A new way to understand your customers
In today’s fast-paced digital world, understanding your customer is essential. Personas, long the foundation of this understanding, offer a snapshot of your target audience’s needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. But what if you could go beyond static profiles? Imagine if you could not only define your personas but actually interact with them—engaging in conversations, gathering feedback, and validating ideas in real time. Enter AI-driven personas: AI models that let you brainstorm, test, and refine concepts with a virtual version of your ideal customer.
In this post, I’ll show you how to breathe life into your personas, transforming them into AI-powered collaborators, in just three simple steps. By the end, you’ll also see how these AI personas can come together in a virtual focus group, giving you insights in real-time—without the logistical hurdles and cost of traditional research.
Step 1: Defining Your Persona
Start by crafting detailed profiles of your personas. These should reflect distinct segments of your customer base, such as “Sandra, the Tech-Savvy Entrepreneur” or “Taylor, the Time-Strapped Manager.” Each profile should include a backstory, skills, personality traits and challenges. This depth is what ensures the AI will simulate realistic conversations and feedback.
For instance, if Sandra values automation and rapid growth, her AI persona should reflect those priorities. John, on the other hand, might prefer solutions that save time without disrupting his already-packed schedule. This precision is critical because the AI relies on this information to mirror real-world customers accurately.
Not sure where to start? AI can even assist in creating these profiles (e.g. ““Please write me a persona for a business consultant who…“). Be sure to refine them until they resonate perfectly with your intended real-world audience.
A persona for Sandra might look like this:
Sandra is a fast-paced entrepreneur who values automation. She’s had multiple successful and some unsuccessful start-ups. She values her business and its growth more than anything. Sandra responds casually, offering honest insights and new ideas as she engages with presented concepts, always aiming for practicality and long-term efficiency.
Key Skills:
- Decision making: She’s a fast-paced decision maker who dares to make decisions even when she doesn’t yet have the full picture.
- Workflow automation: Has a keen eye for finding manual tasks that are inefficient. Is good at coming up with automatable workflows.
- Scaling businesses: Has scaled start-ups from a one-man organization to hundreds of employees multiple times.
Challenges:
- Balancing time: As Sandra is always busy with multiple businesses and multiple roles in each business, she never has some extra time to spend on any of them.
- Ensuring ROI: Every single choice Sandra makes should yield a return on investment.
- Automating tasks without compromising quality: As ROI is important, it’s also important that the quality of any automated workflow isn’t compromised.
Personality Traits:
- Driven: Sandra is focused on achieving her goals and always pushes for growth and success.
- Efficient: She values getting things done quickly and effectively, without unnecessary delays.
- Tech-savvy: Sandra easily adapts to new technologies and seeks out innovative solutions to streamline her work.
- Pragmatic: She takes a no-nonsense approach, focusing on practical solutions that deliver results.
- Forward-thinking: Always looking ahead, Sandra plans for the future and embraces change to stay competitive.
Step 2: Bringing Personas to Life with AI
With detailed personas ready, it’s time to bring them to life with AI. Using advanced platforms like OpenAI’s GPT models, you can create a ChatGPT-based AI tailored to each profile. All you need is a ChatGPT Plus account, and you can configure a custom GPT based on your persona’s profile.
Here’s the prompt I created for Sandra. It includes some basic information, the persona and some context about MyStekz, since I expect her to give feedback about ideas for MyStekz:
This GPT acts as Sandra. It will provide critical feedback, opinions, and suggestions as if it were Sandra, responding with honesty and constructive ideas.
<< insert the persona here >>
Sandra is a user of the MyStekz platform. MyStekz is the intelligent automation development platform. Within MyStekz you can model your business in a Stek. A Stek is a collection of Domains. In a Domain you can add a description, roles, definitions and products. Within products, you can add a description and processes. Within a process you can add a description and a BPMN process model. This process model can contain tasks which in turn can be enriched with a description as well. All entities within MyStekz can be linked in any text field.
Oh, and don’t forget to add a picture, which also helps create a personality. Maybe grab one from thispersondoesnotexist.com or generate one using Flux.
By activating personas like Sandra, you’re no longer guessing what your audience might think—you’re engaging directly with an intelligent version of them.
If you have a ChatGPT Plus subscription, you can try chatting with Sandra yourself here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-tAaj4k7vm-sandra.
Step 3: Brainstorming with your AI Persona
Now comes the real advantage: using AI personas to test concepts before launch. Try asking, “How do you feel about an AI feature that drafts up workflow automations for you?” Sandra might respond, “I like the idea, but it needs to integrate seamlessly to save me time, not create more work.” Don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions. This dynamic interaction makes brainstorming faster and more targeted.
The beauty of this approach is that you’re no longer just hypothesizing about what your customers want—you’re engaging with an intelligent, AI-powered version of them that understands their needs.
Bonus: Creating a Virtual Focus Group
Imagine a focus group of Sandra, Taylor, and other personas debating your latest idea. Well, platforms like CrewAI help you make this a reality. It allows you to create a multi-persona conversation, simulating diverse customer perspectives on a single platform.
The discussion needs to be facilitated, but why not let an AI do that for you? Using CrewAI, load each persona as an agent, add a facilitator, and you’re ready to spark discussions. With an AI facilitator to drive the discussion, you can quickly collect insights across your segments—without the time and effort required for traditional focus groups.
A word of caution: these sessions work best with a well-defined idea upfront, as the AI facilitator will guide all interactions. Starting with clarity ensures high-quality insights.
Do you want to give this a try yourself? Here’s the code on Github!
Much like Stekz’s focus on helping companies with intelligent automation solutions, this group of AI personas provides tailored feedback on how your diverse customer segments perceive and interact with your products.
One of the results from a focus group for MyStekz with Alex the Business Analyst and Taylor the Project Manager.
Turning Insights into Action
Once your AI focus group wraps up, it’s time to turn those insights into action. Maybe Sandra was thrilled about the product’s efficiency, while John had concerns about the learning curve. These AI-driven conversations help you see exactly how different customer segments respond, allowing you to fine-tune your offering before it hits the market.
Of course communicating with your real users and customers is still key in understanding them as personas will not easily account for every user of your product. So be sure to regularly update your AI personas as you gather fresh insights from real users.
At Stekz, we’re passionate about helping businesses harness the power of intelligent automation. If you’re ready to take your customer insights to the next level with AI, let’s chat! Visit Stekz.com to see how we can help you transform your business.