AI synthetic audiences are already here and poised to upend the consulting industry
There is a war brewing between AI and consulting. Akin to an armies slow march towards the castle, a new technology is coming to dethrone the expert guessers of Mckinsey, Nielsen, Gartner, Publicis and the rest. Any consulting that involves analyzing people (think all of marketing, research, polling, etc.) will have to reckon with the technology of “synthetic audiences”.Synthetic audiences aim to generate digital versions of people that can then be surveyed almost instantly and affordably, but not as accurately. Think Tamagochi but with people. By prompting AI with information about a person, we ask AI to get in their shoes, simulate the thoughts, behaviors, priorities and decisions of real world humans. We can also invent non-specific placeholder people or personas and survey them as though they are real. Various firms have already fielded products in these domains, including startups Electric Twin, Artificial Societies, and Aaru, and even the century-old Dentsu.What used to take 4 months to survey people, plus two months to create a nice PowerPoint presentation of findings at a total cost of thousands or even tens of thousands, now takes two minutes and costs only a few dollars. It may seem like I’ve picked my winner. But in this war of tribes, I’m a Romeo, caught between the two warring houses. I work for a large incumbent in this space. From 2023-2025 while working at the London headquarters of WPP, I built similar tools for numerous Fortune 500’s and advised many New York University researchers on the subject. Companies like WPP with head counts and revenues that rival the populations and GDP’s of small European nations need startups for their speed and high margins, while startups need our distribution.My advice has always been for unity between these tribes. Considering WPP is partnering with numerous startups, is working tirelessly in building our own tools and building deep connections with hyper scalers, it’s possible I mislead you with the war analogy. This may be a love story after all. But destiny’s bottle of poison is in our hands. These next few years are pivotal and formative.The future will ultimately be determined by the buyers of these studies. Fortune 500’s, with the largest appetite for market research, often hesitate to include synthetic audiences in their diet. The first question I’m asked in any pitch is "will AI steal my data?" I find this question to be an emotional response. It seems to me like most AI fears are remnants of a 2022 LinkedIn post that burrowed itself into our collective consciousness.I generally respond to this question with another: “Do you use Microsoft Teams?” The answer is often "yes." Almost every enterprise stores sensitive data in a cloud service that Google Amazon or Microsoft provides. These are the same companies that provide enterprise AI services, which state in their terms and conditions that they won’t train models with your data. Now, believing this statement is optional, but for that matter believing is voluntary for all things.Criticisms of accuracy on the other hand, are harder to dispute. The famed venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) titled its analysis of this budding tech scene as “Faster, smarter, cheaper”. As the hopeful mediator in this war, I agree synthetic research is faster and cheaper, but is it smarter? Not sure. A seminal paper from Stanford by Park et al. established a benchmark in 2024 proving that AI can simulate human responses to surveys with an average of 85% accuracy. In fact for certain portions of the general social survey, they replicated answers with more than 90% accuracy. When the model is provided relevant information and is given rich context (like a mini biography of the person) it can guess their actions and thoughts very accurately.But no prediction can be 100% accurate. A future where human propensities are modeled even better than humans can express their own desires is a possibility. Maybe we’ll live in a future where the movie Minority Report becomes reality. However, this future is too distant to warrant the attention of a business reader and is better suited for Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg.What is more interesting to me is what this technology can do at lower accuracies. In my private tests, I’ve seen that with very simple information about a person, such as their age, neighborhood and gender, certain behaviors can be modeled with 72% accuracy. An argument can be made that these are easy-to-make predictions. Predicting whether a married person will have children is low stakes. This can’t completely replace the unique insight of a strategist. However, considering how elusive it is to understand and model people. A solution that’s better than random and so attainable poses to make an impact.Think about the immense scale. The human mind works with a small range of values. We understand when something is twice as fast but we can’t comprehend when something is 175,200 times faster. All of a sudden a journey that took several days becomes becomes several hours, bridges get built, gas stations, entire industries are started. When improvement isn’t marginal but exponential, it has positive externalities that are impossible to predict even by this article.What I suggest for all of us is to eat the popcorn and watch the show. No matter what happens, it’ll be fun.