If you knew your political representative was using solely an LLM and their advisors to summarize the current state of affairs to inform their decisions on policy, how would this make you feel?
This is what too many product managers are doing with AI tools: replacing user research with AI summaries, then filling the gaps with sales-led requests or tech-led endeavours.
The purpose of UX research is to learn and understand the context around your product, so that your team can build a better product together.
When was the last time you truly learned something from a point-form summary? It might prompt a thought, encourage you to dig deeper into a topic, but it's not research. It's just a summary with infinite forms, an unreliable or incomplete one at that.
The value of sifting through at least some of the data is the process of synthesis. It takes time and repeated exposure to really learn a concept. The act of seeking out new details and knowing where to look is that added value that you bring to the table. Distilling the key concepts and teaching that context to the team is how you reinforce that learning and spread it.
LLMs aren't a replacement for user research. It's a tool that might be able to help or augment the process.
Let's go back to the original question: How do you feel about someone making decisions for you without getting to know you?
When we make product decisions, that's what we're doing. Making decisions for our customers and our users.
Take some time and sit with this discomfort. Think about what might be missing from how you approach understanding your product's viability. How we might actually understand the problems better, with or without these tools?
After all, these are only tools. We use the right tool for the right job.
(Posted to my LinkedIn to try to stem the tide of people "solving" the user research "problem" by just talking to LLMs.)
️ Rachel Dubois 
If you have a project related to Decidim, reach out to us and let’s help build our story together!
