Best practices guide for supporting AI-Moderated Interviews

Unlike traditional quantitative surveys, AI-Moderated Interviews (AIMI) represent a ‘Qual-at-Scale’ methodology. AIMI uses conversational AI to conduct one-on-one, open-ended, voice and/or video-enabled interviews at scale. AIMI allows for real-time probing—simulating a human moderator—across hundreds of participants simultaneously.

This methodology necessitates a higher level of technical readiness and deeper respondent engagement than standard studies.

The demand for users to participate in AI-Moderated Interviews has seen significant growth since 2025 and is projected to continue expanding as the technology advances.

This increase is driven not only by new technology but also by research, such as that conducted by the University of Mannheim, which indicates that AI-Moderated Interviews offer superior linguistic quality. Specifically, respondents use 51% more unique words and discuss 36% more unique themes, establishing this as a scalable and in-depth research method.

AI-Moderated Interviews are typically characterised by:

• Higher CPIs offered to reflect the increased effort by the respondent

• Increased study LOI, which also leads to higher CPIs offered

• Increased conversion rates as the participants tend to be more highly engaged and better rewarded for their time and effort

AI-Moderated Interviews present an excellent opportunity to increase conversion and revenue rates and boost respondent engagement and retention. The demand for these types of surveys is expected to continue to increase as buyers experiment and scale this methodology.

AI-Moderated Interviews are typically run by:

• Customers who need human qualitative data at scale.

• Brands, political pollers, media, or research agencies running AIMI studies via video, audio, or text.

• Project Managers that need to run studies that require higher respondent effort and variability than traditional quantitative surveys.

• Project Managers who need to run studies where traditional survey benchmarks, e.g., Length of Interview (LOI), Incidence Rate (IR), and Cost per Interview (CPI), may not directly apply.

Similar to traditional survey research, we see a range of target audiences requested by AIMI buyers.

We encourage supply partners that want to effectively monetize AI-Moderated Interview opportunities to review this document and their integration.

Please reach out to your Account Team if you have any questions about leveraging audio and video surveys.

Enable Opportunities that collect PII  

Supply partners leveraging our programmatic integrations must first ensure they are not excluding opportunities that collect PII to be able to sample to AIMI survey opportunities.

• Feed Partners:

  • Confirm your subscription is not excluding PII opportunities. Review your current Feed Opportunities subscription settings to ensure your subscription does not include a filter on PII collection. If your subscription includes in the body the property collects_pii set to FALSE, your system is not receiving PII surveys.  You will need to reset your subscription and either change this to TRUE or omit the argument entirely.

  • Confirm your survey evaluation logic does not exclude PII opportunities. If your subscription does not exclude PII opportunities, also confirm that any rules for scoring or selecting surveys for respondents does not exclude or demote surveys where collects_pii is TRUE.

  • PII studies can be identified via the collects_pii property in the Feed Opportunities response.

• Match Partners:

  • Including the allow_pii_surveys=true parameter on entry links enables PII opportunities. More information can be found under “Entry Links” in our Match Integration Guide.

Map to AIMI Qualifications

To ensure you can present audio and video surveys in your offerwall, please ensure you have mapped your integration to the following qualifications:

Please review this document to access the full Cint Standard Qualification Library and read the latest updates.

Respondent Criteria Recommendations

As AIMI studies require increased focus and effort from respondents, we recommend prioritizing proven, high-quality respondents. This may include:

• Excluding respondents who have not previously interacted with any surveys

• Prioritising respondents who have previously participated in video, audio, or extended LOI surveys successfully

Respondent Experience Recommendations

Video and Audio labels (Feed API only)

We recommend displaying labels for audio or video requirements when offering an AIMI opportunity to a respondent.

This may include an icon of a webcam or a microphone or text labels such as ‘Video’ or ‘Audio’.

As respondents will be more easily able to identify that it’s a conversational study, we expect that there will be a lower drop-off rate, as participants who are unwilling to participate or are not in a quiet environment will not enter the study.

Examples:

Video survey

Audio survey

Pre-survey notification (Feed API and Match)

We recommend that partners add a pre-survey notification to alert respondents that the study will require a quiet environment to provide responses in audio or video format.

By adding this notification to the respondent journey prior to survey entry, respondents will be clearly informed about the requirements to participate and have the opportunity to exit the survey without registering as a drop-off and whilst maintaining their engagement with other available surveys.

For Match Supply Partners: when enabling PII for the respondent session, you should prompt the user that they may enter a survey that requires audio or video responses.

Example:

The information supplied by Cint will show whether the study requires audio or video responses, so you can reliably display the correct information in the offerwall.