Can we just run a survey and use AI to summarise the results?

You can, and for small groups it can work.

However, this approach has limitations as the number of contributors grows.

You lose:

• Structured clustering at scale
  It becomes harder to group and compare large volumes of input in a consistent way.
• Attribution
  It is often unclear who contributed what, and how that input is shared across the group.
• Consensus mapping
  There is no clear way to distinguish genuine agreement from surface-level alignment.

AI tools can produce strong summaries, but they do not provide a structured, traceable view across large groups.

Mindhive is designed to retain that structure, making it possible to understand both the outcome and how it was formed.