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On Thursday, June 11, the Paris chapter of Women in Research (WIRe) gathers in person for an evening on where qualitative research is actually heading. Verso is proud to sponsor it.
Doors open at 19:00 and we run until 21:50. Lydia Bellahouel, our CEO and co-founder, co-organises the Paris chapter as Event Lead and will be there from start to finish.
You can sign up here!
Why we said yes
WIRe has been quietly doing the unglamorous work of supporting women in consumer insights for more than a decade. Mentorship, visibility, peer networks, hiring intros. The industry still skews male at senior levels even though qualitative research is full of brilliant women operating at the very top of their craft. Sponsoring this event is the most obvious, most useful thing a research‑tech company can do, and we think more vendors in our space should be doing it.
The working theme: the evolving role of qualitative research
The evening is built around three threads we keep hearing from research leaders.
1. From AI hype to practical application
Every insights team has been pitched an AI tool in the last 18 months. Most have run a pilot. Far fewer have actually changed how they work. The interesting question is no longer whether AI belongs in qual. It is which parts of the workflow it should touch (moderation at scale, transcript clean‑up, first‑pass synthesis) and which parts it should stay away from (strategic interpretation, the judgment calls that decide what a finding actually means).
2. From insight to decision enablement
A 47‑page synthesis deck is not an insight. A decision shifted on the back of it is. The bar is rising for insights teams: how readable, defensible, and used an output is by product, brand, and strategy stakeholders matters more than how exhaustively it covers the data. Speed of synthesis is table stakes now. Translation into decisions is the new game.
3. Depth over volume?
The AI moderation crowd, ours included, loves talking about scale. Hundreds of interviews in a week. The honest question is when that scale earns its keep, and when ten well‑designed conversations with the right ten people would have told you more, faster. We have opinions. We expect the room will have stronger ones.
What to expect
A real conversation between researchers, not a vendor showcase. No pitch, no demo, no slide deck from our side. We are sponsoring because we want the format to exist and the community to keep growing, not to broadcast a product.
If you work in consumer insights, UX research, brand strategy, innovation, or product, come find us. Lydia and the WIRe Paris team are handling registrations. The seats are limited and the conversations tend to be better when the room is varied, so do bring colleagues from outside the usual research circles.
You can sign up here!
See you on June 11.