Kapiche’s Automatic Themes feature helps you uncover what customers are saying — fast. By leveraging AI, we take the heavy lifting out of manually coding themes, letting you go from raw feedback to structured insight in minutes.
What Are Automatic Themes?
Automatic Themes are Kapiche’s way of turning raw customer feedback into a structured framework — without the need for manual tagging or coding.
We use a combination of bottom-up discovery and top-down organization to help you go from tens of thousands of comments to a clean, usable insight structure.
🔽 Bottom-Up: Discovering Themes from the Data
Kapiche starts by reading each piece of feedback using generative AI to detect key ideas — we call these topics.
Topics are then grouped into themes using unsupervised machine learning.
These themes represent the most granular, data-driven units of meaning in your analysis — shaped directly by what customers are saying.
🔼 Top-Down: Organizing Themes for Reporting
Once themes are created, Kapiche helps you make sense of them at a higher level:
Themes are automatically arranged into theme groups using AI — this gives you a clear reporting structure for tracking issues, opportunities, or business areas.
If you have your own multi-level reporting hierarchy (e.g. Business Area → Category), Kapiche can map themes into that automatically too.
This dual approach ensures your insights are both faithful to the data and ready for reporting and decision-making.
🛠 How to Use Automatic Themes
To get started:
Enable AI Themes
If your site doesn't yet have AI Themes enabled, get in touch with us and we’ll help you activate it.Fill in Dataset Context
When creating a new project, provide the dataset context — this helps us tailor the results to your business or use case.Dataset Type
Dataset Description
(only required for some dataset types)
Text Field Descriptions
Generate Themes on Analysis Creation
When creating a new analysis, the option to “Generate AI Themes” will be automatically switched on.
Explore in Theme Builder
After the analysis runs:Head to the Theme Builder to explore the results.
You’ll see key statistics (1) and a summary of each top-level Theme Group (2)
Just like with manual themes, you can:
Rename themes
Move them between groups
Merge or delete them as needed
Explore in the Workbench
Once you've evaluated your theme framework, go to the Workbench to start finding insights.
🔗 Merging Similar Themes
Kapiche aims to give you themes that are both accurate and readable, though we lean slightly toward precision. That means some similar ideas may show up as separate themes.
You can consolidate and streamline your framework by:
Reviewing the themes in Theme Builder
Merging any that you feel are too close or redundant
(See the Theme Builder Guide for step-by-step instructions.)
🔄 What Happens When New Data Is Added?
When your dataset grows, Kapiche automatically processes the new feedback:
Incoming feedback is mapped to topics.
If the feedback maps to an existing topic in your dataset, it automatically carries that topic’s current theme assignment (if it has one).
If the feedback produces a new topic, it is checked against your theme framework.
New topics are merged into themes if possible.
A new topic is compared to existing themes using adaptive thresholds that account for theme variance.
If it passes the bar and doesn’t reduce theme cohesion, it is added to that theme.
Topics that don’t merge are clustered.
New or previously unassigned topics are grouped into clusters.
A cluster is surfaced as a candidate theme if it appears at least 30 times across all data or in at least 1% of records over the past 90 days (whichever is higher).
Candidate themes appear in the Theme Builder.
They show up in the New Themes folder for you to review.
You decide whether to merge them into existing themes or promote them to new themes in your framework.
This keeps your theme structure current without becoming noisy.
Questions? 🤔
That's it for this article. If you have any questions about automatic themes in Kapiche (or anything else!) you can get in touch with us any time by hitting the blue chat button to your right 👉