ethnobot

Qualitative depth, survey speed.

Understand how people actually experience AI

AI-powered interviews that surface the real stories, tensions, and patterns behind adoption — at a fraction of traditional research cost.

15 min
Average interview duration
8–12
Verbatim quotes captured per session
5–7
Evidence-backed themes extracted
80%
Cost savings vs traditional research
For individuals

Experience the interview yourself

Take the 10-minute conversation that maps your AI profile. No signup, no cost — just a genuine research conversation with Ethnobot.

Try it yourself
For organisations

Explore for your organisation

Run ethnographic interviews at scale across your workforce. Discover adoption patterns, absorption gaps, and transformation readiness.

Learn about Org StudiesSee what clients receive ↗
The problem

Qualitative research doesn't scale. Until now.

Everyone's talking about AI adoption. Nobody's listening carefully. Surveys miss nuance. Interviews are expensive. The real stories stay hidden.

"The greatest risk is winning the AI frontier but losing the AI era."
— Eric Schmidt, Former CEO, Google
88%
experimenting with AI
81%
see no meaningful ROI
85%
fail to scale beyond pilots

The bottleneck isn't technical — it's organisational and cultural. Most organisations are on track to win the tools and lose the adoption. Ethnobot exists to understand that gap from the inside.

See the global evidence behind the AI adoption crisis →

Surveys capture what, not why

Tick-box data tells you adoption rates. It can't tell you about the consultant who secretly uses AI to write proposals and feels conflicted about it.

Interviews don't scale

A skilled researcher can run 3–4 interviews a day. To study AI adoption across an organisation of 500, that’s months of work and tens of thousands in costs.

The gap between headlines and reality

AI discourse is dominated by hype and fear. What’s missing is the mundane, specific, messy truth of how people actually integrate these tools into their working lives.

How it works

From link to insight in under an hour

Ethnobot is a purpose-built AI that conducts qualitative research interviews — with the rigour of a trained researcher and the scale of software.

01

Create a study

Define your research question. The interviewer adapts its approach while maintaining structured methodology across every conversation.

02

Share a link

Generate unique interview links. Participants click, consent, and start talking. No accounts, no downloads, no friction.

03

AI conducts the interview

15–20 minutes of deep, structured conversation. One question at a time. Follows the energy. Captures verbatim quotes.

04

Get structured analysis

Each interview produces key quotes, usage patterns, mental models, thematic tags, maturity signals, and contradictions — all backed by evidence.

What makes it different

Research methodology, not chatbot theatre

Built on decades of qualitative research practice. Every design decision serves the quality of the data.

Methodology

Concrete before abstract

For every general claim, the interviewer immediately asks for a specific, recent example. “Walk me through what happened.” This is what separates rich data from opinion.

Depth

Follows the energy

When a participant shows excitement, frustration, or hesitation, the interviewer goes deeper before moving on. The most important insights live in emotional resonance, not scripted questions.

Rigour

Evidence-backed themes

Every theme in the analysis must cite at least one verbatim quote. No hallucinated insights. No unsupported claims. Tensions and contradictions are surfaced explicitly.

Scale

Consistent at any volume

Interview #1 and interview #500 follow the same methodology. No researcher fatigue, no drift, no shortcuts. The 4pm interview is as sharp as the 9am one.

Live example

A real interview, in action

The interviewer builds rapport, asks one question at a time, and follows threads to their natural depth. When something lands, it captures the quote and checks it back.

Helix Interviewer
Research Interview · 18 min
Interviewer
Walk me through how you used AI yesterday or this week. What were you trying to accomplish?
Participant
I had ChatGPT interview me with 40 questions before writing anything — it’s how I avoid getting the statistically most probable answer.
Interviewer
Can you tell me about a time when that questioning process surfaced something you hadn’t thought of?
Participant
It asked how I wanted indigenous iconography represented — and I realised, why should I get to decide that? It identified a blind spot I just wasn’t thinking about.
Interviewer
“It identified a blind spot and asked a question in a really interesting way that forced me to modify the design.” — Did I capture that accurately?
Who it's for

If you need to understand how people actually use AI

Ethnobot is for anyone who needs rich, qualitative data about AI adoption — not just numbers, but stories, mental models, and the tensions beneath the surface.

Researchers

Scale qualitative fieldwork without sacrificing depth. Run 100 interviews in a week instead of a quarter.

People & Culture teams

Understand how your workforce is actually adopting AI. Find the hidden experts, the anxious, and the patterns you didn’t know existed.

Consultants & strategists

Gather deep evidence for AI transformation projects. Ground your recommendations in what people actually do, not what leadership assumes.

“Synthesis doesn't just mean sorting 400 post-it notes into clusters. It's being able to manage complex multi-stakeholder power dynamics — that is the real art of my profession.”

— Research participant, public innovation consultant — reflecting after the Helix Interview on where human value lies and where AI value begins

Suhit Anantula
Good Design Award recipientPublished author15+ years in design & strategy

Built by a designer who's spent years in the space between strategy and making

I'm Suhit Anantula, founder of The Helix Lab, and I've spent the last 15+ years working at the intersection of design, strategy, and technology. My career has been about understanding how people think, behave, and make decisions — and designing systems that work with those realities, not against them.

My work has been recognised with a Good Design Award, and I've partnered with organisations ranging from startups to government agencies on projects where getting the human insight right was the difference between success and expensive failure.

When AI arrived, I saw the same pattern I'd seen with every major technology shift: the people building and deploying it weren't listening carefully enough to the people using it. The research was too shallow — surveys and sentiment scores when what was needed was the kind of deep, specific, messy qualitative understanding that only comes from skilled conversation.

So I built the tool I wished existed. Ethnobot is a research instrument designed by a researcher — informed by decades of qualitative methodology, encoded into an AI that can run hundreds of deep interviews without losing the thread.

The Helix Moment book cover

The Helix Moment

How to Think, Design and Lead in the Co-Intelligence Age. The research and thinking behind Ethnobot draws on the frameworks explored in this book.

thehelixmoment.com →

Get in touch: suhit@anantula.com

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