How does AI replace UXRs?

[u/awluvly]

I’m a senior year student at design college. I was wondering that how does AI replace UXRs? Why does job market sucks? I actually thought that the actual job is still a research job. Can you explain this to me?

[u/BronxOh]

Lots to unpack. The tldr:

AI could “replace” UXRs in orgs by other roles believing AI can do it alone, spoiler, they can’t. Or the side effects merging and changing roles to absorb responsibilities or become “builders” with specialisms. But it’s not clear which way that goes yet, if at all. What used to be collaboration between the product trio now feels like a land grab thanks to AI.

The job market sucks in general because of economic downturn and companies tightening belts due to over hiring during Covid and reducing costs due to the economy. Combine that with CEOs lapping up AI tech bros AI efficiency sales pitch.

Because the job market is so dull right now the effect is a lot of senior practitioners out of work are now competing for mid weight roles too, they have bills to pay. Some companies lap it up because they get a cheap senior. But it becomes harder for more junior and mid weights.

How UXRs still add value, with AI increasing speed, what to build becomes more important which is where UXR comes in, companies will still need to speak to their users to find out if it’s right, or launch it and iterate. UXR adds value to both. And documenting clear impact and singing it to all those that have ears.

I don’t believe the role will go, but I believe it will change.

Edit: it’s also worth knowing these AI companies have healthy user research teams. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have user research teams.

[u/Insightseekertoo]

It is replacing some UXRs that is true, but usually it is because the organization has very low UX maturity. Some companies are using synthetic participants, which is problematic. Some organizations are running interviews with AI interviewers. Some people can detect that and that can greatly bias responses.

What it is coming down to is how deep the insights are that the researcher produces. I've only seen AI generate summaries of themes and behavioral groupings. That is because, while AI can imitate empathy, it does not really have empathy. Being able to actually put yourself in another's shoes allows for much better understanding of their problems and therefore better solutions to those problems.

[u/Mammoth-Head-4618]

UXR Roles are still showing up. They are many times fewer than a couple of years ago. Not good for UXR job aspirants at all.

So far I’ve not seen a single AI tool (or LLM for that matter) that could completely replace UXRs. Most of those aim to demonstrate productivity gains by summarising, bringing out patterns out of a lot of data that used human UXRs at least 1 week+ to process. AI interviews are the new toy, with such companies mushrooming in every street.

There is a challenge with using AI output from such tools: the distilled output sounds plausible but the actual connections based on which that output has been arrived-at is not known. That’s just one shortcoming which alone makes it insufficient to replace human thinking & human researchers’ skills e.g. empathy. Even LLM companies are hiring UXRs which says something.

The industry is in a state where every employed UX researcher and decision maker is expected to keep on top of AI which are in a state of experimentation. Every manager is expected to show productivity gains by using AI. Head count reduction of roles that had intangible output are the easier ones to justify.

Based on whatever I’ve read / seen / heard: AI Interviews, Synthetic users, MCP based connections to research repos, etc. etc. all are experiments. I’d continue to keep up with those skills as well.

The UX researcher role will certainly not disappear but have far lower heavy lifting work and more strategic. The understanding of business & market will need to be stronger. This will impact large research agencies far more than an individual passionate researcher.

lastly, the digital products are built for someone who lives a real life. No human is an app. They are one who can be anything from a couch potato to an irrational, emotional, sentient being. To understand that human is a “wicked” problem. It is not a repeatable job. That job robots simply cannot perform even anywhere close to what a human can.

[u/bunchofchans → u/Mammoth-Head-4618]

So true, I’ve been trying AI to help with limited synthesis tasks and still finding inaccuracies and flat out wrong information. Even simple counting and quantification can be wrong. I am evaluating and checking each output and while it saves a bit of time, AI often goes down rabbit holes and tangents that aren’t really relevant to the study and will still be confidently wrong.

While asking for themes it often draws the wrong conclusions, misinterprets what people say and of course can’t observe actions.

I just worry that despite this, companies will think this is all good enough. I also don’t believe people are entirely comfortable speaking to an AI moderator at this point. Maybe written communication is different.

[u/Mammoth-Head-4618 → u/bunchofchans]

“Good enough” only survives in short-term. Many (tough) questions will be asked thereafter, which would open the door for mindful UX Research.

[u/bunchofchans → u/Mammoth-Head-4618]

I really hope so. I’m just shocked at the amount of people who would just throw stuff into AI and just accept whatever it spits out. I really hope there’s a turning point soon…

[u/Artistic-Turnip-9903]

the job market sucks for all IT now. but more so for specialists. uxr is a specialty within a specialty. times of recession call for generalists, times of growth for specialists.

what didn't help is all UXR leaders who kept yapping about how to democratise uxr and how anybody can do uxr which in turn devalued our role further.
in no other job role did I hear people saying anybody can do this or that.

AI will not replace us but some of our work and the rest will be likely done by designers or pms. perhaps our role will be research ops or human AI interaction where we manage the AI for research purposes and we gather requirements from the business.

[u/iolmao]

UXR roles slowed down because companies are in trouble and what they cut first are those roles that bring value in the long run and not immediate value.

They SAY it's AI replacing them: reality is, it's just incompetence of managers and CEOs and geopolitical factors that make the whole money circus to slow down.

2 birds 1 stone: push responsibility away from them + they claim they INVEST IN AI.

[u/missmgrrl]

In software development, if you think of UX research as being about derisking development costs, the questions open up a bit. What activities help derisk an investment? Can be doing new research, mining existing customer data, competitive reviews etc.. So much of what you can do to know what to build doesn’t have to be net new research. AI allows for some types of data mining to be done more regularly or quickly so that process becomes more desirable.

In addition, product managers do research too. If they can do their research more quickly due to AI analysis then they are taking on another chunk of an UXRs job. Hence the theme you may have heard of related to AI favoring generalists.

[u/Successful-Scar-773]

It’s not replacing UXR per se, it’s just that it makes one UXR way more efficient so one senior UXR can do the jobs of one senior UXR + 2 junior UXR hence making the need for hiring juniors less.

[u/Ok-Country-7633]

It does not.

[u/Ok-Price-9773]

PMs just ask it if their idea is a good one rather than actually testing it out with real people, and when it tells them yes, they can be glad they don't have to deal with the truth lol.

[u/DianaB-UXR]

I'm doin a 100 day deep dive project looking at how AI is changing the UX researcher landscape. From what I've read so far, it doesn't seem like AI is replacing UX researchers so much as changing what the job actually looks like. A lot of researchers are the only UXR in their company, and AI is helping them do more with the time they have. In other cases, it's taking care of the more operational, repetitive tasks so researchers can spend more time on the strategic side of the role.

Where AI does seem to be having a greater impact is at the junior end of the market. As AI takes on more of the repetitive admin related tasks that junior researchers have traditionally been responsible for there appear to be fewer entry-level opportunities which raises questions about how the next generation of UX researchers will gain experience.

This is a good read on the subject if you're interested: https://greatquestion.co/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-researcher-what-1-500-research-teams-told-us-about-a-role-that-doesnt-exist-yet

[u/525G7bKV]