Analyse your surveys with AI, the safe way

Collecting responses is the easy part. The real work is analysis: summarising open text, testing whether two groups genuinely differ, finding which question drives an outcome, weighting a skewed sample. Traditionally that means exporting to a spreadsheet and wrestling with pivot tables. SurveyLane takes a different route — it lets you talk to your data.

What is MCP?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets AI clients connect to external tools and data sources. SurveyLane ships a hosted MCP server, so any MCP-capable client can securely connect to your survey data and run real analysis on it.

In practice that means you open an AI client you already use — Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Cursor have ready-made install snippets — connect it once, and then ask questions about your results in plain English. The AI picks the right statistical tool, runs it against your live data, and writes up the findings.

What the AI can actually do

The server exposes more than twenty read-only analysis tools. Rather than generic chit-chat, the AI has access to purpose-built statistical operations:

• Summarise results and open-text answers.
• Test significance with t-tests, ANOVA and chi-square.
• Find the key drivers behind an outcome.
• Cross-tabulate questions and build cohorts.
• Weight a skewed sample to match a target population.
• Check scale reliability and compare survey waves.
• Flag drop-off in a funnel and auto-generate a full report.

Because these are deterministic tools rather than the model guessing, the numbers are sound. The AI's job is to choose the right tool, feed it the right parameters, and explain the result — not to invent statistics.

Read-only and safe by design

This is the part that matters most. The connection is strictly read-only. The AI can list and analyse your data, but it can never create, edit or delete anything. Access runs through a personal token, scoped to your own account, that you generate and revoke instantly under Settings → API access.

Privacy is built in. For anonymous surveys, respondent names and e-mail addresses are never returned — the tools hand back aggregates and de-identified answers only. And your data is never used to train AI models: the server simply reads your data and hands it to the MCP client you connected. Nothing is sent elsewhere.

The token is read-only and scoped to your account. The AI can analyse everything and change nothing.

Why this beats exporting to a spreadsheet

Exporting freezes your data at a moment in time and divorces it from its structure. Asking questions through MCP keeps you connected to the live results, with the question types, sections and logic intact. You can follow a thread — "is that difference significant?", "does it hold for new customers?", "what does the open text say?" — without re-exporting at each step.

Getting started

Generate a read-only token in Settings → API access, paste the install snippet into Claude or Cursor, and start asking. If you ever want to cut access, revoke the token and the connection dies instantly. It is the analytical power of a data team, available in the AI client you already have open — without ever putting your data at risk.