NewMR AI & Innovation Update – April 2025

April NewMR WebinarNewMR Webinar
Wednesday, 23 April, 2025
Broadcast time 3pm London (10am New York, 9am Chicago)
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Join us as we bring you updates and information relating to the impact of AI and Innovation in the insights and market research world.

  • David Wright & Karlien Kriegler, Hello Ara
    What Lies Beneath the Keystrokes: Unlocking Insights Through Typing Patterns in Conversational AI Research
  • Josephine Hansom, MRS Board Member & EDI Council Chair
    AI and Equality, Friend or Foe?
  • Ray Poynter, NewMR
    A scenario forecasting review of AI in the context of insights & research

Click here to register

Synopses

What Lies Beneath the Keystrokes: Unlocking Insights Through Typing Patterns in Conversational AI Research
David Wright & Karlien Kriegler, Hello Ara
Conversational AI has rapidly transformed the research industry, powered by Generative AI’s ability to enhance probing, automate verbatim coding, and create richer, more dynamic respondent experiences. As a result, more people are typing—and typing more often—in surveys than ever before.

But Conversational AI isn’t just about adding a couple of open-ended questions to the end of a closed survey. It’s a craft: built on thoughtful conversation design, deeper follow-up probing, and a fundamentally different interaction style. This change in interaction affects good respondents and fraudsters alike. Following an extensive academic review, we began keylogging select projects to uncover what typing itself can reveal. The findings have been fascinating.

In this session, we’ll explore and challenge the following hypotheses:

  • Can typing patterns distinguish between System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) thinking?
  • Can we tell when someone is truly engaged with the survey?
  • Can fraud be identified without reading the text, just from the typing behaviour?

AI and Equality, Friend or Foe?
Josephine Hansom, MRS Board Member & EDI Council Chair
What impact will AI have on issues such as Diversity, Equality and Inclusion? In this session, Josephine Hansom will highlight positive and negative possibilities and suggest initiatives that should be followed.

A scenario forecasting review of AI in the context of insights & research
Ray Poynter, NewMR
In this session, Ray will use a scenario planning approach to highlight different plausible impacts of AI on the field of Insights and Research. Ray will contrast today’s picture with the scenarios he outlined in 2023.