The AI Finds. We Decide: Building Ethical AI Research When You're Locked Out of Users

When our team lost access to users for seven months, we had a choice: wait it out, or find another way to listen. We weren't AI specialists. We had no playbook. But we built an AI-powered social listening approach with human judgment at the centre - that uncovered real service issues we would have missed entirely.

This talk shares the experiment, the safeguards, the mistakes, and the mindset shift that made it work. It's for anyone who's curious about AI but unsure where to start.