Primary research
Primary research is data you collect yourself, such as survey responses, interviews, focus groups or usability tests, for the question at hand.
What it means
Primary research produces new evidence. Methods include surveys, customer interviews, focus groups, concept tests and field observation. It answers questions that published sources cannot, such as how a specific buyer ranks features or why a customer switched vendors. The trade-off is cost and time, and sample quality matters as much as the questionnaire.
AI helps at several steps. It can draft survey questions, group open-text answers into themes and summarize interview transcripts. Synthetic respondents, which are AI models that imitate a survey panel, are a different case. They can suggest hypotheses, but they do not replace people. In a German study that compared 500 AI respondents with 500 human ones, the AI diverged from the humans on most questions tested. Use real respondents for the decision and treat AI output as a draft.
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https://aimarketresearchtools.com/glossary/primary-research/