Ipsos / Handelszeitung article: Personas in the age of AI

A persona represents a consumer group through a psychological and behavioural profile, making it easier to understand the group. Personas have undergone rapid development in recent years. What began in the late 19th century as a sociological tool for representing population groups has evolved into an indispensable tool for market research, UX design, and marketing. Today, AI is revolutionizing how we create and use personas.

Over the years, several key functions of personas have emerged. They bring data to life by humanizing abstract information and create a platform for co-creation and iterative development. Personas ensure a consistent understanding of target groups across the organization and provide a safe framework for testing ideas and documenting decisions, thus mitigating risks. They stimulate creativity and innovative thinking by capturing emotions and perspectives.

The rise of AI and persona bots
With technological advancements, personas have become more sophisticated and now incorporate AI-driven tools. This evolution has led to the creation of persona bots—interactive entities that teams can use to communicate and gain insights from.

At Ipsos, we rely on the blend of human intelligence (HI) and artificial intelligence (AI) to drive innovation and deliver meaningful, human-centric insights to our clients. Therefore, the persona bot also combines expertise in areas such as prompt engineering and data science with human creativity, curiosity, and ethical standards. A persona bot allows employees to interact with personas representing their target audiences through a secure portal. Teams can ask questions about attitudes, behaviours, communication needs, and more. Personas can be interviewed individually or as a group.

Creating an effective persona bot requires more than simply feeding raw data into an AI system. Careful curation and organization of information on various aspects is essential (e.g., demographic and psychographic information, motivations, needs, attitudes, insights into relevant brands, context, and consumption occasions, etc.).

Biases and limitations
Personas also have limitations that must be considered. AI makes it easy to create seemingly realistic personas that do not represent actual customer groups. Furthermore, personas are archetypes, not monolithic constructs. Their validity is context-specific to a particular market, country, or purpose. The quality and depth of the collected data is crucial for AI-generated personas, as inaccurate or biased data can lead to misleading conclusions. Persona bots can only answer questions within the scope of the analysed data, not beyond. Finally, AI sometimes identifies false correlations and mistakes them for causal relationships, which is why human expertise remains indispensable.

For Swiss companies, this translates into investment in data quality, specific employee training, the implementation of ethical guidelines, and defining the right mix of human and artificial intelligence for each task.

Application in the Swiss economy
Persona bots offer exciting possibilities. In customer-centric product development, Swiss companies can use persona bots to quickly and cost-effectively pre-evaluate early-stage product ideas before moving on to the next stage of the process. For personalized marketing strategies, teams can tailor messages and campaigns to different target groups by "discussing" them with the corresponding persona bots. This enables a much deeper and more intuitive understanding of the specific needs and motivations of each group. Companies can use this understanding of different customer types to improve their services in a targeted way. This can be particularly helpful for traditional Swiss companies undergoing digital transformation.

Finally, PersonaBot democratize consumer insights by making them available to various stakeholders within a company (not just market researchers, but also product managers, designers, and even executives). This means they can work directly with personas to inform their daily decisions, fostering a customer-centric culture throughout the organization.

Conclusion and outlook
Personabots are a powerful tool for bringing the customer voice to Swiss organizations. Responsible use is crucial to fully realize their potential and minimize biases. In an era where customer focus is paramount, personabots offer Swiss companies the opportunity to elevate customer relationships and position themselves as innovative players in the local and global market.

This article is based on the new global Ipsos white paper: Personas in the Age of AI | Ipsos and was written in collaboration with HI (Martin Fenböck) and AI (Ipsos Facto). 

Here is the link to the article published in the Handelszeitung published on October 30, 2025, in both the online and print editions: Personas in the Age of AI | Handelszeitung