Building

Describe the survey. Then edit the draft.

AI survey drafting turns a one-sentence description into a complete first draft — questions, options, scales and section breaks — which opens in the builder as an unpublished draft for you to edit. Only the prompt you type is sent to the model. Respondents' answers are never involved, and nothing is ever published on your behalf.

The author owns the wording. The model does the typing.

A worked example

A parking consultation takes an afternoon to build and a minute to describe. So describe it:

The prompt
Consultation for residents and businesses on a proposed controlled parking zone in the town centre. About ten questions. I need to know where people live or trade, how they travel in, whether they support the zone and why, and I want the business questions kept in their own section.

What comes back is a draft along these lines:

  • A multiple choice asking whether they are responding as a resident, a business, or both.
  • Checkboxes for how they usually travel into the town centre.
  • A section break for the proposal itself.
  • A linear scale from 1 to 5 for support, with labels at both ends.
  • A paragraph question asking what the zone would change for them.
  • A section break for businesses, with a number question about deliveries per week.
  • A closing section break titled "About you", with an address question for street and postcode, the postcode checked.

Demographic questions land at the end and arrive marked optional, and the drafter is told to ask one thing per question in neutral wording. Those are house rules baked into the drafter, not something you have to ask for — and like everything else in the draft, you can overrule them.

That is a survey you can argue with, which is the point. You will rewrite the support question because your legal team has a preferred form of words. You will add the rule that hides the business section from residents, because a draft is questions, options, scales and section breaks — not conditional logic, scoring or translations. Those you add once the shape is right.

Every kind the drafter can produce is one the builder already supports, so nothing arrives that you cannot then edit by hand. The full set is on the question types page, and the drag-and-drop editing that follows is described on the form builder page.

It opens as a draft. It is never published.

There is no version of this where a survey goes out under your organisation's name without a human reading it first. The draft lands in the builder in the same state as a survey you started from scratch: unpublished, editable, with no link to share until you make one.

This matters more for a consultation than for a feedback form. A question that leads the respondent is a question a challenge can be built on, and wording a statutory consultee disputes is your problem, not the model's. Treat the draft as a first pass from a capable colleague who does not know your policy context: useful for structure and coverage, not authoritative on phrasing.

What is sent to the model, and what is not

Your prompt, and nothing else

The only thing that leaves the platform is the sentence you typed. Not your other surveys, not your response data, not your uploaded files. The drafter runs before a survey exists, so there is nothing about respondents for it to send.

Respondents are not in the loop at all

Most of the awkward questions about AI in a survey tool are questions about respondents' data: which sub-processor sees it, what the lawful basis is, whether consent was informed, whether it trains someone else's model. Those questions do not arise here, because no respondent data is involved at any point. The UK GDPR page sets out how respondent data is handled, and the sub-processors page lists every third party that touches it.

Do not paste personal data into the prompt

The prompt is text you write, and it is sent as written. You do not need anyone's name, address or case reference to describe a survey, so do not put one in. Worth saying out loud rather than leaving it implied.

The model's output is treated as untrusted input

A language model produces plausible text, not valid data structures. It will occasionally invent a question kind that does not exist, return a dropdown with one option in it, or write a title of four hundred words. So the output is not written straight into your survey — it goes through the same gate as anything else arriving from outside.

Kinds are checked against the real list

Every question kind in the response is validated against the kinds the builder actually supports. Anything else is discarded rather than rendered as a broken card.

Choice questions need two options

A multiple choice, checkbox, dropdown, ranking or matrix question with fewer than two options is dropped, and a matrix without rows goes with it. A half-formed question is worse than a missing one, because it looks finished.

Lengths and counts are capped

A question title is truncated at 300 characters and a description at 500, a question keeps at most 20 options or matrix rows, and a draft stops at 30 questions — so a runaway generation cannot produce a survey that is unusable in the builder or on a phone.

The visible consequence is that a draft is sometimes shorter than you asked for. That is the validation doing its job, and the fix is to add the missing question yourself.

What AI drafting is not

The word "AI" is currently attached to a great many things. Here is the boundary, stated plainly.

  • It does not analyse responses. AI analysis of survey responses is not built. The reporting you get is counts, charts, completion and drop-off, worked out from your own data — see analytics and reporting.
  • It does not read your data. It has no access to responses, partial responses, uploaded files or exports. It runs before the survey is sent.
  • It does not make decisions about individuals. It writes question text before the survey is sent, so there is no profiling of a respondent and no automated decision about an identified person. It is also optional: every survey can still be built by hand. How the platform as a whole handles this is set out on the UK GDPR page.

Questions people ask about AI survey drafting

Does AI drafting publish a survey for me?

No. The output opens in the builder as an unpublished draft. Nothing is live until you review it, edit the wording and publish it yourself.

What is sent to the model?

Only the prompt you type. Respondents’ answers, existing responses, uploaded files and anything else in your account are never sent.

Can it analyse my survey responses?

No. AI analysis of responses is not built. Drafting produces a set of questions before anyone has answered; it has no access to response data.

What happens if the model returns something invalid?

The output is validated before it becomes a draft. Question kinds are checked against the real list of supported kinds, choice questions with fewer than two options are dropped rather than creating a half-formed card, and lengths and counts are capped — titles and descriptions are truncated, a question keeps at most 20 options or matrix rows, and a draft stops at 30 questions.

Does the draft include conditional logic and scoring?

No. A draft is questions, options, scales and section breaks. Conditional logic, scoring, translations and validation rules are added afterwards in the builder.

Does the AI make decisions about individual respondents?

No. It writes question text before the survey is sent. It does not profile anyone, score anyone or produce any output about an identified person.

Describe it, then edit the draft.

A sentence about what you need to find out comes back as questions, options, scales and section breaks. It opens in the builder unpublished, so the wording is still yours to argue with before anyone sees it.

  • Only your prompt is sent to the model
  • Output checked against the kinds the builder supports
  • Nothing is ever published on your behalf
Draft a survey