Heron's AI-led interviews reach the former employees, customers, and competitors who know a business — dozens at a time, in hours — using discussion guides and follow-up patterns refined across more than 50,000 researcher-led interviews. Same sourcing standards. Same compliance. A different lane for a different kind of question.
AI-led interviews completed
interviews in the Heron library informing every guide
first transcripts delivered
of interview craft behind the discussion guides
Every Heron business diligence engagement can draw on both lanes. Researcher-led interviews go where the source is hard to reach and the nuance is the point. AI-led interviews go where the question needs breadth — many voices, fast, structured the same way every time. Most engagements use both.
You bring the question. A Heron researcher turns it into a discussion guide: the hypotheses to test, the follow-ups that matter, the lines not to cross.
Heron's sourcing team identifies and screens former employees, customers, competitors, and channel participants of the company in question. No consumer panels.
The AI interviewer conducts each conversation on the guide, probing on what the source actually says, at whatever hour suits the source, in their language.
Transcripts land in the Analytics Platform and the Heron MCP as they complete, with structured evidence and, on request, a researcher's synthesis.
Most AI interviewers learned from consumer surveys. Heron's learned from twenty years of diligence conversations: when to ask a source to be specific, when to ask for a number, when to test a claim against what another source said. Every guide is built by a researcher; every interview follows it; every follow-up is grounded in what the source just said, not a script.
“The new pricing didn't land well with our larger accounts.”
ClarifyWhich accounts, roughly by size, pushed back hardest?
QuantifyOf those, how many did you actually lose or downgrade?
ContrastYou mentioned the prior year's increase went through. What was different this time?
Probes on the source's own words. “Tense” becomes “what specifically did they point to.”
The same guide across every source, so twenty interviews are comparable, not twenty anecdotes.
Guides are researcher-built; transcripts are reviewed; any conversation can be escalated to a researcher-led interview.
Twenty to a hundred customers of a target on retention, pricing, and switching intent — before the LOI.
Distributors, resellers, and rivals on where the pressure is coming from.
Former senior employees within 48 hours of the print. This is how Heron Events runs.
See Heron Events →Recurring quarterly programs on the same guide, so change is measurable.
Ten quick interviews to decide whether a name deserves a researcher-led engagement.
Sources interviewed in their own language, across the 20+ countries where Heron operates.
“Nobody from the buyer side had ever asked me how many of my accounts saw the competitor's bundle. I'd never counted. It was eight of twenty.”
The guide encodes the lines a Heron researcher would not cross. The interviewer does not cross them either, and transcripts are reviewed before release.
Every source is informed they are speaking with an AI interviewer on behalf of Heron and consents to recording before the conversation begins.
Sources are described by role and tenure, never by name. Heron's attribution framework errs toward less identifiability, not more.
Completed interviews appear in the Heron Analytics Platform and through the Heron MCP as they finish. Integration partners carry the library to the Bloomberg Terminal, FactSet, Capital IQ, and Daloopa. Heron Skills turn a program's transcripts into your firm's own memo format inside your own AI.
Search, benchmark, and build IC-ready outputs on completed interviews.
Explore →Transcripts inside Claude, ChatGPT, or your own agents as they complete.
Connect →Bloomberg Terminal, FactSet, Capital IQ, and Daloopa.
Partners →Your firm's memo format, produced from the program's evidence, in your AI stack.
Skills library →Some sources won't talk to software. Some conversations turn out to need a person who can read the room. When that happens, the interview moves to a Heron researcher — same engagement, same guide, no re-scoping. The two lanes exist so you never have to choose between coverage and depth.
Some prefer it: no scheduling friction, no interviewer to impress, and the conversation happens when they choose. For sources who won't, a researcher conducts the interview.
No. The guide sets the ground to cover; the follow-ups are generated from what the source actually says. See “The interviewer” above.
By Heron's sourcing team, against the specific company — former employees, customers, competitors, channel partners. Heron does not use consumer panels.
Researcher-built guides, transcript review before release, and interview-quality grading on every conversation. Weak interviews are re-run or escalated.
Yes. The MNPI protocols, consent standards, and attribution framework are the ones Heron has run for asset managers for more than twenty years.
Heron Events is a scheduled application of AI-led interviews to post-earnings reads on covered companies. This page describes commissioned AI-led interview programs on the company of your choice.