A product trio used to spend a week after research in a war room, affinity-mapping quotes until a point of view fell out. Now the transcript tool hands them themes before the ride home. The readout looks finished. The meeting where someone has to say we are cutting this flow still takes the courage it always took, and it takes longer, because the themes sound more official than a wall of sticky notes.
Official is not the same as true, and a theme is not a decision.
synthesis was never the point
The point of research is a change in what you build. Themes are an input. Someone still has to say which theme matters, which one is an artifact of how you asked, and which customer you are willing to disappoint. A model will happily produce a balanced summary that offends nobody and commits to nothing. That summary is cheap. Acting on it is the expensive part, and it should be.
Do not skip the argument because the document arrived early.
A readout nobody can disagree with has not finished the research. It has deferred it.
keep a person on the claim
Use the tool to cluster, to find the quote you would have missed, to draft the deck. Then write, in your own sentences, the claim you are willing to take into a planning meeting. Attribute it to a person. If the claim is wrong, that person should be able to say so without blaming the model.
The teams that get research wrong in the age of cheap synthesis are not the ones who move slowly. They are the ones who treat a generated theme as permission to stop thinking.