What we learned from letting AI lead: AI Agents4Qual conference report
Dr Susanne Friese · · Experiments & evidence
Dear Reader,
Some of you may remember the AIAgents4Qual conference, which I organized together with colleagues in March this year. We set it up as a methodological experiment: What happens when AI is no longer simply assisting the qualitative researcher, but takes on substantial parts of the research process?
We have now published our reflections on the conference and the discussions it generated in Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS).
The article is available in both English and German, so choose whichever version you prefer:
AIAgents4Qual 2026: What Happens When AI Becomes the Primary Actor in Qualitative Research?
And just remember - this is NOT the way I would recommend to work with AI. The conference was just an experiment to see what happens if we push the margins.
Work with AI assistant in a cooperative, iterative way. Never expect or ask for the final answer. For qualitative analysis - start descriptively, so as we have always have done it. We first need to understand the data, then we can push further to the conceptual and interpretive part.