In a 1998 interview with Businessweek, Steve Jobs was asked whether Apple had conducted consumer research while developing the iMac. The question was pointed. Apple was then fighting to revive its fortunes after years of decline, and the iMac—with its radically different, translucent shell—was a bold gamble for a company struggling to regain its footing. The query was straightforward: how much of the product had been shaped by what consumers said they wanted?

Jobs' answer was more nuanced. Apple had plenty of research on its existing customers and watched industry trends closely, he said. But he was wary of using focus groups to design complex products. “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them,” he told Businessweek.

Nearly three decades on, the market research industry has evolved dramatically, embracing online panels, behavioral data, and artificial intelligence. It is now possible to hold thousands of conversations with customers at a fraction of the traditional time and cost. Yet a stubborn question remains: does having more customer insight actually lead to better products?

The founders of Conveo, a two-year-old Belgian startup, believe the answer lies in using AI to identify patterns that customers may not articulate themselves. The company looks across hundreds or thousands of video conversations for recurring frustrations, unmet needs, and emerging behaviors—and then gives product and marketing teams a way to act on them.

“If you are doing a thousand interviews a month, you can start asking questions like: What is changing? What are people talking about? What are the emerging trends? What are the things that we don't know that we don't know?” says Conveo co-founder Hendrik Van Hove. “And then you can start using that data to inform your decision making on a continuous basis.”

From consulting work to an AI moderator

Van Hove came up with the original idea for Conveo while working at McKinsey, where he was running studies, surveys, and interviews and often analyzing the findings until late at night. While working on a project for a large pharmaceutical company, he realized AI could transform the way interviews were conducted. “I could see that this was one of the few use cases where AI actually works,” he recalls.

With the backing of the influential Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, Van Hove and co-founder Dieter De Mesmaeker launched Conveo's first product, an AI moderator, in 2024.

For years, researchers have tried to bridge the gap between the scale of quantitative research, which analyzes large data samples to identify trends, and the depth of qualitative research, which uses interviews, focus groups, and other methods to explore why people think or behave the way they do. AI moderation pushes that idea further, allowing companies to conduct hundreds or thousands of adaptive, qualitative-style interviews rather than simply analyzing larger volumes of data.

That distinction is central to the debate around the technology: Conveo is presenting AI moderation as a way to expand the volume and consistency of customer conversations, while its critics are focused on whether scale can preserve the human interpretation that gives qualitative research its value.

“Qual at scale” splits the industry

But while the idea of “qual at scale” is gaining traction, it has divided the market research world. Critics question whether a methodology whose value has traditionally rested on depth, human interpretation, and the ability to read between the lines can really be scaled.

“I see it as a supplement, not a substitute for human-to-human research,” says Simon Shaw, director of behavioral science at market research and insight consultancy Trinity McQueen and a board member of the Association of Qualitative Research (AQR). “These platforms are fast and cost-efficient… but I think there are real differences. Good qualitative research is relational, reflective, and nonlinear. There are moments of inspiration, which is a very human thing.”

Shaw argues that AI moderation, in contrast, is “extracting information, rather than having a relational exchange with somebody.” That limits its ability to build trust, understand emerging cultural themes, or get to the heart of what people really think or feel about something, he says.

Van Hove counters that Conveo's AI can analyze videos for body language and tone of voice and react in real time, bringing it closer to traditional qualitative research. But replacing humans was never the intention. “We're not trying to be better than a human, it's just not possible. When you're in someone's house, seeing how they live, there are all these other factors you can add [to an analysis of their behavior, which AI cannot],” he says.

The real value of AI moderation becomes obvious on larger projects, he says. “For example, we have companies in Europe that are doing research in Japan,” Van Hove explains. “You don't have one interviewer per market; it's the same AI analyzing every market. There are no translation issues. The data is perfectly captured, so you can go back to it months later. That's when the ROI is clear.”

He adds that there are other benefits to AI moderators. “There's no time constraint; there's no human judgement. People are typically not willing to share negative feedback when there's a human interviewer, but they'll be honest with AI.”

Investors buy in

Investors can see the potential. Conveo's Series A in September raised $50 million from DST Global Partners, Balderton Capital, Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital, and Y Combinator, bringing its total funding to date to $55.8 million.

As attention turns to growing the company in the United States, Van Hove has swapped Brussels for Manhattan. “There's a big difference in terms of how much access you have to capital, to talent, and to clients [in America],” he says. “Today I have a meeting with the CEO of a protein brand, an hour later, I go to a marketing event where there will be CMOs of Fortune 500 companies, and then I have a dinner with one of the largest pharma agency owners in the U.S. In Belgium, you'd have to take a flight and plan two weeks in advance to have even one of those meetings.”

Being headquartered in Europe, however, has its advantages, Van Hove says. “There's a lot less employee churn. Our team is super loyal, we have a lot of fun together, and everyone is invested [in the future of the company]. The work ethic in Europe is incredible. We're also very happy with our European investors.”

Conveo has scaled from a team of 15 in December 2025 to 80, and now has offices in New York, San Francisco, and London. “We are only at 1% of our journey, and so I feel like there's still so much ahead of us,” says Van Hove. “There's so much that we still need to get out of the ecosystem, in Europe and in the U.S. I'm looking forward to what's next.”

That expansion will put the company's central proposition into a broader set of markets and research projects: whether AI can make customer conversations more continuous and scalable while leaving room for the human judgment that both sides of the debate consider important.

This article was originally published on Fortune.