Korst, Puntoni, and Toubia in Harvard Business Review, November 17, 2025. The second in the market-research sequence, following How Gen AI Is Transforming Market Research and preceding How AI Helps Scale Qualitative Customer Research.
Where the May 2025 piece made the case that gen AI's effect on market research could be revolutionary, this one is about two of the tools. Synthetic personas aggregate demographic and psychographic data to stand in for a market segment. Digital twins use individual-level data to model one consumer.
HBR's summary reports that these proxies can track human responses closely in some domains, and that they carry bias and struggle to capture the full diversity of human opinion. The recommendation is to define the use case and the performance metric first, then validate synthetic output against real-world benchmarks.
Read it in Harvard Business Review.