No, but it has changed how research gets done, and researchers who ignore it will be replaced by researchers who don’t.

AI is good at analysis. Give it a pile of transcripts and it will find the patterns quickly. It is much weaker at synthesis, which is the part that matters. Analysis is finding the pattern in the facts. Synthesis is knowing what the pattern means for your business, and that needs an understanding of your goals, your constraints and your customers’ context.

There are specific things it still misses. It works from text, so it over-interprets what people say and loses how they said it. Tone, hesitation, body language and the long pause before someone answers honestly all disappear. It over-indexes on whatever comes up most often, which is not the same as what matters most. Smaller insights that do not fit a large theme get lost. And it will not tell you when it is wrong.

We use it daily. We just do not let it do the thinking.