Field notes — Research, ideas & perspectives

From insight to deck

Once the analysis is done, a finding still has to become a slide that fits the client's template, their fonts, their layout. That reformatting can eat an afternoon. The Verso researcher agent does it from the chat: point it at an insight or a section of the report, ask for a slide, and it builds the PowerPoint in the client's own template, ready for the readout. Ask for one slide or the whole deck, and it comes out on brand from the first export.

Lydia Bellahouel, Co-founder and CEO, Verso

15 prompts to steal for your next study

The Verso researcher agent sits inside every study and answers questions from your own data, with a clickable citation behind every figure. This is a working list of 15 prompts, from the quick orientation questions to the ones that do real analytical work: verbatim hunting, cross-tabs, on-demand coding, hypothesis testing, competitive benchmarking, recall across all your past studies, and slides. Copy them, swap in your own topic, and see what comes back.

The memory of summer: why the trip you remember isn't the one you had

By September, the holiday has become a story: the airport queue and the rainy day are gone, the terrace view stays. Two findings explain the edit. The rosy view (Mitchell and Thompson, 1997) shows people remember trips as better than they rated them at the time. The peak-end rule (Kahneman and colleagues, confirmed on real tourists in 2025) shows memory leans on two moments, the peak and the ending, not the length. For research, the lesson is practical: when you ask someone to recall an experience, you are measuring a rewritten memory, not the experience itself, so where you place the question decides what you learn.

Product literacy: your customer arrives knowing more than your staff

Your customer often knows more about your product than the person selling it. They looked it up before they arrived, read the ingredient list, compared it to two competitors, and checked what other buyers said, usually starting with an AI tool rather than a search engine. By the time they reach the shelf or the sales rep, the decision is mostly made.

What a Good Study Brief Looks Like (Free Generator)

A study brief is the document that decides whether a piece of research will be any good, long before the first interview. It sets the decision at stake, the objectives, who gets interviewed, and the questions they are asked. Here is what a strong study brief contains, and how our free study brief generator writes one for you in a few minutes.

By Lydia Bellahouel, CEO and co-founder of Verso

IIEX Europe 2026: AI Qualitative Research in Amsterdam

We spent three days at IIEX Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, and one thing was clear across the floor: AI-moderated research has stopped being a novelty and become the baseline. The interesting question now is what gets built on top of it. Here is what stood out to us on AI qualitative research, the convergence of qual and quant, and the rush toward synthetic consumers.

By Lydia Bellahouel, CEO and co-founder of Verso

Behaviour of the month, June 2026 : How Gen Z Actually Decides to Buy, and Why Your Brand Is Barely in the Room

When Gen Z decides to buy, the brand is almost absent from the final decision. In our study with Discurv, the choice gets made by seeing the product used by someone with a similar body and life, then checked against Reddit threads, YouTube try-ons, and customer reviews. Here is what that pattern means for how you research the buying journey.

Building a company that never sleeps

Verso was invited on the main stage at OpenAI's event during VivaTech to talk about building an AI-native company that never sleeps. It means a qualitative research platform built around AI from day one, running 200 interviews overnight, so progress never stops when the team steps away.

Resources

From insight to deck

15 prompts to steal for your next study

The memory of summer: why the trip you remember isn't the one you had

Product literacy: your customer arrives knowing more than your staff

What a Good Study Brief Looks Like (Free Generator)

IIEX Europe 2026: AI Qualitative Research in Amsterdam

Behaviour of the month, June 2026 : How Gen Z Actually Decides to Buy, and Why Your Brand Is Barely in the Room

Building a company that never sleeps