Every research and analytics tool right now is bolting on AI. What does Fred‘s AI-powered analysis actually do differently and where do you draw the line between automation and the irreplaceable human judgment of a researcher?
Imre Guaglianone: You’re right that almost every research, analytics, and UX tool is now adding AI. The difference with Fred is that we do not see AI as a shortcut to replace research judgment. We see it as a way to remove the repetitive work around user research so researchers, founders, and product teams can spend more time making better decisions.
Fred’s AI-powered analysis helps teams move from raw interviews, survey responses, notes, and study data into structured insights much faster. It can identify patterns, cluster feedback, highlight recurring pain points, summarize user interviews, and help turn research data into usable reports. But the key difference is that Fred is designed around the research workflow itself, not just a generic AI layer on top of documents.
Where we draw the line is interpretation. AI can help organize the evidence, surface themes, and reduce analysis time. But the researcher still needs to understand context, nuance, business constraints, user behavior, and what a finding actually means for the product. Human judgment is especially important when deciding which insights matter, what trade-offs to make, and how research should influence product strategy.
So our philosophy is simple: Fred automates the admin, synthesis, and reporting friction around user research, but it keeps the researcher in control of the final interpretation. The best AI-powered user research platform should make researchers sharper, not make them invisible.
What inspired you to build Fred, and what gap did you see in the user research market that existing platforms were not solving?
Imre Guaglianone: The inspiration for Fred came from seeing how fragmented user research had become. Teams were using one tool for recruiting, another for running studies, another for transcripts, another for tagging, another for analysis, and then another for reporting. By the time the research was ready to share, the team had already lost time, context, and momentum.
The gap we saw was not that there were no UX research tools. There are plenty. The gap was that most tools solved one narrow part of the process. They did not help teams run the full research workflow from study setup to participant recruiting, analysis, insight management, and reporting in one connected system.
We built Fred because user research should be easier to start, easier to scale, and easier to act on. A founder, product manager, designer, or UX researcher should be able to understand their users without spending days stitching together spreadsheets, transcripts, research notes, and slide decks.
Fred is designed to be an AI-powered user research platform that helps teams collect customer feedback, analyze user interviews, manage insights, and turn research into product decisions. The goal is to make high-quality research accessible not only to mature UX research teams, but also to startups and product teams that need fast, reliable customer insight.
Many startups, especially early-stage ones, treat user research as a “nice to have” rather than a core function. How do you convince a cash-strapped founder that investing in a tool like Fred is worth it before they have product-market fit?
Imre Guaglianone: I would actually say user research matters most before product-market fit. That is when every product decision is expensive. If you are building the wrong feature, targeting the wrong customer, or solving a problem people do not care enough about, the cost is not just the money you spend. It is the months you lose.
For an early-stage founder, user research is not a corporate process. It is a survival mechanism. It helps you answer the most important questions: Who has the problem? How painful is it? What are they doing today? What would make them switch? What language do they use to describe the problem? What is blocking adoption?
Fred helps cash-strapped founders make research practical. Instead of hiring a full research team or spending weeks manually organizing interviews, they can recruit participants, run studies, analyze customer conversations, and generate reports much faster. That makes user research less of a luxury and more of a product discovery engine.
The way I frame it is this: before product-market fit, you cannot afford to guess. A tool like Fred helps founders validate assumptions, analyze customer feedback, and make better product decisions before they burn too much runway. For startups, the return on user research is not just better insights. It is fewer wrong bets.
Fred covers studies, recruiting, analysis, and reporting. That’s a wide surface area. Are you going deeper on any one of those, or is the vision to become the end-to-end operating system for UX research teams?
Imre Guaglianone: The long-term vision is for Fred to become the end-to-end operating system for user research and product discovery. But that does not mean we treat every part of the workflow as equal at every stage.
Our focus is on the parts of research where teams lose the most time and context: recruiting the right participants, running structured studies, analyzing user feedback, and turning that analysis into clear, shareable reports. These steps are deeply connected. If recruiting is disconnected from study design, or analysis is disconnected from the original interview evidence, the quality of the insight suffers.
So yes, Fred covers a wide surface area, but the reason is intentional. Research is not a set of isolated tasks. It is a workflow. A strong UX research platform needs to help teams move from question to participant, from conversation to insight, and from insight to decision.
Over time, we want Fred to be the research repository, AI analysis assistant, participant recruiting tool, and reporting layer that product teams use to understand their users continuously. The goal is not to add features for the sake of it. The goal is to create one connected system where research becomes easier to run, easier to trust, and easier to act on.
What are your key goals at Web Summit Vancouver 2026, and what partnerships or opportunities are you looking to explore?
Imre Guaglianone: Web Summit Vancouver is a major opportunity for Fred because it brings together exactly the kind of ecosystem we care about: founders, product leaders, investors, enterprise teams, and technology partners who are thinking seriously about the future of AI, product development, and customer understanding.
- Our first goal is visibility. We want more teams to understand that Fred is not just another survey tool or research repository. Fred is an AI-powered user research platform for teams that want to run studies, recruit participants, analyze user interviews, and generate research reports in one connected workflow.
- Our second goal is partnerships. We are interested in speaking with product-led companies, design teams, UX research teams, startup accelerators, venture studios, and communities that help founders get closer to their customers. Fred is especially relevant for organizations that support early-stage startups, because research is often the missing link between an idea and product-market fit.
- Our third goal is learning. Web Summit Vancouver is a place where you can hear directly from founders, operators, and investors about what they are struggling with. For us, that is valuable research in itself. We want to understand how teams are currently using AI for customer feedback analysis, product discovery, and user research, and where existing tools are still falling short.
Ultimately, we are going to Web Summit Vancouver to build relationships with people who believe what we believe: that better products come from better customer understanding. Fred’s role is to make that understanding faster, more accessible, and more actionable.
Meet Fred – The User Research Shepherd in the News Forbes | ItaliaEconomy
Meet Fred – PITCH DECK
Meet Imre Guaglianone, Founder, Meet Fred – The User Research Shepherd, at booth #E154 and startup island #PS-03 at Websummit Vancouver 2026. Brought to you by the Italian Trade Agency (ITA) in Canada.
Visit vancouver.websummit.com for more. Browse the Italy @ Web Summit Vancouver 2026 brochure or visit the ITA portal and Machines Italia website to learn more about the delegation.
