GPT-4 revolutionizes user surveys thanks to Outset! Don't miss this incredible breakthrough!

A solution to speed up qualitative data collection

Getting answers to difficult qualitative product questions from users can be costly, both in terms of time and money.

At least, that's the experience of Aaron Cannon, a former strategist at Deloitte, where he was responsible for facilitating research projects for Deloitte clients. Cannon and his team would spend hundreds of hours on a client project, only to have to devote additional time - and resources - to planning and moderating interviews with the clients in question.

"Corporate decision-makers expect faster and faster results from research teams," Cannon told Toukiela in an e-mail interview. "Researchers feel this pressure every day, especially after being hit hard by the 2022 layoffs. The biggest risk for the industry today is that the increasing speed of decision-making will lead to a decline in the ability of analytics functions to keep pace. That's why researchers need tools to speed up and amplify their work."

A start-up for autonomous interviews

So Cannon teamed up with Michael Hess, whom he met while working at Untapped, a talent recruitment start-up, to found Outset. A Y Combinator-backed company, Outset independently conducts and synthesizes interviews.

"The general slowdown and associated layoffs have hit research and analysis teams particularly hard. But the demands of business leaders to make more informed and strategic decisions have not diminished, leading to expectations to do more with less," said Cannon. "This is a tailwind for Outset as people look to technology to amplify their work."

Using AI to conduct interviews

Outset leverages GPT-4, OpenAI's flagship text generation AI model, to conduct interviews with research study participants. How exactly? Outset users create a survey and share the link with future respondents. Then Outset - powered by GPT-4 - follows up with respondents to clarify, probe responses and create a "conversational relationship" for in-depth answers.

For each question, GPT-4 generates themes, counts answers and highlights quotes to "uncover the story", as Cannon puts it.

"Today, much of the work of collecting and analyzing qualitative data is done manually. In this way, we're competing with the long nights I used to spend reading transcripts and scheduling interviews as a consultant," said Cannon. "We believe Outset will expand the research market, making user insights faster and more accessible to more teams within the company."

Promising results

Outset is still in its infancy. But despite GPT-4's imperfections and limitations, Outset has already enjoyed some success with a well-known brand: WeightWatchers. WeightWatchers was able to conduct and synthesize over 100 interviews in 24 hours, according to Cannon, the results of which are now being used to propose a new framework at WeightWatchers for user segmentation.

"We're currently working with 15 enterprise analytics teams at companies like Opendoor and other large consumer-facing businesses to help them make smarter, faster user-centric decisions than ever before," said Cannon.

Expansion and future prospects

Outset, which recently raised $3.8 million in a financing round led by Adverb Ventures with the participation of Weekend Fund and Sam Altman's brother Jack Altman, plans to expand its team from four full-time employees to six by the end of the year.

"We've just raised our seed capital and our team is small, so we're maintaining a low burn rate," said Cannon. "Despite the general economic downturn, there is a growing demand for AI-powered tools in everyday knowledge work, which gives us another tailwind. Between our funding round, low burn rate and accelerating tailwinds, we're well positioned to weather any storm."