This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from Ask Me Anything Attendee surveys about Topics of Interest. If you want to get better at survey analysis, or you’re ready to dive into AI survey response analysis, you’re in the right place.
Choosing the right tools for analyzing survey responses
The best approach for analyzing your survey data depends on the form and structure of your responses. If you’ve done a survey with Ask Me Anything Attendee about Topics of Interest, you’ll likely have a mix of quantitative and qualitative answers, so here’s how I think about it:
Quantitative data: If your survey includes simple stats—like how many people chose a specific option—these numbers are easy to crunch in Excel or Sheets. Conventional tools handle this well, fast.
Qualitative data: When you’ve got open-ended or follow-up questions (“What do you care the most about?” or “Tell me why you chose this topic”), counting just doesn’t cut it. This is where you need AI-powered analysis: reading it by hand is slow and error-prone, so automate it with the right tools.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Copy-paste and chat: You can export your survey responses and paste them into ChatGPT or a similar GPT tool. Then, just start a conversation about your data. It’s a decent way to start if you’re already using these tools, but:
Convenience: It can get messy fast. Formatting, context, and managing large chunks of data is clunky. With hundreds of responses, it’s hard to keep track of what’s what, and it’s easy to blow past the AI’s context limits.
Actionability: You’ll need strong prompts and plenty of patience to get good insights out of unstructured survey exports.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Built for the job: Platforms like Specific combine survey collection, follow-up probing, and AI-powered response analysis in one workflow. The AI’s follow-up logic means responses are richer and more detailed right from the start—so your analysis is instantly more robust. You can learn more about the automatic AI follow-up questions here.
True conversational analysis: When you’re ready to dig in, Specific summarizes all responses, spots key themes, and serves up actionable insights—no spreadsheet wrangling, just real understanding. You can chat directly with AI about the results, just like in ChatGPT, but with extra features: filter responses, manage data cloned into AI context, and collaborate efficiently across your team.
Other smart options: Dedicated qualitative analysis tools like NVivo, MAXQDA, or Delve also use AI-assisted coding and theme identification, but these can get technical and still require a lot of manual set-up or interpretation. Tools like Canvs AI and Quirkos also provide strong sentiment analysis and make qualitative trends more visible, but they tend to be overkill for just one Ask Me Anything Attendee survey. [1]
Want to generate a smart survey for this exact case? Try this AI survey generator preset for ask me anything attendees interested in a particular set of topics.
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze Ask Me Anything Attendee survey responses about Topics of Interest
If you’re using AI (whether it’s GPT tools, Specific, or another platform) to analyze your Ask Me Anything Attendee surveys, prompts are your not-so-secret weapon for surfacing everything from major themes to hidden opportunities. Here are my proven favorites:
Prompt for core ideas: If you only pick one, make it this. It extracts the main recurring ideas from a big set of responses, with short explanations and data-driven counts. (This is what Specific uses by default!) Paste it into your AI tool:
Your task is to extract core ideas in bold (4-5 words per core idea) + up to 2 sentence long explainer.
Output requirements:
- Avoid unnecessary details
- Specify how many people mentioned specific core idea (use numbers, not words), most mentioned on top
- no suggestions
- no indications
Example output:
1. **Core idea text:** explainer text
2. **Core idea text:** explainer text
3. **Core idea text:** explainer text
Always feed the AI as much context as possible. Tell it what your survey is for and what kind of outcome you want (e.g., understanding which topics captivate your AMA crowd most, or what questions spark the most engagement). For example:
Here’s what you need to know: I surveyed Ask Me Anything Attendees to uncover which topics they find most compelling in this context: [describe your event/audience background here]. My main goal is to craft sessions that match attendee passions and address burning questions. Use this info when extracting core themes from the responses.
Want to get more specific? Try follow-up prompts:
Tell me more about XYZ (core idea): If the AI spots a common theme, have it break down subtopics, related answers, or patterns within that core idea.
Did anyone talk about [topic]? (Include quotes): Quickly check if a particular interest or concern popped up, and ask the AI to pull actual attendee quotes for richer context.
Prompt for pain points and challenges: If your attendees mentioned struggles or frustrations, ask:
Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.
Prompt for suggestions & ideas: Ask the AI to surface all the suggestions, ideas, or requests for future AMA topics. Group by frequency, include direct quotes if you want (this can inspire future events or content).
Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.
For more inspiration, see our rundown on the best questions for ask me anything attendee surveys and explore the AI-powered survey response analysis features in Specific for true prompt flexibility.
How Specific analyzes survey responses based on question type
Specific structures its AI analysis to match how your survey questions are set up for maximum clarity. Here’s how it works:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): The AI gives you a summary for all responses—and if you had automatic follow-up questions, it rolls those into the summary, making your data analysis richer and more connected. Read about automatic AI followups.
Choice questions with follow-ups: For each choice, the AI summarizes all the follow-up responses related to that specific selection. This lets you compare topics and concerns across answer groups.
NPS questions: Here’s where things get interesting: Specific breaks down follow-up answers based on NPS category (detractors, passives, promoters) so you don’t just see a number—you see what’s motivating (or blocking) your audience.
You can pull off the same analysis in ChatGPT, but you’ll need to do more manual filtering and re-prompting. If you want to build your survey with these features baked in, check the AI survey generator or the AI survey editor to get started fast.
How to handle challenges with AI context limits
Every AI tool has context size limits—meaning you can only paste or send a certain amount of text at once. For a packed Ask Me Anything Attendee survey, this is a real obstacle. If you have hundreds of long responses, you’re going to bump up against this wall quickly.
Specific solves this with two smart techniques:
Filtering: You can zero in on only the most relevant conversations—filter by responses to specific questions, or by attendees who chose a particular answer. That way, only what matters gets analyzed in-depth.
Cropping: Instead of sending your whole survey, you can crop it so that only the question (or set of questions) you care about goes into the AI for deeper insight. This keeps you under the limit but still unlocks targeted learning from your event community.
If you’re working outside Specific, you’ll need to copy, filter, and chunk your data by hand—tedious, but doable if you plan carefully.
Collaborative features for analyzing Ask Me Anything Attendee survey responses
Collaborating on Ask Me Anything Attendee survey analysis is usually a messy exchange of CSVs, long email threads, or scattered spreadsheets. If your team is working together to plan a high-impact AMA, you’ll want to keep everyone moving quickly on the same page.
Chat-driven collaboration: In Specific, analyzing your survey is as simple as chatting with the AI together. You can spin up multiple chat threads—each focused on a particular theme, filter, or segment of your responses. Each chat shows who started it, so you always see how each insight or angle was explored, and who’s leading the charge.
Attribution and visibility: Each message in the AI Chat includes the sender’s avatar, so everyone knows who said what and can follow up easily—no more guessing or duplicated work.
Annotation and synthesis: Build insights in the open, ask follow-up questions in the thread, and watch everyone’s discoveries come together as new priorities or ideas for your next Ask Me Anything emerge.
This is a major upgrade from the usual back-and-forth, whether you’re planning your first or fiftieth AMA session. If you need a one-click way to build an NPS survey for your audience, jump straight to the NPS survey creator for AMA attendees or learn how to create an Ask Me Anything Attendee survey about topics of interest the easy way.
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