John Whalen, PhD

Cohort 1

April 2025

Cohort 2

June 2025

May 2025

August 2025

November 2025

July 2025

October 2025

September 2025

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets in the evening (ET).


February 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets in the afternoon (ET).


March 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets afternoons (ET).

April 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets evenings (ET).


May 2026

June-July 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets in the evening (ET).

Facing AI-driven change? Download The Future of UX Research Roles – A Primer for AI-Aware Researchers to understand how AI is evolving your role from data collector to strategic orchestrator. Inside, explore AI-powered workflow shifts, debunk common fears, identify the five key skills you’ll need, and preview cutting-edge tools. Future-proof your career—adapt with confidence, maintain human insight, and lead in the AI era.

The Future of UX Research Roles – A Primer for AI-Aware Researchers

Ready to supercharge your UX research? Download AI-Powered Analysis – A Primer for UX Researchers, adapted from John Whalen, PhD’s AI for Customer Research course. Discover how to leverage AI’s speed and scale while maintaining human rigor. You’ll get step-by-step guidance on summarizing transcripts at scale, clustering themes, linking qualitative insights to metrics, and best practices for validating AI outputs. Whether you’re handling 10 interviews or 1,000, this primer equips you to integrate AI into every stage of your analysis.

AI-Powered Analysis – A Primer for Researchers

Tired of slow, repetitive UX research tasks? This free guide shows you how to master prompt engineering to supercharge your research with AI—cutting hours off analysis, boosting insight depth, and keeping your work truly human-centered. Learn powerful meta-prompts, best practices, and practical examples you can use immediately. Download now to transform your workflow and future-proof your skills!

Transform Your UX
Research with AI: Master
Prompt Engineering

Synthetic Users – A Primer for Researchers

Discover how AI-moderated interviews can transform your UX research! This primer reveals when AI shines, where it falls short, and how to use it effectively. You’ll learn practical strategies for faster, scalable insights without sacrificing research integrity. Whether you're curious, skeptical, or ready to experiment, this guide provides clear examples, best practices, and tool recommendations to help you leverage AI and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving research landscape.

AI-Moderated Interviews – An Introductory Primer for Researchers

We conducted a head-to-head test of humans and AI-tools each performing research tasks such as designing studies, moderating interviews, analyzing results, and creating deliverables. We then had expert researchers blindly evaluate the output from AI and humans to learn when AI tools performed well, and when humans are indispensable. Download a 1-page brief summarizing our findings to find out when AI tools were most valuable!

AI vs Humans - A User Research Showdown

Gain hands-on mastery of AI research tools and frameworks to deliver trusted insights faster while maintaining the rigor that matters.

AI Research Expert | Johns Hopkins PhD

AI for UX Expert | Fortune 500 clientele | CEO, author & speaker

AI for Customer Research: Future-Proof Your UX & Product Skills

UXR Lead

Lead Experience Researcher 

Full-Stack Dev

Director of UX Reserach

Lecturer and Entrepreneur

Digital CX Analyst 

Senior UX Researcher

Principal User Experience Researcher

Learn to build AI agents and workflows—developing judgment for what works, what doesn't, and how to adapt as capabilities evolve.

John Whalen

Agentic AI for Research: Build Custom Workflows & Synthetic Users

Staff UX Researcher

Principal, UX Research

Google

Capital One

Bloomberg

Pinterest

<pre><code class="language-markdown">If you're anxious that AI might make your skills obsolete, you're not alone. Customer research is changing fast—and whether you're a seasoned researcher or a designer or PM now expected to gather insights, you need to create results you can trust in an AI-powered world.

Here's the challenge: AI tools promise speed and scale, but can you trust the output? How do you maintain quality while leveraging AI's power?

The gap is widening. Some teams spend weeks gathering insights manually while AI-confident practitioners deliver trustworthy results in days at 10x scale. The difference isn't just speed—it's who gets invited to strategic conversations, who leads high-impact projects, and who shapes decisions with confidence.

This course gives you frameworks to evaluate quality and trust. You'll access enterprise-grade tools, learn from founders building these platforms, and develop critical judgment to distinguish reliable insights from AI noise.

You'll try tools yourself and form your own conclusions. No hype. Just practical expertise from someone who's tested hundreds of tools and knows what delivers trustworthy insights.</code></pre>

Create Customer Insights with AI You Can Actually Trust

Conduct AI-moderated customer interviews confidently

Extract insights from 50+ interviews using AI-powered analysis tools

Develop frameworks to assess new AI tools and know when they actually work

Use synthetic users for rapid testing and validation of ideas before launch

Guide your team or organization in adopting AI research tools and best practices

Connect with practitioners navigating AI research together and sharing insights

You've worked with customer insights in some capacity—whether you've conducted research yourself, collaborated with researchers on your team

Experience with customer research or user feedback

This is a practical course with weekly exercises using AI platforms. You'll need time to experiment and apply what you learn.

Willingness to try new tools hands-on

We use tools and prompting techniques that don't require any coding knowledge. If you can write clear instructions, you're ready.

No technical background required

Researchers seeking to deliver insights faster at scale using AI—while maintaining the quality and rigor that makes their work trustworthy.

PMs and research leaders balancing the need for rapid customer insights with concerns about maintaining quality, rigor, and team standards.

Designers seeking practical AI tools to understand users, test concepts, and make evidence-based design decisions with confidence and speed.

PayPal

You've heard about AI agents. Synthetic users. Deep thinking models that can work autonomously for hours. They sound powerful – but what do you actually do with them?These new capabilities – agentic AI that runs complex multi-step processes, synthetic users that scale research impossibly fast, systems that think deeply while you're offline – unlock something fundamentally different. Not faster prompting. True research partners that follow your direction, think through problems, and execute sophisticated workflows without you at the keyboard.This course teaches you to harness these frontier capabilities. You'll create agentic workflows that execute multi-step research processes independently. You'll deploy synthetic users informed by real research data and learn when they're valid versus when human participants are essential. You'll build systems that think for considerable time, following the exact research patterns and rigor you define.Using accessible tools like n8n and Claude Code, you'll move from prompting to orchestrating. No coding background required – but you will learn to work with an IDE, terminal, and automation platforms that unlock AI's full research potential.

Move Beyond Prompting. Harness the Full Power of Agentic AI for Research.

Build AI Agents for Your Research Workflow

Create and Deploy Synthetic Users

Build Custom Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Overcome the Technical Barrier

Orchestrate End-to-End Research Pipelines

Lead Advanced AI Research Initiatives

While not strictly required, Course 1 provides a strong foundation. You should be experienced with prompting AI and evaluating AI outputs.

Recommended: Completion of "AI for Customer Research"

Some agentic capabilities need Claude Code or Codex ($20/month). We'll guide you through setup.

Required: Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus subscription

You'll work with an IDE, terminal, and automation platforms. We provide onboarding for non-technical researchers. New to me too! --John

Willingness to learn new technical interfaces

Alumni from "AI for Customer Research" ready to build autonomous agents, synthetic users, and workflows that work independently.<pre><code class="language-markdown"></code></pre>

Experienced researchers wanting to explore frontier capabilities—building agents, deploying synthetic users, and pushing beyond limits.

Product managers and designers ready to harness agentic AI for research—no coding background required, just curiosity to learn.

Strategic answers you can trust, fast

Cognitive scientist, CEO & O'Reilly author · Top 100 Maven instructor

We run qualitative research for you — AI-moderated interviews, expert analysis, strategic deliverables.

Cognitive Scientist | CEO & Author

Done-for-You Qualitative Research

Turn mountains of customer feedback into strategic answers you can trust

Your customers are telling you what to build, fix, and prioritize. It's sitting in survey responses, support tickets, app reviews, and NPS comments. But who has time to read through it all — and even if you did, would you know what to look for?Most people skim a handful of responses and go with their gut. Or they paste everything into ChatGPT and get a vague summary they can't really trust. Either way, the strategic signal stays buried.In this three-hour hands-on workshop, you'll build an AI-powered analysis pipeline that does what a senior researcher does — but in a fraction of the time:Extract specific findings from your raw feedback dataSynthesize patterns across hundreds of responses, with evidence countsVerify every claim against the original source — no hallucinations, no cherry-pickingProduce a strategic summary framed around what to do nextNo coding. No expensive tools. Just structured prompting techniques and text files you can reuse with any AI assistant.You'll leave with a working system — configured for your specific data and questions — and the skills to point it at your own feedback the same day.

Go from a pile of unread feedback to strategic answers you can trust and act on — in a single afternoon.

Finally get through your feedback backlog

Find what you didn't know to look for

Trust what the analysis tells you

Make AI think strategically — like you

Turn feedback into a decision, not another document

Never start from scratch again

Product managers and founders sitting on customer feedback they haven't had time to properly analyze

Designers, engineers, and startup teams who need customer insights but don't have a dedicated researcher

Researchers who want to accelerate their own analysis and give non-researcher partners a workflow they can run

Hands on with Synthetic Users: Customer Research's Future

AI for UX Expert, Fortune 100 clientele, CEO, author & speaker

Learn how to create synthetic users tailored to your needs and how to "interview" them and generate insights.

Generate realistic AI-powered users

Use synthetic users to validate concepts before costly real-world testing. Anticipate what real customers might say.

Test ideas with AI-driven personas

Leverage AI for instant expert feedback in your domain. Create an expert partner in insights, branding, marketing, etc.!

Explore synthetic experts as research partners

Claude Code for Research: Agents, Skills & Commands

Learn how to create customized agents using Claude Code's agent frameworks.

Build Specialized Research Agents in Claude Code

See how Claude Code’s skills and command features turn your research steps into powerful agentic workflows.

Automate Multi-Step Research Tasks with Skills and Commands

Activate agents and automate background tasks so your research continues progressing even while you're offline.

Create an Always-On Research System Powered by Claude Code

Get Answers In Hours With AI-Powered Customer Interviews

Set up and conduct your first AI-moderated customer interview in under 30 minutes.

Learn How To Run Your First AI Moderated Interview

Quickly gather actionable customer insights to answer your strategic questions within hours.

Gain Insights in Hours

Watch as I create a new study live! See how AI interviews me and how it analyzes interviews for key insights.

Watch and Learn – Live demo!

Beyond Prompting: Agentic AI for Customer Research

See how agentic AI can change the role of the researcher—from writing prompts to orchestrating autonomous research work.

Understand the Shift from Prompting to Agentic Workflows

See how to structure and sequence agent behaviors to collect, synthesize, and analyze customer insights efficiently.

Design AI Agents for Real Research Tasks

Discover where agentic AI adds the most value for accelerating research and insight generation.

Identify High-Impact Use Cases for Your Team

The AI Research Toolkit You Need in 2026

Sophisticated AI prompt engineering

Which tool to use, when to use, how to optimize, how to scale research, how to blend qual + quant.

AI-moderated customer interviews

Learn how to ask questions of your repository. Gain insights from large-scale data samples.

AI analysis of research

Learn how to use synthetic customers and researchers and designers to develop a multi-agent system.

How to partner with synthetic users

Synthetic Users & Experts: Your 2026 Research Edge

Learn to deploy coordinated groups of synthetic users to reveal reliable, pattern-based customer perspectives.

Harness a Team of Synthetic Users for Richer Insight

See how synthetic experts can deliver instant domain knowledge, critique, and synthesis to elevate your research output.

Leverage Synthetic Experts for High-Quality Reasoning

Activate synthetic users and experts as an always-available system for continuous consumer and expert insight.

Learn directly from John Whalen, PhD

John Whalen, PhD

About John

Courses

AI for Customer Research: Future-Proof Your UX & Product Skills

Agentic AI for Research: Build Custom Workflows & Synthetic Users

Workshops

Turn Customer Feedback into Action with AI

Lightning Lessons