---
title: QRCA Views: Return of the Big Idea - Can AI philosophy agents make qual more valuable?
description: Can AI philosophy agents revive big ideas in qualitative research? Discover how asking big questions can transform insights.
image: https://news.okayhuman.com/hubfs/blog%20images%20(3).svg
---

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 April 24, 2025

# QRCA Views: Return of the Big Idea - Can AI philosophy agents make qual more valuable?

 By  [Ben](https://news.okayhuman.com/insights/author/ben)  ·   1 minute read

*AI is capable of much more than transcribing interviews and summarizing findings. Qualitative researchers can use AI as coach, collaborator, and sandbox to expand their human powers of imagination and thought across every part of the qualitative research process, from the brief to the report. Ben Jenkins challenges us to think like philosophers, not afraid or encumbered in asking the “big questions.*

**On November 21, **World Philosophy Day passed us by with very little commotion as we dealt with elections, manhunts, and regime changes. But the discourse on all of these things might have been so much more profound and consequential had we only given more thought to, well, thought, or thinking. Specifically, I’m talking about the bigger, more philosophical kind of thought. Yet that sort of thought typically passes us by, just as World Philosophy Day did.

This is a shame because philosophical thought is valuable for its ability to help us ask big questions. Big questions are typically quite tough, sometimes sensitive, and when done right, challenge orthodoxies. They are also essential to solving big problems, and we have plenty of those right now, whether it’s the meta-crisis1 that combines terrifying ecological, political, and technological threats or the more modest (and less terrifying) creativity crisis2, which has produced huge shifts in the marketing industry.

But asking big questions has become rare, even among qualitative researchers, whose business it is to ask questions. Our age has been defined by the AB test and a political squeamishness, both of which have seeped into qual to thwart its ambitions. In this article, I hope to explain why we stopped asking the big questions and how the age of AI may finally have provided us with the means to invite big questions and big ideas back into the discourse—and back into qualitative research.

[Continue reading on QRCA Views...](https://www.qrcaviews.org/2025/04/04/return-of-the-big-idea-can-ai-philosophy-agents-make-qual-more-valuable/)

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