How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Surveys

Artificial intelligence is often used as a buzzword. Many websites and tools try to score points with AI, yet in everyday use it often adds no real value. With online surveys, it is different: here AI takes over exactly the work that used to cost you the most time.

To make this concrete, let's start with an example: Lena works in the HR department of a machine manufacturer with 120 employees and needs to set up an employee survey. In the past, she would have looked for a template, reworded each question one by one and, once the responses came in, spent entire evenings with Excel and hundreds of comments. Today she describes her plan in a few sentences, gets a fitting questionnaire and has the AI summarize the answers for her at the end.

AI changes surveys most dramatically in three places:

• Creating: The AI writes the questionnaire from your short description.
• Editing: A single instruction changes many questions at once.
• Analyzing: The AI summarizes results and open-ended answers for you.

But AI does not replace real respondents or your own judgment. We'll show you what this looks like in practice with a survey tool with AI, using Lena's survey.

At a glance: AI in every step of your survey

The overview below shows how AI changes the individual steps of a survey and what you should still watch out for yourself.

Creating the questionnaire: templates become a side note

Templates used to be the most convenient way into any survey. But anyone who has used one knows the problem: a generic employee survey knows nothing about shift work, about your new remote-work model or about the fact that administration and production have very different concerns. In the end, you adjust so many questions that you might as well build a questionnaire from scratch yourself.

With AI, you flip that around. Instead of searching for a template, you describe your own case and the AI creates a questionnaire from it that fits exactly. For example, Lena writes:

The more precise your description, the better the draft. So always state the goal of the survey, who should answer, which topics matter to you and how long the survey may be at most. At empirio.ai, you'll find this path under "New survey" and then "Create with AI." The AI creates the questionnaire on the free plan already.

Already have a draft? Then just import it

Many people have already given it plenty of thought and collected their questions in a Word document, a PDF or an Excel list, maybe even agreed on them together as a team. You don't have to do that work again. Using "Import survey", you upload your document and the AI transfers it one to one into an online survey, with all questions and answer options. This works with Word, PDF, Excel and PowerPoint files, as well as CSV and text files up to 10 MB. Retyping is a thing of the past.

Where templates are still useful

Questionnaire templates won't disappear entirely. They're a good source of ideas when you don't yet know which topics belong in a customer survey or in feedback after an event. And with established measurement instruments like the Net Promoter Score or validated scales from research, the exact wording matters so that you can compare your results with others. It's best to use such questions unchanged.

Editing the questionnaire: changes at the push of a button

The first draft is rarely the last. Colleagues have comments, the works council wants a question phrased differently, and as you read through, you spot a few typos. Until now, that meant opening and changing each affected question one by one. With a long questionnaire, that's a test of patience.

With AI, you give one instruction and it applies to the whole questionnaire. A few examples from Lena's survey:

• Spelling: With a single instruction, the AI corrects all spelling errors and typos in the entire questionnaire.
• Adding answer options: The works council wants a middle option on all rating questions. Instead of opening 30 questions one by one, Lena has the AI add the answer "Neither agree nor disagree" to all of them at once.
• Consistent wording: Did some questions address people formally and others casually? The AI makes the tone consistent across all questions.
• Improving individual questions: A question like "How satisfied are you with leadership and communication?" asks about two things at once. The AI helps you turn it into two clear questions.

At the end, it's worth taking a look at the whole questionnaire. Have the AI review it and ask specifically about leading wording, duplicate questions and missing answer options. At empirio.ai, optimizing individual questions and reviewing the whole questionnaire are part of the free plan.

There is one thing the AI does not replace, though: the test with real people. Before you launch, send your survey to two or three people from your target group and ask whether everything is clear.

Multilingual surveys without a translation agency

In some departments at Lena's company, there are colleagues who would rather answer in English, Polish or Turkish. In the past, she would have hired a translation agency or skipped it altogether. But that's exactly how many surveys end up missing the voices of people who aren't comfortable in the survey's language.

AI translates your questionnaire automatically into other languages, and the answers still land in a single, combined analysis. At empirio.ai, multilingual surveys with automatic translation are available from the Pro plan on. Still, have the translation proofread by someone who speaks the language well, because the AI doesn't always know the technical terms used in your company.

Analyzing: spot patterns instead of poring over tables

After three weeks, 94 of 120 employees have answered. Lena has charts for every question right away, because at empirio.ai those are part of the free plan and update live. But the interesting question isn't what percentage checked "somewhat satisfied" on a given question, it's what the results say overall.

This is exactly where AI helps with analyzing your questionnaire. It summarizes the results and points you to patterns and standout findings, for example that satisfaction with shift scheduling in production is much lower than satisfaction with leadership. Whether this difference really comes down to the department is something you then check with a cross-tabulation. Using the AI assistant, you can also ask questions directly about your results. At empirio.ai, the AI summarizes results from the Plus plan on, and you can also try a limited number of analyses and messages to the AI assistant for free.

Open-ended answers: from a mountain of comments to clear themes

AI saves the most time with open-ended questions. Nobody enjoys reading 94 comments on suggestions for improvement twice, and sorting them cleanly into categories takes hours by hand. In Text Analysis, you have the AI analysis search specifically for main themes, sentiment, criticism, suggestions or recommended actions, and you get the key quotes along with it. With Text Labeling, the AI assigns each answer to a category that you can then adjust yourself. This needs at least 20 text answers. The word cloud as a quick first overview is free, and analyzing open text with AI is available from the Plus plan on.

Your own judgment still matters. Always read a sample of the original answers and compare them with what the AI summarized.

Surveys by chat: AI agents do the clicking for you

The next change is already here: you don't necessarily have to open a survey tool yourself anymore. If you work with Claude or ChatGPT anyway, you can tell it in the chat which survey you need, and the AI agent creates it directly in the survey tool, changes questions or pulls the results. This is made possible by what's called an MCP server, which lets AI assistants work together with other programs. At empirio.ai, the MCP server is free.

What AI does not replace in surveys

As much as AI makes easier, there are a few places where you should take a close look. Survey research is currently taking an intensive look at where AI helps and where it can distort results.

AI answers are no substitute for real respondents

The idea keeps coming up to simply have language models answer on their own, as a kind of artificial participant. The Pew Research Center tested this in detail in 2026 and reaches a clear conclusion: probably not. Even in the best setup, the AI answers were off by an average of about 11 percentage points from the real results, and for individual people they matched only about every other answer. For Lena, that means: she finds out what her colleagues think only if she asks them.

Bots can fill out surveys

The flip side: AI can also pose as a human. A researcher at Dartmouth College developed an AI agent that fills out online surveys convincingly, slipping past all the tested checks in 99.8 percent of cases, for about 5 cents per answer. The study was published in 2025 in the journal PNAS. This mainly affects open surveys that offer a reward. So share your link as specifically as you can, for example on the intranet, by email or via a QR code on the bulletin board. Also take a closer look at answers that come in strikingly fast or look identical.

AI follow-up questions add depth but cost time

One intriguing idea is to have an AI ask follow-up questions on open-ended answers, much like in an interview. A study with around 600 participants showed back in 2020 that a chatbot that asks follow-up questions gets more informative and more specific answers than a classic online survey (Xiao and others). A more recent study by the research institute NORC confirms that the answers become more detailed, but it also shows the price: the survey took about twice as long, and slightly more people dropped out at the first follow-up question (NORC). For short surveys like Lena's, a well-worded open-ended question is therefore often the better choice.

The responsibility stays with you

AAPOR, the American association for survey research, published a report on the responsible use of AI in 2026. The key points apply to any survey: a human checks what the AI delivers, and you disclose what you used AI for. If you're running a survey for a thesis, that note belongs in your methodology section.

Data privacy: where does the AI run?

When it comes to data privacy with AI and surveys, one question often gets overlooked: where do the answers go when the AI analyzes them? If you copy your respondents' answers into a general-purpose chatbot, they often end up with a provider in the US. With an employee survey in particular, that's sensitive, because even seemingly anonymous comments can sometimes reveal who wrote them.

At empirio.ai, your survey data stays in the EU, and the AI features run there too. Your input and survey data are not used to train AI models, and you get the data processing agreement right when you sign up. That's how you lay the groundwork for GDPR-compliant surveys.

If you connect empirio.ai to an outside AI assistant, you're deliberately choosing that service. From then on, its terms and server locations apply. There, make sure your input is not used for training.

Checklist: how to use AI in your survey the smart way

With these points, you get the most out of AI without putting the quality of your survey at risk:

• Describe your case precisely: Goal, target group, topics and maximum length belong in every description.
• Use existing drafts: If your questionnaire already exists as a file, import it instead of retyping it.
• Use standard questions unchanged: Don't have established scales and metrics reworded.
• Have the whole questionnaire reviewed: Ask specifically about leading and duplicate questions.
• Test with real people: Two or three people from your target group are enough for a first test.
• Share the link specifically: That keeps bots and random participants out.
• Check the AI analysis: Read a sample of the original answers and verify important numbers yourself.
• Watch where the AI runs: Personal answers don't belong in just any chatbot.

By the way, Lena set up her survey in one afternoon and finished analyzing the comments in one morning. She spent the rest of the time on what really matters: discussing with managers and the works council what should change after the survey.

If you want to get started right away, you can create your survey with AI here.