AI–Human Hybrids for Marketing Research: Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as Collaborators

The authors’ central premise is that a human–LLM (large language model) hybrid approach leads to efficiency and effectiveness gains in the marketing research process. In qualitative research, they show that LLMs can assist in both data generation and analysis; LLMs effectively create sample characteristics, generate synthetic respondents, and conduct and moderate in-depth interviews. The AI–human hybrid generates information-rich, coherent data that surpasses human-only data in depth and insightfulness and matches human performance in data analysis tasks of generating themes and summaries. Evidence from expert judges shows that humans and LLMs possess complementary skills; the human–LLM hybrid outperforms its…