Erin May sits down with Alec Levin, CEO and Co-Founder of Learners, to explore how researchers can navigate the rapid changes reshaping their field. Alec shares his vision for how AI and automation are creating unprecedented opportunities for research teams willing to step up and lead.

Alec argues that while AI can handle routine tasks like usability testing and surveys, researchers have a chance to focus on higher-value discovery work that includes prototyping and coding. He emphasizes that this is a critical moment for researchers to define their own future rather than letting executives decide their role. The conversation covers practical examples of AI-powered research workflows, the importance of cross-functional collaboration, and why researchers need to be more proactive in pitching their vision internally.

Highlights

• 03:40 Balance sheeting thinking for change
• 06:15 Connecting researchers through community
• 13:11 Discovery research importance
• 15:02 Vision needed for researcher evolution
• 24:08 Automated research workflows emerging
• 31:16 Human elements AI can't replace

Resources

• AI for User Research 101 Workshop
• What is the New AI in Research Risk Cascade?
• Assessing the ROI of AI in UX Research Webinar
• AI Context Engineering for Research Course

This week we're revisiting one of Awkward Silences' most memorable episodes.

This episode welcomed Ruby Pryor, founder of Rex, a consulting firm specializing in UX research and strategic design.

This episode gets into what it means to demonstrate the "business value" of one's work, specifically how researchers can and should quantify their impact in terms that are tangible to the company. Ruby shared ways to score early wins, build momentum, and overcome communication frictions to find shared value.

Episode Highlights

• 03:14 - UX researcher impact: insights, optimization, prioritization, strategy
• 09:14 - Understanding organizational structures and strategy development collaboration
• 20:22 - Challenge of quantifying impact and strategic level
• 21:33 - Measuring strategy impact: challenges and indicators
• 30:04 - Prioritizing investments based on strong market indicators
• 38:51 - Stakeholders prioritize growth, revenue, and cost reduction

About Our Guest
Ruby Pryor is the founder of Rex, a service design and UX research consulting firm. Her previous roles include UX research at Grab, strategic design at Boston Consulting Group and management consulting at Nous Group. She has taught courses on increasing the impact of UX to learners from 5 continents and has spoken about design and UX at conferences in Asia and Europe.

Resources on UX Research Impact

• How to Track the Impact of Your UX Research
• Leading an Impactful User Research Team
• Use Stakeholder Interviews to Drive Impact

Erin May sits down with Sam Ladner, Senior Principal Researcher of Strategy at Workday, to explore the evolving role of AI in qualitative research. Sam brings a refreshingly balanced perspective on where AI can genuinely help researchers and where it fundamentally cannot replace human insight.

Sam explains how AI has transformed labor-intensive tasks like transcription and closed coding, freeing researchers to focus on the deeper work of sense-making and understanding outliers. She emphasizes that while AI excels at mathematical correlation hunting, qualitative research is about unriddling complex human experiences that require thinking, feeling, and imagination. The conversation covers practical applications like using MAXQDA for AI-assisted coding, the importance of explaining every outlier in qualitative work, and why emotional storytelling must remain exclusively human territory.

Highlights

• 03:09 Why machines can't replace human sense-making
• 08:47 Human moments AI cannot understand
• 12:00 Explaining outliers in qualitative coding
• 16:27 Building effective coding systems for AI
• 21:33 Getting AI to do closed coding properly
• 29:26 When to use AI for low stakes research
• 37:23 AI cannot substitute for qualitative research

About Sam
Sam Ladner (she/her) is a sociologist who helps teams innovate, design, and learn. She is the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector and Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research. She has worked on dozens of advanced software projects at Microsoft, Amazon, and most recently Workday, where she worked as a Senior Principal Researcher studying the future of work. She is now an independent researcher and consultant, writing her third book, tentatively titled Practical Foresight: Strategic Foresight in Applied Settings. She received her PhD in sociology from York University and lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Resources

• Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector
• Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research
• Qual vs Quant vs Mixed-Methods Field Guide
• Qualitative Sample Size Calculator