Today we happily welcome back Michele Hansen. Michele is the co-founder of the Software-as-a-Service company Geocodio – a SaaS that provides hassle free geocoding. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Michele was a product manager in financial publishing and a project manager for a web development agency.

Michele is the author of an excellent book on customer interviewing which I recommend everywhere I go “Deploy Empathy”. That’s the one with the yellow duck. Aaand after something like a two year break she’s again the co-host of the Software Social Podcast.

Today we will dive into the topic of AI in customer research. I want to add a few numbers from a Qualtrics trend report, just to kind of highlight the relevance of the topic if that’s needed at all. So in the 2025 trend report 69% of respondents say that they have used synthetic responses in their research, 83% plan to increase their AI investment and 73% agree that within 3 years synthetic data will make up more than half of the data they use. So, there’s definitively something going on here. Let’s dive in!

Links to sources:
deployempathy.com

Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4551487

Episode 81: AI in customer research with Michele Hansen