AI as a Co-researcher in the Qualitative Research Workflow: Transforming Human-AI Collaboration

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into qualitative research is shifting the boundaries of knowledge production. Instead of mere tools, AI is increasingly conceptualized as a co-researcher or research partner—an epistemic agent that helps in the analysis, interpretation, and reflexivity of data. This article proposes an abductive model, called AbductivAI, for analyzing qualitative data, based on collaboration between humans and AI agents. It explores how AI functions as an analytical partner, reflexive collaborator, and participant in distributed cognition within the framework of the human-AI qualitative research workflow and data analysis approach. To build the model, we used advanced prompting techniques (Chain-of-Prompting) and used the 323 abstracts submitted to the World Conference on Qualitative Research as data. Although this data was not intended for research, its exploration allowed us to test the AbductivAI model, showing that interactions between humans and AI agents can benefit qualitative data analysis if the human recognizes and defines their role as a reflexive agent responsible for the entire process.