The Challenge
The company's Research & Insights team wanted a quarterly tracker that could follow how investors think about and use generative AI in finance, not only how many were adopting it, but why, and how that differed across customer segments like investor type, asset tier, and brokerage segment.
A standard quantitative survey could answer the “what.” But understanding the reasoning behind investors' attitudes toward AI, at a sample large enough to break out by segment, meant fielding open-ended questions to roughly a thousand people every quarter, and finding a way to read and theme those responses consistently from wave to wave, without it becoming a slow, manual coding exercise each time.
The Solution
The team built the tracker around CloudResearch Engage, using its AI-moderated open-ends to capture qualitative depth inside the same survey instrument as the quantitative tracker, rather than running qual and quant as two separate efforts.
Qualitative Depth Without Slowing the Field
Five open-end questions, each with automated AI follow-up probing, ran inline with the closed-end tracker questions in a single wave, reaching the full sample rather than a smaller qualitative subset.
One Integrated Story, Not Two Reports
Because the qualitative responses were structured and theme-able from the start, they could be woven directly into the same report as the quantitative crosstabs, organized around the same investor segments, instead of living in a separate qualitative writeup.
Built to Repeat
The approach was designed with the next wave in mind: consistent question wording, consistent segments, and a consistent way of turning open-ended responses into comparable themes, so the tracker can hold together as data accumulates over time.
Results
Wave 1 produced a single integrated report spanning investor adoption of AI, current use cases, motivators and barriers, trust, and firm perceptions, with quantitative findings and AI-moderated qualitative themes presented together, organized consistently around the company's priority investor segments, rather than as separate quant and qual deliverables.
What's Next
With Wave 1 complete, the company's Research & Insights team plans to run the tracker quarterly using the same integrated approach, so leadership can watch how investor sentiment and behavior around AI shift wave over wave rather than relying on a single snapshot.
About This Organization's Research & Insights Team
This organization's Research & Insights team runs ongoing consumer research that helps guide the company's product, marketing, and advisor strategy for investors.