1990 Research Labs

Their pitch is 'we've mastered the art of listening' to users through interviews and usability testing — which was genuinely valuable until Perplexity started analyzing user behavior patterns from actual product usage data and Claude began generating user personas from social media footprints without scheduling a single interview.

User interview facilitation, insight synthesis, and workshop facilitation — the entire consulting delivery model — gets replaced by AI that can analyze user sentiment from support tickets, app analytics, and social listening faster than you can say 'Notion dashboard.'

Their India-specific cultural insights and startup network relationships are real assets that can't be downloaded, plus the testimonials show genuine client satisfaction with their depth-over-breadth approach. But cultural understanding is precisely what large language models are getting scary good at — and relationship moats dissolve when the underlying service becomes commoditized.

They're already offering 'AI Summaries' for interview insights, which suggests they see the writing on the wall — though bolting AI onto a manual interview process feels more like digitizing the horse cart than building the automobile.

Understanding users survives; hiring consultants to conduct interviews to understand users doesn't. AI eliminates the question 'what do our users think?' by continuously analyzing what users actually do, making scheduled conversations feel quaint.