#188 - Why AI Can't Replace Qualitative Research with Sam Ladner of Workday

Erin May sits down with Sam Ladner, Senior Principal Researcher of Strategy at Workday, to explore the evolving role of AI in qualitative research. Sam brings a refreshingly balanced perspective on where AI can genuinely help researchers and where it fundamentally cannot replace human insight.

Sam explains how AI has transformed labor-intensive tasks like transcription and closed coding, freeing researchers to focus on the deeper work of sense-making and understanding outliers. She emphasizes that while AI excels at mathematical correlation hunting, qualitative research is about unriddling complex human experiences that require thinking, feeling, and imagination. The conversation covers practical applications like using MAXQDA for AI-assisted coding, the importance of explaining every outlier in qualitative work, and why emotional storytelling must remain exclusively human territory.

Highlights

• 03:09 Why machines can't replace human sense-making
• 08:47 Human moments AI cannot understand
• 12:00 Explaining outliers in qualitative coding
• 16:27 Building effective coding systems for AI
• 21:33 Getting AI to do closed coding properly
• 29:26 When to use AI for low stakes research
• 37:23 AI cannot substitute for qualitative research

About Sam
Sam Ladner (she/her) is a sociologist who helps teams innovate, design, and learn. She is the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector and Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research. She has worked on dozens of advanced software projects at Microsoft, Amazon, and most recently Workday, where she worked as a Senior Principal Researcher studying the future of work. She is now an independent researcher and consultant, writing her third book, tentatively titled Practical Foresight: Strategic Foresight in Applied Settings. She received her PhD in sociology from York University and lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Resources

• Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector
• Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research
• Qual vs Quant vs Mixed-Methods Field Guide
• Qualitative Sample Size Calculator