Amanda Amyx is a design UX research leader who specialises in translating compelling customer insights into strategic product decisions. Currently serving as the senior director of design and research at Hatch, a company dedicated to sleep health and wellness technology, she leads teams at the intersection of consumer empathy and business growth.
How to AI UXR is supported by Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that partners with you to build, moderate, and synthesise interviews, allowing you to go from question to actionable insights in just a few hours.
In This Conversation
These days, research and product teams are being asked to produce more evidence, more quickly, and across more experiences than traditional, human-driven methods can support. AI moderation is an attractive solution, but it also raises a question for research leaders: if a machine can conduct an interview, where does that leave researchers?
In this episode, Amanda shares how her team is using AI-moderated studies as a supplemental source of evidence alongside surveys, human-led interviews, prototype testing, and continuous listening. She sees AI moderation as a powerful supplement, not a substitute for human-moderated research.
The value of the method, as Amanda shares, isn’t that AI moderation removes the need for research skill and judgement. Instead, when designed carefully, AI moderation can help teams collect natural-language feedback at greater scale, compare findings across sources, and hear from participants in moments that would otherwise be difficult, or impossible, to reach. Say when your newborn is screaming at three o'clock in the morning; a real-life customer situation for Hatch.
The How to AI UXR Map
This series builds on the insights shared in the How to AI UXR map, a five-page map that charts key trends, helps you pinpoint your AI maturity level, and offers practical, real-world applications you can adapt to your research systems.
In this episode, we cover:
Why AI moderation still requires researchers to design strong studies, define where probing should happen, and recognise that poor questions will still produce poor evidence.
Why Amanda sees AI moderation as another source of evidence rather than a replacement for human-moderated research, especially when teams need greater scale or additional validation.
How her team has used AI moderation to understand growth audiences, including what brands people trust, what routines support sleep, and what lengths people go to for a good night’s rest.
Why speed matters, not only because research can be completed faster, but because teams can gather reactions to concepts and prototypes overnight—data that would otherwise be too late or impossible to gather.
How AI moderation can extend research into moments that human scheduling rarely reaches.
Why Hatch has been careful about expectation setting, including telling participants upfront when they’ll be interviewed by an AI moderator and giving them other ways to share feedback.
Why her advice to sceptical researchers is to try AI moderation first as a participant, then pilot it on low-stakes studies where they already have enough expertise to judge whether the output is useful.
Partway through the episode, Priya Krishnan, the cofounder and COO of Strella, shares her take on the conversation.
Connect with the Guests
Amanda Amyx, Senior Director, Design & Research at Hatch
Priya Krishnan, cofounder and COO of Strella
How to AI UXR is supported by Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that partners with you to build, moderate, and synthesise interviews, allowing you to go from question to actionable insights in just a few hours.
