In this episode, Lenny Murphy sits down with Hakan Yurdakul, CEO of Bolt Insight, to unpack how AI-native research is reshaping qual and quant. Hakan shares his Unilever-to-founder origin story and the personal “bring summer forward” purpose that drives Bolt’s human-centric philosophy. They dig into BoltChatAI and why AI-moderated qual only works when it’s trained on real human interviews and supported by rigorous human-in-the-loop checkpoints.

The conversation explores Bolt’s Dynamic Personas—living profiles that refresh with ongoing human input—plus the limits of synthetic data for innovation. Finally, Hakan lays out a “Jarvis-style” vision for an AI assistant insights officer, and the duo reflects on what this shift means for trust, ethics, and the evolving role of researchers as strategists and storytellers.

Key Discussion Points:

Hakan’s path from Unilever marketing/insights to founding Bolt Insight—and the “bring summer forward” mission guiding the company.
What it means to be an AI-native research firm across quant + qual, and why “qual at scale” is now feasible.
Human-in-the-loop AI moderation: training on real interviews, quality scoring, and guardrails to avoid “chatbot research.”
Dynamic (living) personas and meta-analysis: how Bolt keeps personas current and useful without over-relying on historic synthetic data.
The next 2–5 years: AI automates grunt work, pushing researchers toward strategy, storytelling, and doing more with the same.

Resources & Links:

You can reach out to Hakan Yurdakul on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Hakan Yurdakul for being our guest. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.

160 - Bolt Insight’s Human-in-the-Loop AI Research

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