Will AI lead to more accurate opinion polls?

"When you hear the word 'politician', what is the first image or emotion that comes to mind?" The voice is young, female, brisk and business-like and belongs to an AI agent. A computer programme in other words. A string of code. A man on the other end of the line replies. While he's airing what is a pretty cynical opinion of politicians, three other AI agents process what he's saying. One checks he's answering the question, one analyses whether he's being too superficial and needs prompting to go deeper, while the third checks that the respondent is not a fraud… not a robot, for example. This poll is being conducted by a French AI opinion poll company called Naratis. "The US has start-ups like Outset, Listen Labs and Hey Marvin that do AI polling like this in the commercial sphere. To my knowledge we're the first to do this for political opinion polling as well," says Pierre Fontaine, the 28-year-old engineer who founded the firm in 2025. What was once the most labour-intensive corner of opinion research is becoming one of its most automated. In France, as elsewhere, that shift is beginning to reshape how public opinion is measured, understood - and potentially influenced. Naratis