Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss

Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss

From Training Data by Sequoia Capital

June 2, 2026 · 42 min

About this episode

Alfred Wahlforss discusses how Listen Labs uses AI to conduct customer interviews at scale, revealing insights into consumer behavior.

Alfred Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO of Listen Labs, is building an AI agent that interviews your customers at a scale no focus group ever could—thousands of voice conversations at once, drawn from an audience of 30 million people. A year after launch, Listen serves hundreds of Fortune 100s to Startups including Microsoft, Google, NBC Universal, P&G, Anthropic, Cursor, and Cognition. Alfred explains the counterintuitive finding underneath it all: people are often more honest with an AI than a human interviewer, opening up to a non-judgmental entity that costs less and never makes them feel rushed. He walks through why interview transcripts—not credit card data or behavioral logs—turn out to be the richest fuel for predicting how customers will behave, how Listen back-tests its simulations to know which questions it can and can't answer, and why 80% of the company's engineering goes into building the right audience. As AGI makes building trivial, Alfred argues the scarce resource becomes knowing what to build. That's the loop Listen wants to own.

People in this episode

Guest: Alfred Wahlforss

Topics covered

  • customer insights
  • AI technology
  • market research
  • interview techniques
  • business strategy

Keywords

  • AI agent
  • customer interviews
  • focus groups
  • behavior prediction
  • engineering resources

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Listen Labs, Microsoft, Google, NBC Universal, P&G, Anthropic, Cursor, Cognition

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