Executive Summary

Overview

The Summary tab delivers an AI-generated executive summary of your project's results, written through the lens of the research objectives you set during project setup. Instead of reading every question equally, Highlight AI identifies which results matter most for what you set out to learn, leads with a clear verdict, and backs it up with your most decision-relevant metrics. The Summary complements Instant Reports — use the Summary for the immediate takeaway, and Instant Reports when you need the comprehensive slide deck covering every question.

Learn how Highlight uses AI to generate these insights.

Accessing the Summary

The Summary is the first thing you see: when you open Insights on a project, you land on the Summary tab by default, and it sits first in the tab order.

Your summary generates automatically when fielding wraps up — there is nothing to configure or trigger. While fielding is still in progress, the Summary tab shows a placeholder and points you to the tabs where live results are already streaming in, like Explore. While Highlight AI is writing your summary, you'll see a progress indicator; the page refreshes automatically when it's ready, typically within a couple of minutes.

Summaries are also available on your recently completed past projects — open any of them to see their results summarized.

What's in Your Summary Report Header

The top of the page orients you and your stakeholders at a glance:

• Your project name, study type, and fielding dates
• Participants: The number of study participants
• Products: The number of products tested
• Days in field: How long the study fielded

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary card is the heart of the page. Written by Highlight AI from your project's results, it opens with a direct verdict on how your products performed against your objectives, then breaks down:

• What's working: The results that support a positive read
• Where it falls short: Gaps, weaknesses, or risks the data reveals
• Recommendation: Suggested next steps based on the findings

The Executive Summary is intentionally written as narrative, without raw numbers — the supporting data lives in the result cards below it, so the summary stays readable and shareable.

Project Objectives

Your research objectives from project setup are displayed alongside the summary, so everyone reading the page shares the same context for why the study ran and what it set out to answer.

Key Results

Below the objectives, the Summary surfaces your most decision-relevant metrics as visualization cards — up to three, selected and ordered by how strongly they speak to your objectives. Each card leads with an AI-written takeaway as its title, followed by a side-by-side bar comparison of every product on that metric (for example, Top 2 Box scores or mean ratings on a scale question).

How Highlight AI Builds Your Summary

When fielding completes, Highlight AI works through your results in three steps:

1. Prioritize: It reads your research objectives, study design, and full survey structure, then ranks every metric by how relevant it is to what you set out to learn.
2. Interpret: For each top-ranked metric, it analyzes the results — including how products compare and whether differences are statistically significant — and writes an interpretation focused on what the result means for your objectives.
3. Synthesize: It combines those interpretations into the verdict-first Executive Summary.

Because your objectives drive the prioritization, the same survey can produce different summaries for different research goals — the Summary tells your study's story, not a generic recap.

Tip: Clear, specific research objectives during project setup lead to sharper summaries. The more precisely your objectives state what decision the research supports, the better Highlight AI can prioritize and interpret your results.

Share Your Feedback

A feedback control sits at the top of the Executive Summary, next to Powered by Highlight AI. Give the summary a thumbs up or thumbs down, and add a comment about anything on the page — whether the verdict felt right, whether the right results were prioritized, or anything else. Your feedback goes directly to the team building the feature and is used to evaluate and improve the AI output.

Working with Your Summary

• Share it: The Summary has a stable URL — share the link with teammates who have project access.
• Go deeper: The Summary is the starting point, not the full picture. Use Explore to browse every question, Scorecard for full statistical significance testing, and Crosstabs for detailed cross-tabulations.
• Build the deck: When you need a stakeholder-ready presentation covering all results, generate an Instant Report.

Tip: AI-generated summaries are a strong first read, but always verify key findings against the underlying data in Explore or Scorecard before making high-stakes decisions.

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