AI Models of Real Consumers Could Hold Marketing Insights

(Tanjo CEO Richard Boyd) decided that AI could help develop a far more comprehensive, flexible model that would find unexpected insights faster and cheaper. That was the start of Tanjo Animated Personas (TAP), the company's simulated models of real human beings that can be queried to see how they'll respond to words, phrases and product concepts. … "It's essentially the new scientific method," Boyd says. "… machine learning can ingest such large amounts of data ... bring all the sources together and let the system find every hypothesis that might be true.”

Michael McGuire, a VP of research for Gartner who’s reviewed Tanjo’s technology, agrees that even the best survey is limited by having to ask questions, which may be the wrong ones. … “Observation has become more important to marketers because people don’t always do what they say,” McGuire says. Tanjo allows for (simulated) observation on a huge scale at rapid speed.”