The shape of survey analysis is changing. Recense is built for what comes next.

Recense is a survey analysis tool built around one bet: the next decade of insights work is a collaboration between a researcher and a frontier AI model, and the software for it has not been built yet.

The problem the tools were built for is no longer the problem

Modern survey analysis tools changed the work once already. Before them, analysing a survey meant briefing a data-processing company, waiting for crosstabs in Excel, and emailing back a list of corrections. Self-serve analysis software collapsed that loop: researchers could self-serve crosstabs from a .sav file with a bit of setup. The time between a question and an answer dropped from days to minutes. Faster iteration meant better analysis, better storytelling, more impact.

Working with a frontier model on a real, complex U&A deep-dive in late 2025 made it clear something similar was happening again. The bottleneck has moved further downstream — from generating crosstabs to interpreting them and building a narrative the business can act on. The model could propose analyses, draft commentary, challenge weak threads, and ladder up to a story that was actually interesting. The work shifted from running tabs to directing an agent: which hypotheses to test, which threads to pull, which insights to lead with.

Software that centred the work on building crosstabs made sense for the previous era. It does not match the way the best researchers are starting to work now.

What Recense is

Recense is a survey analysis workspace where a researcher and AI agents work through the analysis together and write the story together. Import an SPSS file and work with the data on a fast, drag-and-drop canvas. Brief an agent to build tables, apply filters, derive variables and draft commentary, or point it at your own work and ask it to review, challenge or extend it. Either of you can pick up where the other left off.

The architecture follows the bet. Agents work with the same tables, filters and notes you do, so what they make is real work you can edit, not text in a chat window. Computation runs in your browser, so local files stay local and tables recompute as you work. Model choice is open: bring your own key, swap providers, move to whatever is best in the next six months.

What Recense isn't

Recense isn't trying to replace researchers. The interesting questions, the business context, the judgement about what matters — these are the parts of the job AI hasn't earned. They probably won't for a while. Recense is built to amplify those parts, by taking the friction out of everything else.

And Recense isn't a thin wrapper around a single embedded model. The pace of frontier model improvement consistently outpaces what any closed implementation can keep up with. Letting users swap in the latest models — directly, today — is a feature, not a concession.

Who's behind it

Built by Matt Harris — a former market researcher who spent years using the tools described above, then spent 2024 and 2025 working with frontier models on the kind of analysis they are starting to do well, and decided the next-generation tool needed to exist. Background in consumer insights at scale. UK-based.

If you'd like to read the longer version of the why now argument, the post that prompted this work is on LinkedIn.

Will Recense be here in five years?

Recense Ltd is founder-funded today, with a deliberately small cost base — the engine runs in your browser, and the team is one person. The plan is to grow on revenue from researchers and teams who find the tool genuinely useful, not on an outsized burn-and-pivot path. The commitment goes both ways: your data stays in formats you already own (SPSS .sav, CSV) and the export path is always available, so you can leave at any time.