Unbundling Expert Networks into Software
Joe Kim, CEO of Office Hours, on the end of crowdwork
The important shift is that spending is moving away from paying for a specific research format and toward paying for the fastest path to a trustworthy answer. A hedge fund phone call, a B2B survey, a user interview, and an AI moderated conversation all solve the same job, which is finding the right person, asking the right question, and turning the answer into a decision. That makes the old expert network bucket too narrow for sizing the market.
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Traditional expert networks were built like brokerages for high spend clients such as hedge funds, private equity firms, and consultants. Office Hours is trying to unbundle that service layer into software, where search, matching, scheduling, compliance, and interviewing happen in product, which lets it chase smaller budgets and more frequent workflows.
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The category lines are already blurring. Office Hours describes B2B user research as a major use case, and counts calls, AI interviews, mentorship, surveys, and user interviews as the same core interaction. User Interviews positions itself as research recruiting plus insights, and GLG now runs both expert calls and surveys from the same network.
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Competitors are expanding in opposite directions. AlphaSense bought Tegus in July 2024 to fold expert transcripts into a larger research terminal, while Office Hours is starting from the expert graph and expanding outward into research, recruiting, mentorship, and AI training. That is the inversion, one side bundles insight into software, the other turns software into a market for expert time.
This points to a larger primary research layer where the winning product is the one that makes human knowledge easiest to find, capture, and reuse across formats. As AI makes interviewing and synthesis cheaper, value shifts even more toward owning the expert supply graph, the compliance layer, and the workflow that turns scattered conversations into repeatable research spend.