Synthetic Personas Are Trending. Here’s Why Real Consumers Still Win

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400
Knowledge Partners

As synthetic personas and AI-generated respondents gain adoption across the research industry, questions about their validity, bias, and strategic usefulness are becoming unavoidable. This article examines three distinct types of synthetic data models — LLM knowledge-based, aggregate correlation-based, and respondent-level survey-trained — and highlights where quality gaps emerge.