AI Interviews Replace Manual Expert Calls
Joe Kim, CEO of Office Hours, on the end of crowdwork
AI interviewing turns user research from a scarce, analyst heavy workflow into a much more repeatable software workflow. Instead of recruiting people, booking hour long calls, taking notes, and reading transcripts one by one, teams can run many guided voice interviews in parallel, let the system ask follow ups, and get synthesized themes back fast. That expands expert networks beyond investors and consultants into product, pricing, and marketing teams that need frequent customer insight.
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The bottleneck in traditional expert calls was not just the call itself, it was the manual work around it. Tegus described analysts spending at least half their time finding experts, then more time coordinating and convincing them to join. Office Hours is built to automate discovery, scheduling, compliance, and payment, which is why AI interviews matter so much on top of that base.
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The product change is concrete. An expert can answer in voice or chat, pause, come back later, and avoid carving out a live 60 minute block. The buyer still gets nuance because the AI can ask follow up questions based on prior answers, then summarize patterns across many interviews without anyone reading every transcript.
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This also helps explain why the market is moving away from crowdwork and toward credentialed experts. Basic labeling businesses were built on large pools of low cost workers, but newer demand from user research and model evaluation needs deeper judgment, domain context, and cleaner sourcing. That is the same shift powering companies like Handshake and Office Hours.
The next step is a blended market where surveys, expert calls, and AI interviews increasingly look like one category, primary research delivered through software. The winners will be the platforms that own expert supply, trust, and workflow, because the interviewing model itself is becoming easy for everyone to copy.