# AI-Assisted Research & Synthetic Users

Purpose: Define where AI helps research, where it does not, and how to use synthetic users safely.
Contents: current adoption signals, AI role split, synthetic-user guardrails, decision flow, risk checklist.

## Current Signals

| Signal | Value |
|--------|-------|
| Researchers citing AI analysis/synthesis as a top trend | `88%` |
| Researchers seeing synthetic users as impactful | `48%` |
| Time reduction from AI-assisted qualitative analysis | `up to 80%` |
| Synthetic agents mimicking survey answers in some studies | `up to 85%` |

## Role Split

- AI handles `what`: transcription, clustering, coding suggestions, draft structure.
- Humans handle `why` and `what to do`: empathy, judgment, ethics, prioritization, strategic interpretation.

## Synthetic Users: Use And Non-Use

| Do | Don't |
|----|-------|
| Use for preparation or hypothesis generation | Use as a replacement for real-user research |
| Treat outputs as hypotheses to validate | Present synthetic output as user evidence |
| Use with widely documented user groups | Use with niche or specialized populations |
| Pilot interview guides or proto-journeys | Use for final concept validation |

## Decision Flow

Use synthetic users only when all are true:
- the target group is broadly documented
- the task is preparation, desk research, or early hypothesis generation
- stakeholders are unlikely to mistake it for real research
- a real-user validation step is planned

Otherwise: use real-user research.

## Risk Checklist

| Risk | Mitigation |
|------|------------|
| Hallucinated patterns | Verify against source data |
| Bias amplification | Use diverse source material and bias checks |
| Privacy leakage | Anonymize data before AI processing |
| Skill atrophy | Keep periodic manual analysis in the workflow |
| Loss of human nuance | Keep interviews and final interpretation human-led |

## Researcher Usage By Phase

| Phase | Acceptable AI use | Hard boundary |
|-------|-------------------|---------------|
| DEFINE | Summarize prior research | Verify summary accuracy |
| DESIGN | Pilot guides or synthesize assumptions | Do not skip human study design review |
| ANALYZE | Assist coding and pattern detection | Validate against source data |
| SYNTHESIZE | Draft structure | Human owns final narrative |
| DISTILL | Trend summarization | Human owns calibration |
