The future of qualitative insights in an AI driven research world with Sarah Haftings

Episode notes

Sarah Haftings has spent nearly fifteen years helping organizations understand their customers more deeply. As Insights Manager at Shurtape Technologies, she leads research initiatives across both consumer and industrial markets, translating voice of customer insights into strategic decisions that shape product innovation and long term planning. In this episode of The Curiosity Current , Sarah joins Stephanie and Molly to explore how qualitative research continues to play a critical role in modern market research, even as AI accelerates the pace of insight generation. Drawing from her early career experiences conducting in-person surveys and analyzing open-ended responses, she explains why hearing directly from customers often reveals insights that structured data alone cannot capture. The conversation examines how insights teams can balance qualitative depth with the speed demands of modern business. Sarah discusses how AI powered tools have transformed qualitative analysis, enabling her small team to process open ended responses faster, increase the number of projects they handle, and deliver insights to stakeholders more quickly than ever before.