Beyond the Algorithm: Overcoming Bias in AI Research

AI is changing how research teams analyze feedback, uncover patterns, and make insights more accessible, but using AI effectively requires more than simply giving it good data.

Join WICT Philadelphia for Beyond the Algorithm: Overcoming Bias in AI Research, an interactive conversation exploring how bias can enter AI-assisted research and what we can do to recognize and mitigate it.

Through real-world research use cases, Christa Chaffinch and Andrea Vogel will explore some of the most common forms of bias that can influence AI-generated insights, including source, framing, selection, interpretation, and confidence bias. They’ll also share practical approaches for keeping AI-assisted research objective, evidence-based, and grounded in context.

What You’ll Learn

Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of:

• Where bias enters the AI research process, from the information provided to an AI tool to how questions are framed and results are interpreted.

• How AI can create misleading conclusions even when working with real research data.

• How AI can support different research needs, including analyzing large volumes of customer feedback and making existing research easier to access and explore.

• Practical ways to reduce bias, including neutral prompting, looking for evidence that challenges a conclusion, separating facts from interpretation, and making it easy to verify insights against original research.

• Where humans remain essential, using AI for repeatable tasks such as finding, organizing, retrieving, and summarizing evidence while keeping human judgment at the center of decision-making.

Whether you work directly in research or simply use research and customer insights to make decisions, this session will offer a practical perspective on how to use AI more thoughtfully and confidently.

Meet the Speakers

Christa Chaffinch

With over 20 years of experience in research and a multidisciplinary background spanning psychology, sociology, and anthropology, Christa brings curiosity, creativity, and a healthy dose of pragmatism to understanding people and their experiences.

Her work focuses on qualitative, observational, and mixed-methods research, as well as building teams, processes, and new ways of working, including experimenting responsibly with AI, that help teams learn faster without sacrificing quality.

Christa believes the best research is collaborative, intentional, and grounded in real human needs, helping teams make more confident decisions and create experiences that genuinely work for the people using them.

Andrea Vogel

Andrea has spent more than 15 years helping product and design teams understand the people they’re designing for. Much of her career has involved observing customers in their homes and everyday lives and bringing teams into those experiences firsthand, creating deeper empathy for customers and a perspective that’s hard to forget.

Today, she’s exploring how AI can add another dimension to research. Andrea builds research agents that sift through thousands of customer comments to surface patterns and signals, giving teams another starting point for exploring what’s happening within the customer experience.

She sees an opportunity to bring together different kinds of evidence: the depth of qualitative research, the scale of customer feedback, and the reality of behavioral data. But as AI becomes part of that process, Andrea believes we need to be thoughtful about how it shapes what we see, where bias can enter, and how we keep insights grounded in evidence that teams can trust.