Opensurvey upgrades AI research platform with synthetic consumer interview feature

Opensurvey has added a feature to its research platform that lets users converse with "synthetic consumers" — AI-generated personas built from real consumer data. Business practitioners can use it to supplement costly, time-intensive consumer interviews with AI-driven persona exploration when developing products or marketing strategies.

The AI-based research technology company announced Thursday that it had added the synthetic consumer conversation feature to Dataspace, its consumer intelligence platform.

A synthetic consumer is a virtual consumer persona generated from actual survey data or trend research notes. Dataspace users can define a target consumer segment, generate a synthetic consumer persona representing that group, and then hold a conversation to examine purchasing tendencies, product reactions and brand perceptions.

Opensurvey expects the feature to cut the time and cost involved in analyzing target consumers. Business practitioners have traditionally committed significant resources to defining consumer segments and conducting quantitative surveys and in-depth interviews. The synthetic consumer conversation tool can serve as a supplementary aid for forming initial hypotheses or stress-testing product concepts early in that process.

Demand from practitioners has already been confirmed. In a survey Opensurvey conducted among webinar registrants, 52.9 percent of respondents — on a multiple-answer basis — named "target segment and persona exploration" as the research type they most wanted to apply synthetic consumers to first.

The workflow begins with data-driven segment creation. Users can draw on Opensurvey's trend research note data or their own survey data to build a specific consumer group, then generate a synthetic consumer persona to represent it. From there, they can explore reactions to particular products or services, category consumption trends and areas for concept refinement through conversation.

Another distinguishing feature is that the platform separates and displays the basis for each response. When relevant data is available, Dataspace's synthetic consumer answers based on that data; when data is insufficient, it draws on the persona's profile to reason through a response. Opensurvey said this transparent sourcing makes the tool more reliable than general-purpose generative AI.

After a conversation concludes, users also receive a hybrid report incorporating both quantitative data and interview content. The synthetic consumer conversation feature is available free of charge to all Dataspace subscribers.

"There is no more intuitive way to understand a target than through an interview, but cost and time have prevented it from being used as fully as it should be in practice," said Hwang Hee-young, CEO of Opensurvey. "We will continue to strengthen the product so that conversations with synthetic consumers can close that gap and help predict the viability of ideas in the market."

Meanwhile, Opensurvey earlier overhauled Dataspace around an AI agent architecture, enabling everything from survey design to data analysis and report writing to be carried out through a chat interface. The company said it reduced numerical errors and hallucinations by having its statistical engine calculate the data first, with the AI then deriving insights from those results.