Persona Bots Are Here. Digital Twins Can Wait

Dyna Boen, EVP & Managing Director, Escalent

The Insight250 spotlights and celebrates, annually, 250 of the world’s premier leaders and innovators in market research, consumer insights, and data-driven marketing. The awards have created renewed excitement across the industry whilst strengthening the connectivity of the market research community. Winners of the 2025 Insight250 were announced last September - you can see the full list of Winners, and those from previous years, at Insight250.com. The 2026 Insight250 nominations are currently in review.

With so many exceptional professionals named to the Insight250, we regularly tap into their expertise and unique perspectives on a range of topics. This regular series does just that: inquiring about the expert perspectives of many of these individuals in a series of short topical features. 

With insights advancing at an incredible pace and the value of insights ever increasing, I sat down with Insight250 Winner Isabelle Dyna Boen. As EVP and Managing Director for Escalent, Dyna is a tireless connector who is always looking to improve the industry. She volunteers for panels and offers advice from her experience growing several brands. She is an avid supporter of women in research in word and in deed. She thinks about advocating for others whether she is building up her own team, or working for others within the industry.

Crispin: Take a bit about the current state of synthetic data within the insights industry.

DB: Synthetic data has quickly become one of the most talked-about frontiers in AI for market research, and for good reason. Earlier this year, Escalent presented a webinar called “Synthetic Data Without the Hype,” and has been actively testing these approaches with enterprise brands. Those experiments, along with my recent musings about the power of insight communities in human-guided synthetic research, have reinforced a simple conclusion: some synthetic data use cases are ready to create value today, while others are still chasing the level of rigor business leaders need.

Crispin: Where do you see persona bots fitting into the research space?

DB: Escalent already has persona bots running for our financial services clients, and the results are encouraging. By contrast, not every synthetic data application is ready for prime time. We are still testing digital twins, and like many others in the industry, we are finding that achieving true fidelity remains difficult. In other words, the market may be fascinated by digital twins—but fascination is not the same as usefulness. True twinning remains elusive.

This distinction matters. While some synthetic applications are still maturing, persona bots are already proving useful—and that means insights teams should not sit on the sidelines waiting for every use case to become perfect. With growing confidence in our process, we are now ready to scale persona bots by taking custom customer segmentations and feeding them into the base model to create tailored bots for additional clients. If you are exploring persona bots, we would be happy to share a demo. But before adopting the technology, organizations need to be honest about a basic requirement: these tools are only as strong as the data foundation beneath them and the humans that guide them. Human guidance includes thoughtful training of the models, to avoid introducing data that creates hallucinations.

Remember each conversation you have with a persona bot is part of training the model.

Crispin: What are some simple ways to engage persona bots to extract value from them?

DB: There are a variety of ways to effectively engage these persona bots. Some examples are:

1. What do you think of this marketing message?

2. What would make the message more appealing to you, and how might we improve it?

3. Where is the best place to publish a message like this, if we want it to be seen by people like you?

4. Having these conversations with persona bots is a quick and easy way to iterate and refine ideas before testing more finished versions among real people.

Crispin: What does it take to build and train persona bots that actually work?

DB: There are a couple different approaches that can work:

1. Good: Start with the original segmentation data from the segmentation study itself.

2. Better: Expand that foundation with segmentation-linked data from every study where you have applied the typing tool, including brand trackers, product trackers and concept tests.

3. Best: Combine both of the above with insights community data, including typed profiles and any additional anonymous variables attached to them, to create a richer and more durable input set.

Crispin: Why does data freshness matter as much as data volume?

DB: If you want persona bots to test marketing messages, products and concepts at unprecedented speed, you need data, and not just a little more of it. You need enough volume to build reliable models, enough breadth to reflect real variation across segments and enough discipline to keep the system current over time. Large sample sizes have always mattered in online market research. In an AI environment, they matter even more.

The difference now is that ad hoc studies and one-time sample targets go stale fast. Always-on trackers and insights communities are no longer just nice to have; they are strategic assets because they continuously refresh the attitudinal and behavioral data needed to keep AI-powered personas relevant, current and useful. If the data ages, the value of the persona does too.

Crispin: What is the ideal strategic direction for insight teams at this stage?

DB:  For insights teams, this is a defining moment. If you are not leading the adoption of these capabilities, you are increasing the odds that someone else will. Marketing organizations are going to move forward with AI-enabled decision tools. The only real question is whether insights teams will shape those tools, or be forced to react to them after the fact. Our industry has the right to win in AI analytics, but that will require leadership, experimentation and the confidence to champion the applications that are ready now instead of waiting for a perfect future state.

The leaders in this next chapter of insights will not be the ones who waited for synthetic data to become flawless. They will be the ones who knew when it was good enough to start creating value.

Escalent is an AI-enabled market research and advisory partner with unmatched industry expertise. For 50 years, we have been catalysts of progress, turning a deep understanding of our clients’ worlds into smarter strategies and transforming human and market insight into decisive action that helps brands outthink disruption and accelerate growth. Following the acquisition of C Space and Hall & Partners in 2023, our 1,600-strong global team now offers a true one-stop shop for industry intelligence, customer insight and brand strategy.

Crispin: Thank you, Dyna, for such a candid and practical conversation. What struck me most is your refusal to treat synthetic data as one single conversation. Drawing a clear line between persona bots, which Escalent already has running successfully for financial services clients, and digital twins, where true fidelity still proves elusive, is exactly the kind of honest, evidence-based distinction our industry needs more of. Your three-tier approach to building a persona bot, moving from segmentation data alone, through study-linked data, to the richer combination with insights community profiles, gives teams a genuinely practical route in rather than a vague aspiration. I was also struck by your point that data freshness matters as much as volume, and that ad hoc samples go stale fast while always-on trackers and communities become strategic assets precisely because they keep refreshing. That is a message insights teams should take seriously. Above all, your challenge that the leaders of this next chapter will be the ones who knew when synthetic data was good enough to start creating value, rather than those waiting for it to become flawless, is one I suspect will stay with a lot of our readers. Thank you again for your generosity and clarity on a subject where confident, grounded leadership like yours will shape how the industry moves forward.