Rewiring Customer Research with Ariadna Román Porro

Inside How AI Is Rewiring Customer Research

1. —

   Meet Ariadna Roman

   The episode opens with Ariadna's path into the field: a senior researcher and service designer from Barcelona who landed in user research by chance and stayed for seven years. Working across banking, healthcare, mobility, and tech, she sets up a candid conversation about how AI is changing customer research day to day, and where she believes human judgment still has to lead.

2. 01

   How AI Rewired the Research Workflow

   • The old bottleneck: transcribing 90-minute healthcare interviews by hand often took twice as long as the interview itself.
   • How tools like Dovetail now handle transcription, tagging, and surfacing the right quotes in a fraction of the time.
   • The tradeoff she still watches for: AI transcription isn't always fully accurate, so a little doubt creeps in.
3. 02

   Where Humans Still Make the Call

   • Why AI can orient and counsel you, but the final decision should always rest with a person.
   • Her habit of double-checking AI output instead of trusting it blindly.
   • Scaling how much you review to how big the decision actually is.
4. 03

   What Synthetic Users Actually Are

   • A plain definition: users who don't exist, built from data you gathered on real ones.
   • The Gen Z example, and why the accuracy depends on how much you feed the model.
   • Her forward guess: synthetic users will get more accurate and faster, but may never match a real conversation.
5. 04

   The Case For and Against Synthetic Users

   • Why teams reach for them: lower cost, faster answers, and a low-risk way to try research.
   • The catch: real people are inconsistent and volunteer things you never asked, which synthetic users smooth away.
   • Her rule: combine them with real data, and never let them make the call alone.
6. 05

   Why She Starts With Real Users

   • The "old school" case for talking to real people before you simulate them.
   • How running live interviews trains you to ask sharper questions later.
   • Why that hands-on experience is hard to shortcut with AI.
7. 06

   The Hardest Parts of Research Today

   • Companies still hesitate to invest in research, so part of the job is proving its value.
   • On the respondent side, people simply have less time to give you.
   • Unpaid research competes with everything else in someone's day, and often loses.
8. 07

   Synchronous vs Asynchronous, and What Gen Z Changed

   • The phone-call parallel: many people would rather write than talk.
   • Why asynchronous surveys win on control, letting people pause and resume on their own terms.
   • What you trade away without a live conversation: the unplanned follow-up question.
9. 08

   Where AI Is Promising and Where It's Overhyped

   • Clear wins: transcription, analysis, and making sense of large piles of reviews or feedback.
   • The overhype: AI review summaries that quietly drop the one insight you actually needed.
   • A shift she sees coming: writing not just for people, but for the AI agents that now read your content too.
10. 09

    Advice for Breaking Into Research

    • Start without AI: draft your first survey or interview script on a blank page, then ask AI to challenge it.
    • Follow researchers on LinkedIn to build a feed, a point of view, and confidence.
    • Don't be scared off by "unicorn" job descriptions; apply anyway and be honest about what you know.