Silicon Personas

That's the premise behind Silicon Personas, Elaboratum's behavioral simulation system. It's designed to get closer to how your customers actually make a decision, not just what they'd say in a survey. Instead of asking a handful of people what they'd do, it simulates how thousands would decide, all at once.

We've been testing it across real cases, and it's pretty life changing how fast we can go from a question to an answer we trust.

The problem it solves

Companies spend more than $140 billion a year on market research globally (Esomar, Global Market Research 2024). A lot of that money buys unreliable answers, not because anyone lies, but because the methods carry built-in bias. Interviewers hear what confirms their expectations. Early information anchors every later judgment. Respondents say what sounds acceptable rather than what they actually feel.

Silicon Personas gets around this by asking a whole population instead of a few people. Outliers and individual bias cancel out, and a clear market signal remains.

What it is

Each simulation queries about 2,600 AI individuals at once. Each one of them is built from three things:

• how people tend to behave (patterns from decision research and Elaboratum's PsyConversion framework, mapping the psychological drivers behind making purchases),
• who they are (the Big Five personality model plus demographics like age and life stage)
• the context they decide in (real-world factors like inflation and what people currently feel they can afford).

Because the system asks a full cluster rather than one respondent, occasional AI mistakes wash out, just the way a single odd answer disappears in a large enough poll. What's left is a quite realistic read on how a whole segment tends to decide.

What to use it for

Product, research and marketing teams can reach for Silicon Personas whenever they need a fast read on customer reaction: early user research, product development, UX feedback, content testing, the possibilities are endless!!

An example

One of our clients that wanted every team to work from the same customer understanding. They turned their existing customer data and interview transcripts into 24 Silicon Personas, then tuned each one against real customer feedback until it behaved realistically. Those 24 personas are now shared across their teams. Whenever someone in product, design or marketing has a customer question, they put it to a persona the business has already validated, rather than commissioning a new study.

Where to start

Interested in how Silicon Personas could help you reach new heights in User Research? Contact us at hej@conversionista.se!