The New Era of Human Understanding Is Here. And It Starts With Our Q4 Release

Before I walk through the exciting updates from Discuss this quarter, in case you haven’t heard, Discuss and Voxco have merged!

Voxco brings scientific rigor, reach, and credibility of decades of quantitative expertise along with AI-powered analytics. And together we represent what’s possible when the nuance of qualitative understanding meets quantitative rigor in a new era for human understanding.

Why is this a big deal for the market research and insights space? 

Let me attempt to answer that question with a visual:

To unpack that visual a bit, I’ll share my point of view on why bringing quantitative and qualitative research together is such a big deal. 

After several years in the industry, the market dynamics and pains I hear both global brands and research agencies experiencing are both consistent and incredible. 

Specifically, on one end of the spectrum there’s been all this hype around AI with new “narrowly built” AI moderation solutions flooding the market from brand-new vendors staffed with just 10, 20, or 30 people. If you’ve only got one shot at getting your project right, can you trust them?

In the middle, there are large vendors that are slow to innovate. Instead, they’re white-labeling one of those narrowly built solutions (for example, Suzy Speaks is just a white label of one of the new vendors). You deserve to know if your vendor is outsourcing their innovation.

And at the other end of the spectrum are lumbering enterprise giants that have moved into massive billion-dollar mergers (Forsta and Qualtrics). The value to customer outcomes is unclear and their innovation strategy (especially around AI) is even more nebulous.

It’s these market dynamics that have me so out of my mind stoked for the future of Discuss. We have a vision coupled with an incredible innovation team that is set to change the game forever.

Imagine a centralized insights hub powered by AI at its core that will eliminate the disconnectedness between tools and workflows that seem to be ever present. While enabling mind-blowing new ways to engage with data and put analyses at your fingertips in ways that have never been done before. 

That’s the future of Discuss.

The qual and quant world coming together in one platform, one dataset, and one story.

AI will be your trusted research partner. 

Synthetic data will give critical instant ideas, feedback, and even predictive outcomes. 

The new Discuss is now set to lead the way in all of these areas, helping every researcher, marketer, UX pro, brand manager, and R&D leader at our customers have massive success in this new era for human understanding.

This bigger canvas is the backdrop for our Q4 release, and honestly, I can’t wait to share more about what that canvas means for our customers in 2026. 

But for now, let’s get into what we just announced.

Here’s what’s new from Discuss in Q4

For context, it’s worth doing a quick rewind. We started 2025 by becoming the first in the industry to launch AI Agents that can actually run the qual workflow end-to-end, from finding the right people to interviewing them to delivering insight-ready takeaways. Then we leveled that up with faster “vibe coding” and becoming the first platform to enable both AI-led and human-led conversations.

And the proof of our customer traction is in the usage: this fall we crossed OpenAI’s 10-billion-token mark, meaning our AI has analyzed tens of millions of pages of real human conversation. Not demos. Not pilots. Actual production work, making Discuss one of the most deeply integrated and battle-tested generative AI applications in market research today.

Today’s release is our exclamation point to our AI-centric 2025 journey.

What’s incredible about Q4 though, is that our AI innovation is centered around dramatically improving customer outcomes that drive our vision for lightning fast answers (24 hours or less) to critical business questions.

More specifically, we’re introducing three big AI-powered capabilities that enable a more connected, always-on system of understanding:

1. Virtual Personas (beta) – AI-powered personas that evolve as fast as your customers do. This is synthetic data done right. It’s not the parlor trick of creating thousands of fake Millennials to answer survey questions. It’s creating a digital twin built off of tons of quant, qual, and other data that you or other team members can chat with.
2. Enhanced Interview Agent – Our AI-led interviews that support an even wider variety of uses, from web or app UX testing to in-home usage tests and shop-a-longs, to empathy programs; AND enable you to easily tailor and train the agent to ensure that it maximizes engagement from respondents and asks the follow up questions as good as the best human moderator.
3. Interactive Data Visualization in Insights Agent – Quant-style visuals that show the scale behind what people say with the ability to drill down and engage insights data like never before.

1. Virtual Personas that learn and evolve with your audience

Let’s start where most teams don’t have enough support today: early-stage thinking.

When marketers, product leaders, and UX teams are in “what if?” mode, they usually have two choices:

1. Move fast on assumptions and hope it works.
2. Wait weeks for a formal study and lose momentum.

Neither of those options is great.

Virtual Personas add a new layer to the research lifecycle by turning what you already know into something you can interact with.

They’re built from the assets you’re already sitting on:

• Past qual, like interview transcripts, video, and open-ends
• Quant reports and surveys
• Briefs, desk research, existing persona docs
• Demographics, behaviors, attitudes

Discuss AI pulls those inputs together, finds the shared motivations and behaviors, and creates dynamic, AI-powered personas that replicate real-world consumer behavior and evolve as new data is added.

You can ask them questions. Pressure-test early ideas. See how different segments might react. Use them to get directional signals before you invest in live research so your studies are more focused, better scoped, and frankly… more worth everyone’s time.

A few ways teams will use Virtual Personas:

• Marketing exploring messaging territories and value props before creative development.
• Product thinking through adoption paths or potential friction points for new features.
• Insights teams building global persona frameworks that actually stay up to date.

It’s like having a focus group that never logs off, grounded in real research, constantly updated, and ready whenever a “what if…” shows up in a meeting.

Virtual Personas are launching in beta, and we’re excited to see how you put them to work in your own decision cycles.

2. AI-led interviews that actually feel like your brand

Next up: the moment of truth. Talking to people.

AI-led interviews have a ton of promise, but let’s be honest, a lot of them still feel… off. Scripted. Abrupt. Like someone handed a robot a discussion guide and said “good enough.”

Our Interview Agent enhancements are focused on creating a new gold standard when it comes to making respondents feel comfortable, and dare I say even connected, to the AI interviewer.

With this release, teams can now:

• Choose moderator voices that match the accent and tone you want, from warm and conversational to more formal and professional.
• Control the depth of probing, from light check-ins to deeper, more exploratory follow-ups.
• Set custom introductions and transitions so the experience feels on-brand and coherent, not pieced together.
• Mix quant-style and open-ended questions in one continuous flow, where the what AND the why are uncovered.

The result: AI-led conversations that feel more like a skilled human moderator. Except it’s one who never gets tired, stays on script, and can run studies across dozens of languages at a scale no human team can touch.

And because the experience is consistent, you’re not dealing with wildly different interview quality from study to study. You can design the interaction once, then reuse and tweak it across projects, markets, and segments.

This is how we see AI interviews evolving: not as a shortcut, but as a repeatable, customizable way to get high-quality qual that teams actually trust.

3. Data Visualization that shows scale and story

If Virtual Personas help you quickly refine your initial thinking and ideas, and Interview Agent helps you understand the why faster across more customers, the last piece is making sense of everything that comes back.

Qual is incredible at explaining the why behind behavior. It’s not always great at answering, “OK, but how big is this? Is this just five passionate people, or a real pattern?”

That’s where Interactive Data Visualization in Insights Agent comes in.

We’ve built a way to “auto-magically” categorize open-ended feedback, turn it into quant-style visuals, and let you engage and drill down on those categories to learn more about:

• The key themes that emerged
• How often they appear
• How they vary across segments
• The real quotes and clips that bring each theme to life

Behind the scenes, AI reviews responses, groups similar ideas, and organizes them into clear, measurable themes. You can quickly see what’s rising to the top, where there’s divergence, and which stories best represent each theme.

Then, instead of manually reviewing interview recordings, your notes, and reading transcripts for hours to build a slide, you can:

• Explore themes interactively inside Insights Agent
• Drill down into segments or individual responses
• Pull the strongest quotes and clips straight into your storytelling and decks

You get the numbers stakeholders want and the human stories they remember, in one place. And because everything is tied back to the underlying data, you’re not just saying “people mentioned X a lot” –  you can actually show it.

From one-off projects to a connected system of understanding

Zoom out for a second. 

Individually, each of these capabilities is powerful:

• Virtual Personas help you prepare smarter.
• The Interview Agent helps you ask better questions at scale.
• Data Visualization helps you analyze and communicate with more confidence.

But the real shift happens when you use them together. And even better, if you can easily analyze and understand key learnings across all your projects, specific to key target audience segments.

Your past projects feed your personas. Your personas shape better studies. Your studies generate richer conversations. Those conversations roll up into visual summaries and a deeper knowledge base. That knowledge feeds the next decision, and the next, and the next.

Instead of qual data living in disconnected projects and slide decks, it becomes a connected, living system of understanding that:

• Keeps pace with how your customers actually think, feel, and act
• Reduces the risk of repeating the same questions over and over
• Helps teams move faster without flying blind
• Makes it easier to keep stakeholders aligned on what’s really going on with your audience

We’re closing 2025 by staying ahead of everyone else.

That’s the future we’re building toward at Discuss: the “what” and the “why” coming together as part of a new era of human understanding. Not just a rearview mirror, but predictive and always-on to ensure you’re ready for what’s ahead.

If you made it this far in my post, I hope you can really feel my sincere enthusiasm and excitement for our last major product launch and release of the year. I’ve been with Discuss for several years now, leading our overarching product and go-to-market strategy. In my new role as Chief Strategy Officer, I’ve never been more in awe of what our incredible team product gurus (product managers and product marketers) and dev rock stars have delivered to drive so much value for each and every Discuss customer.

Want to see it in action?

If you’re already a Discuss customer, these capabilities are designed to plug right into the workflows you’re running today, no reinvention required.

If you’re new to us, this is a great moment to see how Virtual Personas, Interview Agent, and Insights Agent, and our entire platform can help your team move from “we think” to “we know” a lot faster. Book a demo today.

👉 Learn more about the Q4 release