the observatory is an ai-native research practice that uncovers what’s hidden, informing institutions building the future of culture, tech, and innovation.
Expert researchers design the study. Our platform runs it across thousands of people. Nothing reaches you unread.
Four times the speed of a traditional agency, and better work at the end of it.
Send us anything. A hunch, a fight your team keeps having, a decision that’s stuck. Most of the work happens right here, before anyone talks to anyone: what’s actually being asked, and what a real answer would have to look like. Sometimes we tell you it isn’t a research question.
A few hundred people, not a few dozen. Every one of them gets a conversation, on Dialogue, our own platform. Moderated by AI, by our researchers, or in the field. The first answer is usually the polite one. We keep going until it isn’t.
The platform gets us a first pass in hours. Then people take over. Every quote and number checked against source. We argue about what it means, often for longer than you’d expect. Then a call you can act on, including when it isn’t the answer you wanted.
Nothing resets. It all goes into an agent that’s yours: transcripts, coding, the arguments we had, plus whatever your team already knows. Query it here or pull it into your own stack over MCP. Study ten starts from all nine.
Dialogue is the platform we built to run this.
Dialogue runs fully conversational ai-moderated interviews and surveys with hundreds of people at once, in over 70 languages. It recruits from your own customers or a 50M-person panel, probes for the why, and synthesizes as answers arrive. We own it, so we can change how a study runs mid-field.
Four questions we set out to answer.
Are there five types of airline travelers?
Did young luxury buyers really stop caring about logos?
“I’m not buying it for the brand, I’m buying it for the durability.”
Can one World Cup message work in ten countries?
“When a brand uses specific marketing for my country, I feel like that brand really cares.”
What do LA voters actually want to hear?
“I don’t see it on the buses. I don’t see it on the trains. I don’t see it on my street. I don’t see it.”
We work with institutions that intend to change the future.
Culture
Tech
Innovation
Expert researchers with a fundamental interest in answering the most difficult questions.
The Observatory is a small team of researchers, engineers, and designers. We push AI as far as it will go and keep human judgment at the centre of the work.
Our researchers have led research inside large consumer platforms, agencies, and prediction markets.
Together we’re building the next-generation research agency, and giving you the insights to change what your business does next.
Guiding principles
the Observatory is an ai-native research practice based in LA and NYC.
We design the question first, run it at the scale a real answer needs, and read every conversation closely. Most of our work starts with something a team has been circling for months.
We are sector-agnostic, with a preference for questions that are hard to ask: new categories, guarded audiences, subjects people would rather not say out loud.
Let’s start the conversation.
Have a question your team can’t answer? Bring it to the Observatory. Tell us what you need to know and we’ll come back with how we’d study it.