Free Lesson

Build a Synthetic User From Your Real Interviews

Part of Stop Waiting for Insights. Build the Agents That Get Them.

Hosted by John Whalen, PhD

Fri, Sep 11, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI for Customer Research: Deliver Trusted Insights at Scale
John Whalen, PhD
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What you'll learn

Extract grounded user patterns

Use interview evidence to identify goals, constraints, decision criteria, objections, and language.

Build scoped synthetic users

Define what each synthetic user can represent and where the simulation should not be trusted.

Use synthetic users responsibly

Apply them to preflight concepts, questions, and scenarios while keeping real customer validation in view.

Why this topic matters

Synthetic users are more useful when they are grounded in real research data instead of generic persona assumptions. Interview data can provide the behaviors, objections, goals, language, and context that make synthetic users more realistic. In this Lightning Lesson, John Whalen shows how to create synthetic users from interview data.

You'll learn from

John Whalen, PhD

CEO, AI Research Leader, Cognitive Scientist, O'Reilly Author

I’m CEO of Brilliant Experience, have a PhD in cognitive science, and wrote Design for How People Think (O’Reilly).

For 20 years, I’ve helped teams at companies like Google, GSK, and Capital One better understand their customers, capture insights, and build better products.

When AI started reshaping research, I got curious and learned. My team ran “AI vs. Humans” studies to see where AI excels, where human judgment matters most, and how to effectively blend both.

I’ll teach you how to create trustworthy AI research workflows that let you trace every step and insight.

Then advance to the next course and learn to orchestrate agentic research teams, work strategically with synthetic users grounded in real data, and bring in human judgement so you can scale research without losing rigor.

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