Interview Bot: Can Agentic LLM’s Perform Ethnographic Interviews?

Chatbots based on large language models present a scalable and consistent alternative to human interviewers for collecting qualitative data. In this paper, we introduce the agentic chatbot “Interview Bot”, designed to mimic human adaptability and empathy in an interview setting. We explore to what extent it can handle the nuances and open-ended nature of ethnographic interviews. Our findings indicate that chatbots can engage participants and collect meaningful data, but that they still sometimes fall short of fully replicating human facilitated interviews. Not withstanding challenges with the current state of the art, in the medium term, LLM-based agents hold great potential for scaling qualitative research beyond the confines of geographical, cultural, and language boundaries.