Knit Virtual Session: ‘Knitting’ Together Quant + Qual Through End-to-End AI for More Insightful Research

‘Knitting’ Together Quant + Qual Through End-to-End AI for More Insightful Research 

Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. 

During the January 30, 2025, Quirk’s Virtual – AI and Innovation series Knit shared how they help clients conduct qual and quant studies with their AI driven platform.  

Knit’s Head of Research, Zontziry (Z) Johnson, shared examples of insights and reports the platform produces. She explained the customization and that each client has a Knit researcher that becomes part of their team.

Session transcript

Joe Rydholm 

Hi everybody and welcome to our presentation, “‘Knitting’ Together Quant + Qual Through End-to-End AI for More Insightful Research.” 

I’m Quirk’s editor Joe Rydholm – thanks for joining us today. Just a quick reminder that you can use the chat tab if you’d like to interact with other attendees during today’s discussion. And you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenters and we will get to as many as we have time for at the end. 

Our session today is presented by Knit. Z, take it away!

Zontziry (Z) Johnson: 

Alright. Hey everyone. Welcome to our session. As you can see, we're Knit and we're going to talk about ‘knitting’ together quant and qual insights.  

I'm Z. I am the head of research at Knit. I am responsible for helping make sure we can deliver agency level insights at DIY cost and speed.  

For those of you hearing about Knit for the first time, Knit helps researchers at some of the world's best brands and largest brands run agency quality, quant and qual research at DIY cost and speed. Our researcher driven AI, which we will talk about in more detail today, automates some of the most time intensive research tasks, getting those off of your plate. Ultimately allowing you, the researcher, the time to focus on the parts of research that you love the most, which is the storytelling and the insight digging.  

Now, let's go all the way back to yesterday when you were reviewing your stakeholders or your customer's latest research request and asking yourself, am I going to go with quant or qual with this one?  

Let's face it, quant gives you the scale that you need. It gives you numbers-based confidence. You get large sample sizes, you get standardized benchmarks that are essential for comparing results. You have solutions in tech that have progressed in this space. Your turnaround is really fast, and data quality seems to never be an issue.  

But let's be honest, it does always leave the customer or the stakeholder asking, but why is that number there? Why did that number happen? Why, why, why?  

Which is why we run qual, right? The qual gives you the why. Qual gives you stories, gives you emotions, gives you that human connection. With Qual, you can uncover text or context and nuance, but it's slower. It is harder to scale, and it can feel less definitive, so you can't really run both at the same time, or can you?  

This is the opportunity that we have with Knit in 2025. You can ‘knit’ those two methodologies together. You can have quant and qual in the same study, collecting the data at scale. You can get all of that together. You can create insights that are reliable, empathetic, actionable and deeply human. You can balance scale with depth. You can amplify insights; you can amplify them with emotion, and you can drive more actionable and empathetic results.  

That's why I'm excited to showcase today through Knit. Our platform integrates your traditional quantitative studies. Think of around 25 to 30 questions with asynchronous video, open-end responses to give you access to the hard numbers of quant for the what with the why, reasoning and emotions of qual in a single study.  

Now we're doing this with the help of AI at every step of the research workflow, from your questionnaire generation to the analysis plan to vetting the quality of your sample, making sure the data quality is as high as possible, all the way to analysis and to the report.  

Knit gets you a top line report within 24 hours of completing field. That means that you have access to your key takeaways, your key recommendations, your headlines, your visualizations on every slide, all with your key cohorts called out.  

My favorite is it comes with video show reels. So, you have the voice of the customer right there answering the why to the what in this same report.  

Now we've built a really amazing platform. It's really cool and it's really powerful, but with Knit, you also get a dedicated researcher at every step of the way.  

So, you can work with us as you do with an agency. We'll polish your questionnaire, we'll polish the report. We'll make sure that the analysis plan is in line with what your research objectives are. You can think of my team as an extension of your own.  

Now today, I'm really excited that we are going to be showing three new product releases that are related to the idea of making your quant and qual research more stakeholder ready by the time it gets to you.  

To help showcase some of these releases along with everything else that Knit has to offer, I'm going to run through a recent project we ran on holiday shopping. We looked into anticipated shopping habits, spending levels and categories, as well as specific items that topped people's wish lists.  

Now, as mentioned earlier, Knit’s AI assists fully end-to-end. From helping build your questionnaire and creating a unique analysis plan of how our AI aims to tackle and report on your key research objectives all the way to building your top line report.  

For today's presentation and for the sake of brevity, we're just going to highlight a bit of the process once data is already collected. If you're interested in checking out how we help with creating the survey and doing the analysis plan, you can reach out after this presentation. We'll give you an e-mail address that you can use to set up a demo and we can run through the end-to-end process with you.  

Now, where does it start?  

It starts with the first time you actually log into Knit to review your top line report. This is where the magic happens. Of course, you have the option to always log in and review live results and data while the survey is in the field, but we always love seeing our customers' eyes when they can first log in and get that full report in hand without lifting a finger.  

This top line report is always packed with value. Included in every top line are your key findings and your key recommendations. You get your major headlines, you get relevant visualizations, you get your narrative. We include that valuable layer of qual in there through video show reels, theme trees and sub theme trees and help you make sense and make actionable insights out of all of the data.  

Now, as of today, I am really excited to say that your report is even one step closer to stakeholder ready because we have launched custom branded reports. So, not only do you get the report with all of the insights, you also have the ability to customize it with your chart colors, fonts and logos.  

All you have to do is send Knit your brand guide or any prior report template that has your branding applied to it, and we can apply your unique branding to all of your reports. Of course, you can always log in and edit your styling at any time yourself as well. Though many of our clients love reporting directly out of Knit, you can always export your report into PowerPoint and all of your styling will be reflected in the download as well. 

Another thing which is really incredible and one of the frequently asked questions we get about downloading to PowerPoint, yes, the charts are fully editable. None of the pictures require you to manipulate them, every chart downloads as a fully editable chart in PowerPoint.  

Now with that, let's get into a few of the insights that we uncovered through this study.  

Here's one of the insights. Turns out holiday shoppers prefer online shopping, around 41% of them prefer online shopping. But as soon as you add that holiday shopping preference with being able to pick up what they ordered online in the store, that jumps to nearly 70% of shoppers.  

Now, the great thing about Knit is we can always go a level deeper with our findings. When you create your study, our AI also produces an analysis plan which outlines key cohorts or key audience cuts that it plans to cut each insight by, to ultimately address your research objectives.  

As you can see, one of the cuts that we applied to this, one of our key cohorts that we used to analyze this data was whether the respondent was apparent or not apparent. So, the insight here is parents indicated that there was a higher intention to shop in store than non-parents.  

While that insight is already crafted and polished for you in the format of a slide, you always have the ability to dive even deeper into the raw data in our side-by-side view that lives on the platform. 

So just by clicking in, you can easily select the check boxes you want to display on the slide, dig into the summary of deeper insights and even see the reasoning and the statistical significance of every insight.  

Now, the next area we dove into on this particular report was influences on shopping decisions and no surprise pricing and discounts top the list for the general population. But again, let's dig a little bit deeper.  

As we dug into those cuts and segments, we saw that the AI called out a statistically significant insight where wish lists showed a higher influence in purchasing decisions for parents over non-parents. Let's face it, as parents, I'm a parent of a teenager and I live by wish lists because otherwise I don't know what my teenager is thinking at any given moment, especially around the holidays.  

Now let's say we wanted to add a little more insight to that major takeaway. Starting today, Knit’s AI generated report subtitles can help you do just that. You can now tell the full story behind every insight and add nuance to your key findings through the subtitles feature. You now have the flexibility to highlight key takeaways through the report headlines while supporting them with additional context or data within subtitles as needed, and you can toggle these on and off to your heart's content. 

Let's look at this same insight we toggled on the subtitle feature to add a little bit of additional color and nuance to support the key takeaway.  

As we transition off the topic of wish lists, the next question that came up for us was what gifts are parents planning to buy this year?  

So, dig into the qual data where we collected hundreds of asynchronous video responses. First, the AI transcribed all of the videos and then using AI contextual analysis, it grouped all of the responses into themes and it visually displays those for us in a digestible manner.  

On the slide, what we found was electronics topped the list for planned gifts primarily with children as recipients. Again, for parents, probably not a surprise. Those kids really want those electronics. Let's admit it, they're fun.  

Now, taking a peek under the hood, we can dig deeper into what the AI has produced for us. At the top of the page, we immediately get a summarization of the takeaways by the AI, all with citations to each response and verbatim to prove it's not hallucinating.  

This is key. Each of these takeaways, you can go back and find why the takeaway exists and all of the supporting evidence behind the takeaway.  

Now we see the full breakdown of the AI produced theme trees. You can dig into where you want to alter what's displayed on the slide or filter more for yourself to read through the verbatims on your own.  

Of course, the best part of it is not just the ability to gather all of this qual insight, but to make it actionable. That's the researcher's dream, right? Yes, the insight is fun, but our stakeholders aren't here just for fun. They're here for actionable.  

To make it actionable, our AI goes beyond creating theme trees and actually creates video show reels for you to tell a more impactful story to your stakeholders. Here you can see us bringing that point to life through the voice of actual consumers on a slide embedded within the presentation alongside the key takeaways.  

Our research team always reviews the show reels to make sure that the most relevant quotes are being presented, your audio is clear, your presentation is polished. But if you ever want to dive in yourself and alter the show reels or create more show reels or extend the show reels or shorten your show reels, you always have that capability as well. 

It's as easy as selecting the videos you want to include, highlighting pieces of the transcript you want to add or subtract and putting them all together, separating them with additional elements, additional slides to actually section it out so that you can have a video that flows with different sub insights within the video. You can also add background music, you can add captions. It's really cool how you can pull even more insight into show reels on the platform.  

Now we're really just scratching the surface of what Knit can do to tap into the true power of combined quant and qual. We can dig deeper into our qual data and explore how certain predefined cuts responded to each question. This is cool. You can cut the qual by the quant. We can go deeper into any segment or any quant question like how much does the respondent plan to spend on gifts this year in the theme of how quant and qual can be better leveraged?  

I'm excited to unveil our newest feature ‘Knitting Insights.’  

Let's say we want to take this insight around anticipated spend. Let's say we want to add more color to the slide by showcasing the categories that consumers anticipate to allocate that spend two.  

Well, now we can combine each of these insights onto a single slide to create a more comprehensive story. Whether you want to share two quant insights like this side-by-side or tell a more's nuanced story by pairing your quant with a qual insight, Knit gives you the ability to ‘knit together’ insights with the click of a button.  

Here you can see an example of telling a story with the what on one side and the right there on the other. This is a pair of a quant question on consumers holiday shopping, biggest concerns from the prior year with a qual show reel, diving into more nuanced answers of the issues they faced.  

Okay, let's say you're in a presentation with stakeholders and they're all staying quiet because you have just thrilled them with all the insights they could possibly want or it's reality and your stakeholders are asking questions, so they're asking questions and you're about to say, let me get back to you on that because you're going to need to go back and try to dig into the data. No, you can always just yes it.  

For instance, let's say we wanted to know, ‘When do consumers plan on starting their holiday shopping?’ You can type that right into Ask Knit Search at the top of the report tab.  

Maybe we want to break that down by our pre-made cut of income level. Knit will take about two minutes to review all of the data from that survey and find the most relevant answer to your question, and then it puts together a fully fleshed out slide with the visualization and the key takeaway right there.  

Now as we wrap up, I wanted to highlight a few other areas where Knit emphasizes the control that you have over your reports.  

Every slide and insight are fully customizable. Whether you'd like to rewrite a headline, change the visualization, select or deselect what's displayed on your charts, we make sure you can tell the story you want to tell. We just try to get you as close to the way there as we can the second you log into the platform.  

Finally, as mentioned, up top, most of our customers choose to log in once fielding is wrapped and the report is ready. But if you're ever in a time crunch or you're just curious on where the data's trending, you can always jump right into its data explorer while the study is still in field and you can analyze the data as it's coming in, get a pre-read.  

Now if you're interested in testing out Knit, there's generally three core ways that you can work with us. We have internal integrations that enable you to tap into a 10 million plus people panel in the U.S. and Canada. We can target consumers, we can do niche audiences, do very customized audiences. You can bring your own panel or customer list You can also bring in existing data that you have from other studies that you've run with others. You can upload it onto our platform to use the AI to analyze that data.  

Some of our common use cases that our customers have used us for go everywhere from brand awareness and strategy to brand lift, to consumer journey mapping, to competitive landscapes, to concept testing, creative testing, attitudes and usage. There's a lot that you can do on Knit to get the what and the why altogether in one story.  

If you want to partner with Knit, feel free to reach out. We would be happy to talk to you, happy to give you more information. You can go to goknit.com for information. You can take the QR code, you can take us now for that and it will take you to our website to look up more.