He also shares insights on AI’s current role in qualitative research, explaining that while AI moderation isn’t ready to replace human researchers, it can serve as a valuable extension tool. Lively emphasizes that the research industry is in early stages with AI adoption, with rapid changes expected in the coming months.
Measuring Usability Programs
All Things Insights: We are here today at TMRE 2025, with Peter Lively, Former Senior Qualitative UX Researcher at Meta. Thanks so much for coming on and talking with us today about insights. You held a session at the show today, “Meta Monetization UX Playbook: Research at the Pace of Innovation,” held with Discuss. Can you tell us a little bit about that session?
Peter Lively: Sure. We were building out a usability measurement program, and having some problems with actually scaling that program, and so we partnered with Discuss to help us build it out. Initially, it was very cumbersome and difficult to collect the user data, but having moved to the Discuss IO platform, it transformed the whole program. It made us so much more lean and much more efficient at collecting data.
All Things Insights: Discuss and a lot of solution providers at the show are highlighting AI-assisted qualitative research. Do you feel that qual research is having a bit of a moment here in terms of AI and doing more qual at scale?
Peter Lively: It definitely feels like a pivotal moment. I’m a very traditional moderator, with a background in training moderated research, so it would be quite easy for me to say, hey, I’m going to be replaced by an AI moderator, but I don’t feel that’s the case. I feel like it could be really used as an extension to me.
I’m not scalable. I’m a single person, and so having a moderator, an AI moderator that’s kind of helping me out around conducting my research, I think, is probably a good thing. I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think it can absolutely replace me, for sure. But I think there’s definitely some areas where AI moderation could really help me.
Settling into the Early Stages of AI
All Things Insights: Where do you see the industry right now, what is the pulse of the marketplace in terms of AI and human intelligence? There’s the fear factor of losing jobs that’s happening, but also more use cases are happening. There’s more of a comfort zone with using AI as a tool. Where do you see the industry falling now?
Peter Lively: At the moment, certainly from my perspective, it’s very, very early days. I’ve not used an AI moderator, but I’ve certainly used AI to help me synthesize some of my data. And, obviously, I’m a subject matter expert in my field, and so when I see the risk and what’s returned, it’s not quite as I would expect it. So I’ve been testing it. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s getting pretty smart.
All Things Insights: What thoughts do you have on the theme of the show this year, the next era of insights? Everybody’s looking towards the future. Some say the future is here, others might be in early stages, as you mentioned. But for your specialty, for the UX or for the qualitative researcher, where do you see the future?
Peter Lively: That’s a very big question. I feel like things are changing so rapidly. If we had this conversation in six months’ time, even a month’s time, it would be very different, I think. I don’t really know where it’s going to go. I think if we look at twelve months ago, things are very different now, and I expect things to be very different in the next twelve months. I only expect things to improve. As I said earlier, I don’t think AI is that helpful for me, but I know it’s coming. I can see it. I’m really excited to know what’s going to happen in the future.
Supporting User Experiences
All Things Insights: Let me ask you one more question. Often we touch on market research for innovation and product development. Your session today had a little bit of that flavor to it as well. How does your role help you work with innovation teams and to develop these new products and services?
Peter Lively: My specialty is actually in usability and user experience measurement, and so it’s less on the marketing side and more about evaluating products and experiences. I’ve not really had to leverage those tools to help me with my role. It’s more about understanding where the product experience that’s already been built is working for users, and does the feature set actually work for them.
All Things Insights: Will those feature sets be relaunched or tweaked or redesigned based on your research? And a platform like Discuss that has these AI components, did that help you with the initiatives?
Peter Lively: For sure. One of the reasons why we moved to Discuss is because it has a suite of different kinds of products, and they’re continually evolving, so they’re continually adding new products. I think they’re announcing some new products next week. They announced recently that they have live translation for in session, and so if a session has been conducted in Portuguese, it’s been translated into English. So for anybody who’s observing the session who doesn’t speak Portuguese, they can follow along. Previously, you would have to wait for the transcription at the end, which would be translated. It’s thinking like that which is really helping transform my role and makes things much easier.
Every researcher is always working with product teams and is always trying to catch up with product teams. They are not going to wait typically for research. You have to run it in alignment with that whole project timeline. And so any tools that you can get to really accelerate insights collection and analysis is super important, and I feel like Discuss is right there, right now.
The acceleration and the pace just keep getting faster. I feel AI is going to just make that even more challenging because we expect a lot from it, and whether it is going to deliver on that promise is still an unknown.
All Things Insights: Maybe it’s not just the fear factor, but the industry facing the unknown factor as well. Thank you.
Editor’s Note: The next TMRE will take place on October 5-7, 2026, and will be co-located with Content Marketing World at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO.
