Primary Research Becomes Infrastructure
Joe Kim, CEO of Office Hours, on the end of crowdwork
The market is shifting from selling a call, a survey, or a transcript as separate products to selling a faster path from question to answer. Once AI can run the interview, write the summary, and pull patterns across responses, the real scarce asset is no longer the format. It is access to the right person, the right question design, and the trust layer that makes buyers confident the input is credible and compliant.
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Tegus already showed how one format can become another. It used expert calls to create a transcript library, then became part of AlphaSense’s broader research stack. That turned a one time conversation into reusable content, and made expert interviews one module inside a larger workflow for investors.
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Office Hours is pushing the same collapse from another direction. Instead of optimizing only for hedge fund diligence, it counts all knowledge sharing interactions, including live calls, AI interviews, mentorship, user research, and surveys. That means one expert graph can serve multiple budgets inside the same customer, from product research to AI model training.
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The buyer behavior is already broadening beyond classic expert network customers. Office Hours says B2B software companies use the platform to find target buyers, test messaging, and learn why customers choose incumbents. Dialectica is also expanding into voice of customer and product validation work, showing research spend is moving into more day to day operating teams.
The next step is that primary research becomes infrastructure, not a niche service. The winners will be the platforms that own expert identity, credentialing, compliance, and workflow across many use cases, then let AI turn each interaction into structured data, summaries, and reusable insight for every team that needs to learn from people.