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How to use AI to analyze responses from webinar attendee survey about topics of interest

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Adam Sabla

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Aug 22, 2025

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This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses/data from Webinar Attendee surveys about Topics of Interest. If you’re using AI or considering it, I’ll help make survey response analysis much smoother while staying actionable.

Choosing the right tools for analysis

The approach and tooling for analyzing survey responses depend on whether your data is structured (numbers and choices) or unstructured (open feedback). Here’s the breakdown:

  • Quantitative data: When you collect straightforward answers—like how many people picked a particular topic—you can quickly analyze results using Excel, Google Sheets, or built-in dashboards. These tools help tally frequencies and visualize trends.

  • Qualitative data: Open-ended questions and detailed follow-ups reveal attendees’ real attitudes but are tricky to process at scale. Reading through every answer is impossible in most real-world studies. That’s where AI tools come alive, quickly surfacing key patterns and themes in a way that’s just not humanly feasible.

There are two main approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:

ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis

Copy and chat: You can export your survey data—typically as a CSV or text file—and paste it into ChatGPT or a comparable GPT-based platform. From there, you can chat with the AI and probe for insights, trends, and summaries based on your open-ended responses.

Convenience and limits: The downside: managing lots of text, context limits, and messy formatting can make this workflow clunky. Still, it’s a great quick-start if you’re not ready to commit to a dedicated analysis tool.

All-in-one tool like Specific

Purpose-built solution: Tools like Specific were made for exactly this: they let you collect data (with surveys or interviews) and leverage AI for real-time response analysis—all in one platform.

Better data with AI follow-ups: When you run a webinar attendee survey, Specific lets the AI ask intelligent follow-up questions. This captures richer, more honest participant insights automatically. Read more about their automatic AI followup questions feature.

Instant AI summaries & insights: With Specific, you get automatic summaries, the strongest themes, and clear, actionable takeaways—without managing spreadsheets or doing manual copy/paste. You can even chat with the AI about your survey results, similar to ChatGPT, but with added data filtering and collaboration features for teams. Learn more about AI survey response analysis.

Don’t forget: There are many other solid options like NVivo, MAXQDA, and Atlas.ti, each offering AI-powered capabilities for coding, visualization, and sentiment analysis to streamline qualitative survey review [1].

Useful prompts that you can use to analyze webinar attendee "topics of interest" survey responses

Prompts are the backbone of getting useful insights from qualitative survey analysis, whether you use ChatGPT, Specific, or any GPT-like AI. Here’s how to get more out of your data:

Prompt for core ideas: To see what your attendees care about most, use this universal prompt. It’s an industry favorite—Specific uses this approach internally, and it works anywhere with a GPT-based AI:

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

AI always performs better if you give it more context. For instance, tell it what the survey was about, your audience, your goal, or even share a few sample questions you asked. Here’s a starter example:

This data is from a webinar attendee survey exploring topics participants are most interested in for future events. My goal is to find the top 5 content themes that would engage our target audience. Please highlight recurring interests and explain the appeal.

Once you see the big list of themes, keep probing with deep-dives:

Tell me more about [topic/theme]

Prompt for specific topic validation: To quickly check if a subject came up, try:

Did anyone talk about [specific topic]? Include quotes.

Prompt for personas: If you want to understand the types of attendees, use:

Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—similar to how "personas" are used in product management. For each persona, summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed in the conversations.

Prompt for pain points and challenges:

Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.

Prompt for sentiment analysis:

Assess the overall sentiment expressed in the survey responses (e.g., positive, negative, neutral). Highlight key phrases or feedback that contribute to each sentiment category.

Prompt for suggestions & ideas:

Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.

Prompt for unmet needs & opportunities:

Examine the survey responses to uncover any unmet needs, gaps, or opportunities for improvement as highlighted by respondents.

Need help coming up with the right questions? This in-depth guide to great questions for webinar attendee surveys about topics of interest is worth a read.

How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type

Specific tackles every survey question with purpose-built logic for instant, actionable summaries:

  • Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): For every open-ended question, Specific gives you a summary of all collected responses—including those to any follow-up questions the AI asked. This layers context onto each participant’s initial answer.

  • Multiple choice questions with follow-ups: Each answer choice gets its own separate summary of the follow-up responses attached to it. This is especially useful when you want to understand the reasoning behind attendees’ topic preferences.

  • NPS questions: Each segment—detractors, passives, promoters—has its own analysis based on their feedback and follow-ups. You can instantly see how different attendee types feel and why.

Doing this in ChatGPT is possible too, but it takes more manual work to structure, filter, and summarize relevant responses for each segment or question. With Specific, the heavy lifting is done for you, freeing up your time to focus on decisions—not data wrangling. If you want a hands-on NPS example, check out the instant NPS survey generator for webinar attendees.

How to overcome AI context limits with large survey datasets

Working with AI means running into context size limits—that is, only so much data can be fed into the AI model at once. If your webinar drew a big crowd, your exported responses may be too large for a single upload or conversation. Here are two reliable ways to get around this (both available in Specific):

  • Filter responses before analysis: Limit the scope—only send conversations or answers relating to a particular question, choice, or user group into the AI for a focused, relevant slice of insights.

  • Crop questions for AI analysis: Select only the survey questions or sections you want analyzed. This approach streamlines the amount of data and helps your AI processes stay within technical boundaries, especially vital on large events.

Most leading AI tools for qualitative analysis, like NVivo, MAXQDA, or Canvs AI, also build on these strategies by automating coding, sentiment, and theme detection to deal with massive volumes[1].

Collaborative features for analyzing webinar attendee survey responses

It’s a common struggle: When you want to involve more than one person in review or analysis, things quickly get messy. Feedback lands in scattered Excel files, or everybody exports their own filtered batch, leading to duplicated work and version chaos—especially true for webinar “topics of interest” surveys where aligning your team is crucial.

Real-time, chat-driven collaboration: With Specific, all survey data is at your fingertips. Anyone on your team can spark a chat with the AI about the responses, ask questions, apply their own filters, and instantly see summaries—without stepping on each other’s toes or copy-pasting endless replies.

Multiple chats, clear attribution: You can spin up as many AI chats as needed, each with unique filters or segments—say, one chat focusing just on advanced technical topics, another looking at beginner interests. Each chat shows clearly who started it, so you never lose track of who’s exploring what angles.

See who says what: Every message within AI chat shows the sender’s avatar, bringing clarity to collaboration and making it easy to follow threads or revisit decisions made by others. This reduces confusion and fosters more meaningful, cross-team input.

For more on survey customization and rapid, AI-driven survey building, check out the AI survey editor or launch a webinar attendee survey about topics of interest instantly. If you want to start from scratch, the AI survey generator fits any purpose.

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Sources

  1. jeantwizeyimana.com. Best AI Tools for Analyzing Survey Data

Adam Sabla - Image Avatar

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.