By Merlien, September 2026

AI can analyse interviews in seconds. Research agents can retrieve years of evidence. Synthetic users can simulate responses before a product reaches the market. But as research becomes faster and more automated, how do organisations preserve the human understanding that gives qualitative insight its value?

That question sits at the heart of QUAL360 APAC 2026, taking place November 3–4 at Aloft Singapore Novena. Under the theme “Qual Research Reimagined: Connecting Humans & Innovation,” the conference will bring together qualitative researchers, insights leaders, agencies, and industry experts to examine how the discipline can remain rigorous, relevant, and influential in an AI-driven world.

This year, the conversation begins one day earlier and extends into new territory.

What’s New for QUAL360 APAC 2026

For the first time, QUAL360 APAC will be preceded by the UX360 Sprint on November 2, bringing UX360 to Asia in an in-person format.

The addition reflects the growing opportunity to bring qualitative research, user research, product development, and customer experience closer together. Both qual and UX research seek to understand what people need, how they behave, and what shapes their decisions. The difference is often where that understanding is applied.

Opening the Sprint, Sin Lee Loh, UX Leader at Meta and co-founder of UXPA, will examine why research remains essential as users begin interacting with intelligent systems. Her session will explore new expectations around trust, control, and collaboration, while challenging over-reliance on historical data or synthetic proxies when AI creates behaviours that may not have existed before.

Joy Lee, Vice President of UX Research at DBS, will position UX research as an early risk radar, showing how qualitative evidence can identify problems and influence high-stakes decisions before risks become embedded in a product or service. Cathay Pacific’s Ernest Hui, Head of Design, and Kenneth Law, Senior User Research Manager, will demonstrate how bespoke research agents can retrieve existing knowledge, reduce duplicated work, and turn ambiguous stakeholder requests into clearer research questions.

The Sprint brings human understanding into product and design. The main QUAL360 programme then extends it across customer intelligence, innovation, brand strategy, and organisational decision-making.

Also new for 2026 is The Research Hot Seat: Ask Me Anything, a roundtable format that gives attendees direct access to industry leaders. Instead of predetermined presentations, participants can raise the questions they are actually confronting in their work—unfiltered, unscripted, and with zero marketing fluff.

Topics will include connecting early qualitative discovery to customer experience and conversion, maximising the value of AI-human collaboration, and building research operating systems with bespoke agents. The format creates space for candid peer exchange around challenges that rarely have simple or universal answers.

Keeping Insight Ahead of Business Speed

The pressure on qualitative teams is not simply to conduct research faster. It is to deliver evidence while there is still time for it to influence a decision.

Yashan Cama, Head of Brand & Consumer Insights, APAC at Google, will explore how new tools and workflows can keep insight ahead of business speed. By reducing the operational work surrounding research, AI can give practitioners more time for deeper synthesis, interpretation, and judgment.

Dario La Micela, Senior Director of Global Consumer Quality Intelligence & Continuous Improvement at Pandora, will take this thinking further with a closed-loop customer intelligence research operating system spanning innovation through post-sales. His session will examine how organisations can connect research questions, workflows, responsibilities, and actions rather than allowing valuable evidence to remain isolated in individual studies.

Priyanka Bhargav, Head of Consumer Intelligence & Brand Strategy at Flipkart, will present a provocation-first approach to design thinking. By introducing intentionally rough concepts during research, teams can generate more concrete reactions, uncover latent needs, and identify meaningful trade-offs earlier than through open-ended discovery alone.

Together, these sessions point to the same shift: the value of qualitative research is increasingly measured not only by the quality of its findings, but by its ability to reshape questions and guide action.

Keeping the Human Layer

Across the programme, AI is not treated as an automatic solution. The deeper question is how researchers can use its capabilities without removing the context that makes qualitative evidence meaningful.

Esther Tan, Global Director of Marketing & E-Commerce at Plaza Premium Group, describes that context as “heartware”: the human layer that helps organisations interpret behaviour, build trust, and create experiences people will actually adopt. Her session will explore how data can show what happened, behaviour can explain why, and heartware can help determine what to do next.

The agenda will also confront the boundaries of automation directly. One roundtable asks how researchers can automate analysis without losing the human “soul” of qual. Another session will examine when synthetic users are appropriate—and when they risk weakening the credibility of research.

The message is not that technology and human understanding are in opposition. It is that faster tools make sound judgment, appropriate guardrails, and direct engagement with people even more important.

Research Built for the Reality of Asia

Global technologies and research models do not always represent the cultural, linguistic, and economic diversity of Asia Pacific.

Snehal Pawar, Head of Design, Asia at Alstom, and Shruti Umesh Chakke, Founder of Regenerative Nomads, will examine inclusive research designed around people, planet, and prosperity. Their session will address the lack of regional representation in global data models and the need for evidence grounded in Asian realities.

Katherine Mendoza, Consumer Science and Product Experience Global Community of Practice Lead at Haleon, will focus on researching underserved populations in the Global South. Her session will explore how contextualised methodologies can capture lived experience and build indigenous narratives around Asia’s next billion users.

These conversations reinforce a principle shared by QUAL360 and the UX360 Sprint: products, experiences, and strategies cannot serve people effectively if the research behind them fails to understand their context.

One Connected Research Experience

Now in its 18th edition, QUAL360 is the only global conference series dedicated to qualitative market research. Its focused format brings together client-side researchers, UX and design leaders, agencies, independent experts, and technology providers for case studies, panels, roundtables, and meaningful peer exchange.

In 2026, the UX360 Sprint extends that community into product and design, while The Research Hot Seat creates a new space for open industry conversation. Together with the main conference, these formats create three connected days exploring how human insight moves from understanding people to improving experiences—and into the decisions that shape the business.

UX360 Sprint: November 2. QUAL360 APAC: November 3–4, 2026. Aloft Singapore Novena, Singapore.

Registration and programme information are available at apac.qual360.com. Register with the code ARM15 to receive 15% off your ticket.