Enhancing Primary Research with AI-Moderated Calls

Expert research has always presented a tension for practitioners. The value of talking to an expert usually comes from depth – the acute, nuanced insights from a live call. But researchers win through speed and scale. They need to speak to more experts, compare responses, cover several markets simultaneously, and meet tight deadlines. Scheduling friction, interviewer availability, and the manual overhead of comparing dozens of transcripts mean breadth and speed have historically come at the cost of quality and thoroughness, or the other way around.

AI-Moderated Calls resolve the tradeoff. Researchers get structure, scale, and speed, without having to sacrifice nuance from expert conversations.

Three new capabilities expand what’s possible for GLG clients today:

1. Multilingual AI moderation: autonomously led calls in 10 languages.

2. Qualitative and quantitative questions in the same interview: open follow-ups and structured response formats in one discussion guide.

3. Automated export of structured responses: every quantitative answer exported to Excel automatically.

This article lays out how researchers can leverage the capabilities to command greater scale, stronger outcomes, and more value out of every interaction with an expert.

An AI-moderated expert call is a one-on-one interview where an AI agent guides an expert through a discussion guide defined by a client’s research team. The agent asks questions, listens to the expert's response, and probes and clarifies where needed.  

And unlike a survey or scripted questionnaire, GLG’s AI Moderator is able to adapt in real time. While anchoring to a discussion guide defined by you, the researcher, the Moderator has the flexibility to ask natural follow-ups and surface details that an expert's answer may have initially left vague. After every call, you automatically receive a full transcript and recording, ready for synthesis (subject to your firm’s access settings).

AI-moderated interviews don’t replace human-led expert interviews. Among the three formats GLG offers – AI-Moderated Calls, expert-led calls, and human-client-led calls – the right choice depends on where you are in your research.

GLG built the conversational agent in-house. Its judgment comes from our own research methodology – decades of institutional knowledge about how to run an expert conversation – encoded directly into the agent, along with GLG’s Compliance Framework. Before each call, the Moderator is given your discussion guide, your project-level guardrails, and any expert-specific considerations (such as NDAs or off-limit topics).  

The most immediate benefit is the removal of scheduling friction. Because the AI Moderator operates around the clock, experts can do interviews on their own time. The simple shift has significant downstream effects.

• AI-Moderated Calls can run outside workday hours – Timely research happens around the clock – in the evenings, early mornings, and over the weekend – for the good of both the researcher and the expert. Currently, we’re seeing about 45% of AI-Moderated Calls happen in off hours. So whether you need to run multiple calls at once, are in a busy stretch, or need to reach experts outside your time zone – AI-Moderated Calls can happen at any time.
• Higher expert response rates. With no-friction scheduling, hard-to-reach populations – e.g. senior executives, physicians, small business owners, agency contacts – are more likely to engage.
• Faster turnaround. Multiple interviews can run simultaneously. A study that would have taken weeks with a few human interviewers can happen in days.
• Consistent, bias-free execution. Every expert receives a consistent, replicable interview experience, eliminating the variability that comes with different human interviewers across a large panel.
• Scale of a survey with greater depth. Every response is attributable to a named expert. You get the traceability of a live call with the volume of a survey in the same program.
• Keep projects moving. When your team is stretched or offline, interviews keep running on your timeline, so insights are ready when you return.

Since the initial pilot, more and more client teams have started to use AI-Moderated Calls, citing the above benefits as key adoption drivers.

See Ai-Moderated Calls in action: request a demo -->

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Both formats connect you to a GLG expert for a live conversation, but they're optimized for different research moments and needs.

Many research teams use both in sequence. For example, they’ll screen a broad panel and build a consistent baseline with AI-Moderated Calls, and then conduct live expert calls for deeper exploration with the highest-signal voices.

Language barriers pose a persistent hurdle for international expert research. Coordinating with a separate human moderator who’s fluent in the expert’s language for each target market adds cost, scheduling complexity, and variability in how questions are phrased and interpreted. The richest insights from any call often depend on such subtleties.  

GLG’s AI-Moderated Calls now run in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. The AI Moderator speaks with each expert in their native language, so teams can reach experts on multiple continents without sourcing separate moderators.

The impact:

• Richer expert responses. Experts answer in the language they think and work in, producing more precise, detailed responses, especially on technical or market-specific topics.
• Consistent execution across markets. The same discussion guide, follow-up logic, and compliance guardrails, regardless of which language the call runs in. Clean comparisons across geographies without moderator variability.
• Reduced operational overhead. No need to identify, brief, and coordinate a specialist moderator for each language or each region. The AI Moderator handles it natively.

For research programs spanning broad geographic scopes – e.g. international market assessments, cross-border competitive intelligence, global voice-of-customer studies – multilingual moderation makes a reliably comparable cross-market study possible at new scale.

Rich as they are, findings from traditional expert interviews are hard to aggregate. Coding, comparing, and synthesizing dozens of nuanced answers manually across a large panel requires careful, time-consuming analysis. Surveys, on the other hand, produce clean data but not the valuable context and named attribution that makes primary research defensible.

AI-Moderated Calls accommodate both nuance and data clarity. Within a single discussion guide, teams can now combine:

• Open-ended questions with adaptive follow-ups, capturing the reasoning, texture, and expert perspective that hard numbers can't convey. ‍
• Structured response formats, multiple choice, multi-select, scale, and matrix questions, producing clean, comparable data points across every respondent. Responses automatically export to your Excel.

Where teams used to run two separate research tracks, a single research program can now produce both the qualitative insight needed to understand why a market is moving and the quantitative data needed to measure how much or how fast, all traceable to the same named expert.

GLG's industry-leading compliance framework is embedded seamlessly into the AI Moderator, which opens every call with a compliance disclaimer and operates strictly within your firm's guardrails, redirecting experts who may drift toward sensitive territory.

Compliance teams get a comprehensive auditable record from every call, with speaker IDs and time stamping included in automatic transcriptions. Firms can configure:

• Transcript holds and approval workflows – requiring compliance sign-off before transcripts become visible to end users
• Granular access controls – summary-only access, with the verbatim transcript and recording kept private
• Custom retention policies – setting how long recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries are retained
• AI summary and format settings – choosing which AI features (summaries, synthesis, themes, named quotes) individual users can access

GLG's software is purpose-built to enable your firm to enforce your protocols.  

What we don’t do with your data: Your calls, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries are yours. They are never used to train AI models, never used to improve the Moderator, and never shared with third parties. The Moderator’s capability comes from GLG’s methodology and our own expert data, not from client research.

The value of an AI-Moderated Call compounds beyond the conversation itself into a larger, connected research ecology. In myGLG, you can rapidly synthesize insights across calls, surfacing patterns, contrasts, and key themes throughout a project. And with GLG's MCP connector, you can search and synthesize across transcripts directly in the AI tools your team already uses, and trace every insight back to a source quote. Teams can also export findings, generate custom reports, and track follow-up actions, all in myGLG.

As research teams face more pressure – more markets, tighter timelines, higher expectations, and increasingly rigorous audits – they confront a recurring problem: How do I get the depth of an expert interview as well as scale, speed, and structured data? GLG’s AI-Moderated Calls provide an answer.

The AI Moderator is GLG’s purpose-built conversational agent, built in-house on decades of GLG research methodology. It's designed to work as an extension of your team: it runs the research where your team’s bandwidth hits its limit, in the markets and languages you need to reach, and delivers structured, attributable insights at a scale that was previously beyond the bounds of the possible.

Learn more about AI-Moderated Calls or speak with our team to explore how they fit into your research program.