This week, UserTesting announced its acquisition of User Interviews—news that caught the attention of many teams and the research community. While it won’t disrupt day-to-day work overnight, it’s a moment to pause and reflect on the shifting landscape.
Research depends on trust; trust in the tools we use, in the participants we learn from, and in the decisions research helps us make. That trust doesn’t live inside a single tool, but is built across a connected process of participants, methods, decisions, and context. When part of that process changes, teams naturally ask:
- “Will I still have the freedom to choose what’s best for me?”
- “Will participant quality remain high as my needs evolve?”
- “Will my tools keep up as research becomes more continuous and embedded?”
At Maze, we believe research works best when it delivers scale, versatility, and influence.
These principles guide everything we do—from how our platform is designed, to the partnerships we build, to the ecosystem we support—so that research can reach more participants, adapt to any team or study, and drive confident decisions.
Research that adapts to every team
Research teams don’t all work the same way. They operate across industries, maturity levels, geographies, and timelines. The questions they ask and the people they need to learn from are always changing.
Maze was built to be panel-agnostic. Teams can recruit participants from external panels, bring their own users, or mix and match—whatever fits the study. Maze works alongside the tools and providers teams already use, giving researchers flexibility without locking them into a single path or long-term compromise.
In practice, that means access to a wide range of audiences, flexible sourcing options, and coverage across 130+ countries, all while keeping researchers in control of how their work gets done. It’s about supporting how research actually happens in real organizations. And it gives us the ability to shape the ecosystem thoughtfully—without forcing teams into a single way of working.
This approach allows us to:
- Choose partners based on quality and fit across geography, job function, seniority, and B2B/B2C use case
- Raise participant standards together using research-grade AI and panel partner technologies to detect fraud and bots
- Improve the research experience based on real Jobs To Be Done
For researchers, that means confidence. Confidence that the tools they use support learning and influence, not limiting it.
The research community needs a panel that doesn't live inside one ecosystem but can thrive in any workflow with any team. At Terac, we're tackling the full research stack. From owning our own panel to building the research tools that live on top of it.
Zachary Baker
Co-Founder & CEO @ Terac
Scaling research with confidence
Research that influences requires more than tools—it needs scale, quality, and reliability. The more studies being conducted, the more participants are engaged, and the stronger the overall ecosystem becomes. Open access and multiple sources help panels grow, improve participant quality, and ensure insights remain trustworthy.
Having access to multiple panels doesn’t mean more complexity for researchers. Platforms like Maze bring everything together in an end-to-end experience, so teams can run more studies without juggling tools. Features like Maze’s AI moderator and smarter workflows make research faster and easier, while panel providers benefit from growing demand across the ecosystem.
Driving innovation with research-grade AI
At Maze, we combine global reach with research-grade AI to maintain quality as scale increases. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps verify profiles, reduce duplication, and surface quality signals—strengthening human judgment rather than replacing it.
This work happens across two key dimensions:
- Identity: Ensuring participants are real, not bots or fraud, and enriching profiles with reliable, detailed information
- Behavior: Monitoring how participants interact with studies, guiding and prompting where needed, and generating behavioral scores and benchmarks
These insights are shared with panel providers, helping them continuously improve the quality of their audiences.
Our approach ensures researchers hear from the right participants at the right time, with confidence that their insights reflect real behavior and context. By connecting research demand across multiple panel providers, the ecosystem grows stronger for everyone.
As research becomes more continuous, more AI-assisted, and more embedded across organizations, openness becomes structural. The platforms that win won’t be the ones that own everything; they’ll be the ones that work best together.
Jack Prattern
Founder & CEO @ Respondent
Building research for the future
The future of research won’t be defined by any single platform, but by how well tools, providers, and communities can work together in open, flexible ways. At Maze, our commitment to openness comes from listening to the researchers we work with, the partners we collaborate with, and the community shaping the future of the discipline.
Because when research systems are designed to work together, trust follows—and trust is what allows research to drive real influence.
