Lexi Breitz, Ph.D. is Director of Research at Headway, where she leads a team focused on building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from The Ohio State University, with a research background in social cognition, motivation, and health behavior. Before joining Headway, Lexi served as Director of Research & Data Science at Workday, where she oversaw a team of 80+ researchers, data scientists, and engineers. Her career spans research leadership roles at Meta, Instagram, and Nielsen, and she serves as faculty at USC's Master of Science in Applied Psychology program. Across her work, Lexi brings a deep focus on understanding users' attitudes, motivations, and behaviors to build product experiences that meet real human needs.
Sessions
Jun 24
9:35 AM - 9:55 AM GMT+2
Blue Stage
AI for Qual Research
Decision-Making
Innovation
Research Automation
Touching Grass at Scale: How AI-Moderated Research Put the Voice of the User in Every Room
Headway came to Listen Labs with a hypothesis: therapists would resist AI. The research said otherwise. 80% were already using it. This session breaks down how Headway ran six AI-powered studies, from provider adoption to children's intake flows, and turned unexpected findings into product decisions that moved the needle.
Key Takeaways:
AI moderation can unlock more honest answers -- Clinicians and parents opened up more, not less, in an async, low-pressure format. For sensitive topics, removing the human interviewer reduced social-desirability bias.
Speed at this scale changes how research gets used -- When you can deliver provider insights in under 12 hours, research stops being a "we didn't have time" excuse and becomes a default input to real decisions.
Democratizing research requires guardrails, not just tools -- Researcher craft moves upstream into study design. AI moderation is powerful for exploratory and evaluative work, but standards and review are what keep quality from eroding as more teams run their own studies.
