QC'ing a survey is one of the most tedious parts of market research. Checking termination points, skip logic, piping, randomization — it can eat hours. So I decided to test whether an AI agent could do it instead.
I filmed myself trying it out for the first time, using a real survey I'd written for my daughter's soccer team. I intentionally planted a few errors to see if Claude would catch them.
How the Agent Worked
I gave Claude access to a browser and asked it to walk through the survey the way a respondent would, then check for issues.
A few things surprised me:
It walked the survey twice. Claude went through it once as a respondent, then ran it again specifically to verify randomization. It caught un-randomized lists on its own — I didn't have to prompt it to look for those.
It only took screenshots when something was wrong. Rather than documenting every screen, I set it up to capture only the problem areas. Keeps the output clean and actionable.
It produced a proper issue log. The output included a severity rating for each issue and a "fixed/verified by" column — so there's a clear handoff for whoever does the remediation. And you could have Claude go back in and verify the fixes were applied.
A Note on Trust and Access
If you're nervous about giving an AI agent browser access, this setup helped: I gave Claude its own browser profile and its own Gmail account. It never touched my personal accounts. That separation matters, and I'd recommend it as a baseline.
Why This Is Worth Your Attention
The tedious QC checks — randomization, skip logic, terminates — are exactly the kind of mechanical work that takes a researcher's time without requiring a researcher's judgment. If an agent can reliably flag those issues before a survey goes into field, that's real time back in the day.
It's not a replacement for a researcher reviewing the instrument. It's a first pass that catches the obvious stuff so you're not catching it after 200 completes.
I'm still refining the setup, but the first test was promising enough that this is now part of how we think about survey QC at Harvest Insights.
Full walkthrough video on YouTube if you want to see it in action.
