10 Billion Tokens Later: Why Discuss Was Recognized by OpenAI and What It Means for the Future of Qualitative Research

10 Billion Tokens Later: Why Discuss Was Recognized by OpenAI and What It Means for the Future of Qualitative Research

By Adam Mertz, Chief Growth Officer, Discuss

What does 10 billion tokens really mean?

If you’re deep in AI, you know a token is a tiny sliver of language – about four characters or three-quarters of a word. But if you’re in the world of qualitative research, here’s what it really means:

It means millions of thoughts, ideas, reactions, feedback, and “aha” moments from hours upon hours of customer interviews and nuanced conversations processed through our platform.

It means an AI moderator asking thousands upon thousands of respondents across the globe, in their native language, really smart, really specific, and really pertinent follow-on questions as it explores topics and better understands they “why” behind the “what” people think, all while the teams who need and want to hear customers can more easily achieve that goal.

It means AI at scale, powering real-time insights and getting tens of thousands of burning questions answered about key target audiences in a blink, all without losing the human connection that makes qualitative research so valuable.

And now, it means Discuss has been officially recognized by OpenAI as one of the top users of its platform globally across all industries and companies, and is the only market research-related company to receive this recognition.

Discuss at DevDay: A Front Row Seat to AI’s Future

Last week, our VP of Engineering Jesse Thomson traveled to San Francisco to attend OpenAI’s very coveted DevDay and walked away with a very cool honor in hand. (Yes, there’s a physical award. Yes, we have photos!)

OpenAI awarded Discuss for surpassing 10 billion tokens processed through our GenAI platform, a milestone that puts us on the same list as Netflix, Instacart, AWS, and other frontier AI innovators.

We’re also the only company in the market research industry to appear on OpenAI’s Token Milestone list. That’s no small thing.

As Jesse stated after the event, “This recognition reflects our relentless focus on building infrastructure that scales, performs, and powers real human insight at AI speed. We’ve spent years optimizing systems, reliability, prompt routing, and model orchestration, and it’s paying off.”

Why This Matters for Research Leaders

We’re not talking about a cool experiment in an R&D lab. This is AI in production, every day, across more than 100 countries.

Our customers are running AI-moderated interviews, triggering AI Agents to summarize, surface themes, and generate insights at the pace of conversation. And they’re doing it at scale, with trust and with confidence.

This milestone is more than a number. It’s proof that AI-powered research works when it’s done right.

It proves that scale and empathy aren’t mutually exclusive. That you can run thousands of interviews globally and still understand the nuance of human emotion.

We’re the first to reach this milestone in our space because we were the first to bring AI into our platform. It’s more than that, though. This milestone reflects that how we’ve incorporated it into our platform drives immense value for our customers, because otherwise these AI elements wouldn’t be leveraged as much as they have been.

We’re Just Getting Started

10 billion tokens is a huge achievement, but what excites us most is what it represents:

• Faster insight cycles for teams under pressure to move quickly
• Deeper understanding across cultures, regions, and audiences
• More time for thinking and storytelling, not just data wrangling
• Responsible AI that’s built with guardrails and guided by empathy

As OpenAI shared in their email to us:

“There are millions of developers on the platform, but only a small percentage have crossed this milestone – you’re now part of a small group building at the frontier of AI.”

We couldn’t be prouder to represent our category on that list. And we’re just getting warmed up. Over the past year we’ve woven GenAI into the fabric of our platform, with multiple GenAI agents that act as virtual assistants throughout the research lifecycle. In fact, we’re now on track for processing literally billions of tokens per month, so we look forward to surpassing the 100B token threshold sometime next year!

Go Discuss! Let’s keep building the future of human understanding at AI scale.