The additions include a new ‘Ask Bari’ tool to allow researchers to query data in natural language, covering areas such as community discussions, fieldwork progress, or emerging themes.

Bilendi said that Ask Bari would help research teams to query complex qualitative studies in plain language, and receive structured answers grounded in project data.

Bari, short for Bilendi Artificial Research Intelligence, will also help identify cultural nuances in multi-country studies during early fieldwork, as well as recommending unexplored angles, follow-up questions and thematic connections.

Bilendi said that in addition to Ask Bari, Bari will now offer five distinct AI moderator personas, which would allow researchers to align the AI’s moderation style with target audiences.

Other new elements include a re-designed social media-style web portal, and a function to allow users to talk to Bari via text, voice or video in a style reminiscent of popular large-language models.

Marc Bidou, chief executive and founder at Bilendi, said: “By making our AI Bari more agentic and conversational, we are enabling our clients to converse directly with their data just as they would with a human analyst.”