Where do synthetic respondents take consumer research?

For more than a century, the fundamental approach to consumer research has remained largely unchanged: insights are derived from observing and interviewing people in their various roles. In consumer research, this primarily refers to the role of current or potential consumers. The rapid development of large language models, LLM-based chatbots and generative AI, which has been gaining momentum since 2022, has already begun to transform numerous stages of the consumer and market research value chain. However, we are now on the cusp of a shift in the research paradigm: human subjects are being replaced by artificially generated subjects. This presentation highlights various use cases for generative AI in consumer research and offers a look ahead.