Introducing Live Observation: Watch Your AI Interviews Unfold in Real Time

When an AI agent picks up the phone and starts interviewing an expert on your behalf, a natural question follows: what exactly is it saying?

Until now, the answer came after the fact. You'd schedule an interview, the AI would conduct it, and you'd review the transcript once the call ended. The conversation itself was a black box. You had no way to know whether the agent asked the right follow-up questions, handled an unexpected tangent gracefully, or missed a critical line of inquiry — until the interview was already over.

For teams running a handful of interviews, this was manageable. But as organizations scale to dozens or hundreds of AI-conducted conversations, the gap between delegation and visibility becomes a real problem. Research directors need confidence that their AI agents are performing as expected. Analysts need to know that the interviews they'll be reviewing were conducted well. And compliance teams need assurance that conversations stay within appropriate boundaries.

That changes today with Live Observation.

See Every Word as It Happens

Live Observation lets you open any active interview and watch the transcript stream in real time. As the expert speaks, their words appear on screen. As the AI agent responds, you see that too. The entire conversation unfolds in front of you, message by message, with no delay.

A pulsing green indicator tells you the transcript is live. Each message animates into view as it arrives, creating a natural reading experience that mirrors the pace of the actual conversation. You're not watching a recording or refreshing a page — you're seeing the dialogue as it takes place.

When the interview wraps up, the view seamlessly transitions to the final processed transcript. There's no page refresh, no context switching, and no waiting for a separate notification that the call has ended. The experience is continuous from the first word to the last.

Join at Any Point

You don't need to be watching from the start. Open an in-progress interview at any point, and Live Observation immediately loads the full conversation history before continuing with the live feed.

This means you can check in on an interview that started 20 minutes ago and instantly see everything that's been discussed — every question the agent asked, every response the expert gave — and then continue watching the rest of the conversation in real time.

For teams running multiple interviews simultaneously, this makes it practical to move between active conversations. A research director could check in on a supply chain interview, switch to a regulatory expert call, and come back to the first one without missing anything. The full context is always available, regardless of when you start watching.

This also means that if something in your dashboard catches your attention — an interview that's been running longer than expected, or one flagged by a team member — you can jump in immediately and understand what's happening without waiting for the call to end.

Why Real-Time Visibility Matters

Delegating interviews to AI is a meaningful workflow shift. It's one thing to trust that a well-designed prompt will guide a productive conversation. It's another to hand off a high-value expert call and hope for the best. For teams adopting AI-conducted interviews, confidence in the process matters as much as the output.

Live Observation addresses this directly across several dimensions:

Build Trust Incrementally

Watch your AI agents in action before scaling to dozens of interviews. See how they handle follow-up questions, navigate unexpected topics, and maintain conversational flow. This is particularly valuable during early adoption — rather than committing to a large volume of AI interviews based on a few sample transcripts, you can observe the process firsthand and build confidence at your own pace.

Many teams find that watching just a few live interviews is enough to shift from cautious experimentation to confident deployment. Seeing the AI navigate a complex expert conversation in real time is more convincing than any demo or case study.

Quality Assurance in Real Time

If an interview goes off track, you know immediately — not hours later when reviewing a transcript. This is especially valuable during the early stages of configuring a new agent prompt. You can observe how different prompt configurations perform in live conversations, identify areas for improvement, and iterate faster.

Without live visibility, the feedback loop for agent optimization is slow: conduct an interview, wait for the transcript, review it, adjust the prompt, and try again. With Live Observation, you compress that cycle significantly. You can see the impact of prompt changes as they happen and make informed adjustments between interviews.

Stakeholder Confidence

When portfolio managers, research directors, or compliance officers can observe interviews live, it removes the leap of faith that comes with AI-conducted conversations. Seeing is believing — and for decision-makers who need to sign off on AI adoption, live access to the process makes that decision considerably easier.

This is especially relevant in regulated industries where oversight isn't optional. Live Observation provides an additional layer of accountability that complements the post-interview transcript review.

Onboarding and Training

New team members can observe live interviews to understand how the platform works and how AI agents interact with experts. Rather than walking through a recorded demo or reading documentation, they can watch a real conversation happen in real time. This provides practical context that static materials simply cannot replicate.

It's also useful for cross-functional alignment. When a research team wants to show product leadership or compliance stakeholders exactly what an AI-conducted interview looks like, they can point to a live session rather than assembling a presentation.

How It Works

Live Observation is built directly into the interview detail page. When an interview is in progress, the transcript panel automatically switches to live mode. There's nothing to configure, enable, or install — if the interview is active, you can observe it.

The feature works for both phone-based interviews (conducted via Twilio) and web-based interviews (conducted via the browser). Regardless of how the expert joins the conversation, the live transcript experience is identical. Messages are streamed as they happen, labeled clearly as expert speech or agent responses, so you always know who said what.

Under the hood, Live Observation uses real-time event streaming to deliver transcript updates with minimal latency. The system captures each utterance as it occurs during the conversation and pushes it to all connected observers. If your connection drops momentarily, the full conversation history is available on reconnect — you won't miss anything.

Any authenticated user within your account can observe any active interview. There's no need for explicit invitations or special permissions. If the interview belongs to your organization, you have access.

Before and After

Before Live Observation: You schedule an interview, the AI conducts it, and you review the final transcript once it's processed. If something went wrong — a missed follow-up, an off-topic tangent, a prompt that didn't perform well — you discover it after the fact. Iteration is slow, and trust is built primarily through output review.

After Live Observation: You can watch any interview as it happens, check in on conversations mid-stream, and see exactly how your AI agents perform in real time. Issues surface immediately. Trust is built through direct observation. The feedback loop for prompt optimization tightens from hours to minutes.

The difference isn't just about speed. It's about shifting from a reactive workflow — reviewing what happened — to a proactive one where you have visibility into what's happening right now.

Transparency as a Design Principle

We believe that AI tools earn trust through transparency, not opacity. As we explored in Trust, But Verify: Why Observability is Key to Delegating Work to AI Agents, the path to confident AI adoption isn't about blind faith — it's about building confidence through direct observation. When an AI system operates behind closed doors, adoption depends entirely on faith in the output. When that same system lets you watch it work, adoption depends on evidence. Live Observation puts that principle into practice.

Live Observation reflects a broader principle in how we build InsightAgent: every AI-conducted conversation should be auditable, reviewable, and observable. This isn't just a feature — it's a commitment to keeping humans in the loop as AI takes on more complex research tasks.

This is the first step in a series of capabilities focused on giving teams full visibility into their AI-powered research workflows. We're building a platform where delegating to AI doesn't mean giving up control — it means gaining leverage while maintaining oversight.

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Live Observation is available now for all InsightAgent accounts. Get started or book a demo to see it in action.