Customized Interview Moderators Decoded

AI-moderated interviews have changed how research teams work.

They’ve made it possible to run consistent, high-quality conversations at a scale that simply wasn’t feasible before — without sacrificing rigor, structure, or speed.

As AI-moderated research becomes a core part of how teams operate, the opportunity now is to make that scale feel more personal to each company, team, and researcher themselves.

Today, we’re introducing Custom Moderators — a new capability that lets researchers shape how Outset’s AI moderator conducts interviews, so conversations reflect their interviewing style while remaining consistent and scalable.

Your research style, scaled

Outset is built to deliver consistent, 1:1 interviews across hundreds of participants. That foundation remains essential.

Custom Moderators build on that foundation by giving researchers more authorship over how interviews are conducted — not just what questions are asked.

With Custom Moderators, researchers can intentionally shape:

• Tone and phrasing

• Conversational approach

• How the moderator probes and follows up

The result is AI-moderated interviews that feel unmistakably aligned with the researcher behind them — without sacrificing consistency, quality, or scale.

Why now

As AI-moderated research becomes more embedded across organizations, the bar is rising.

Teams don’t just want interviews that are scalable — they want them to be:

• Thoughtful

• Intentional

• Aligned with how their researchers actually work

Interviewing style plays a meaningful role in shaping conversations and insights. Custom Moderators make that style explicit, repeatable, and scalable — allowing teams to move beyond one-size-fits-all execution and toward intentional research design.

How Custom Moderators work

Creating a Custom Moderator is designed to be simple and transparent.

Researchers complete a short interview that captures how they naturally ask questions, probe, and guide conversations. From there, Outset generates a Moderator Style Card that clearly shows:

• The characteristics of the researcher’s interviewing style

• How that style will be applied in AI-moderated interviews

This makes moderation behavior visible and understandable — not a black box.

Once created, Custom Moderators can be:

• Reused across studies

• Shared across teams

• Applied consistently across an organization

Every interview then runs with the same intentional approach — automatically.

Consistency, with your personal style

One of the hardest challenges in scaled research is balancing:

• Individual researcher expression

• Team-wide consistency

• Operational efficiency

Custom Moderators are designed to support all three.

They allow teams to standardize how interviews are conducted — while still preserving the nuance that makes research feel thoughtful and human.

Whether you’re aligning a growing research org or preserving a trusted interviewing approach, Custom Moderators make consistency feel intentional, not generic.

The future of AI-moderated interviews

Custom Moderators represent a shift in how AI supports research.

Not just executing interviews — but adapting to the people behind them.

As AI-moderated research continues to evolve, the ability to intentionally shape conversations will be foundational. Custom Moderators bring researcher authorship directly into the interview experience — setting the stage for more expressive, confident, and scalable qualitative research.

Consistent, scalable AI-moderated interviews — now shaped by your interviewing style.