Mark Kelly
Founder, AI Ireland
Customers are now using AI to make decisions, and now, they’re buying through it. If your business isn’t utilising this feature and understanding AI-native customer behaviour, you may be left behind.
When I speak with business leaders about AI synthetic personas, I usually get a strange look, but hear me out.
No one predicted the meteoric rise of AI chatbots. Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, revealed they had reached 1 billion users with 800 million active monthly. ChatGPT recently announced ‘Click to Buy’ in the US, where customers purchase products through Etsy and Stripe directly in chat.
The shift is already here
The massive scale of platforms like ChatGPT represents a clear shift. Your customers are thinking, searching and buying with AI. Forward-thinking businesses can leverage these same tools to understand customers faster and more cost-effectively than ever. This creates an untapped opportunity to harness AI virtual customers and accelerate market research.
What are virtual customers?
Build synthetic personas — AI ‘virtual customers’ — that model your key segments: a busy parent, a student, a small-firm CFO. Input anonymised survey data and demographics into each persona, then instantly ask them to react to a new feature, pricing strategy or sales message. You get directional insight in minutes, not weeks. Peer-reviewed research confirms these personas respond with approximately 90% human-like accuracy, making them ‘good enough to decide what to test next.’
AI personas cannot replace the nuance and emotion of human interviews.
Intelligent sequencing: the winning strategy
AI personas cannot replace the nuance and emotion of human interviews. Their strength is quick concept testing and surfacing unexpected angles. The most effective approach sequences human and AI research:
- Initiate: Start with your team’s core questions
- Explore: Run fast rounds with AI personas, testing multiple options
- Validate: Bring top two to three ideas to human interviews
- Refine: Loop back to AI to polish final concepts
Real business impact
This integrated approach delivers immediate value:product teams rank features and reduce rework; marketing tests headlines by segment before spending budget; sales practices objection handling with realistic scenarios; UX designers identify friction points before coding.
By combining people and AI deliberately, you learn faster, spend less and go to market with confidence, always confirming findings with real customers.
