How to create a persona with AI explained

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded in our daily work and personal lives and is instantly demonstrating incremental improvements to save us time, provide inspiration and carry out tasks that can be seen as tedious.

The world of Customer Experience management is no exception, and if we dive into the detail of what CX teams do each day to execute strategies and projects we are seeing in concrete terms how AI can help, right now.

In this blog, we will explain how AI becomes a persona creator, an additional team member if you like, who can both create and enrich the personas that make our audience come alive.

What is a persona and how is it used in Customer Experience?

A persona is a human representation of your target audience, based on data and insights your brand already holds (for example, your CRM, surveys and databases will contain details on demographics, challenges, objectives, geography and job titles).

When creating a persona and you have completed this research step you then fill the gaps to develop characteristics and a story, dive into their typical day, their values, preferences in communication and buyer behavior etc.

Once you have their story in a persona framework you can start to map it your brand´s products and services and the journey itself.

Creating a persona is often one of the first steps in your journey mapping exercises. Prior to this, brands may already have broad stroke explanations of what their target market looks like, but more often than not these are dominated by demographics such as sectors, job titles, gender and so on. Whilst demographics are a great tool for data segmentation, they are not personas.

You can find out more about a persona´s role in journey mapping here.

Creating personas can be an intricate process because of the detail required and because they are used as indicators across the business to align an organization; it can be hard to get right.

This is a key area where Artificial Intelligence can help. AI is a great tool for humanizing data, which is essentially what a persona is. So how can brands use AI to create personas?

AI as a persona creator 

Kick start persona creation with AI

We talked earlier about how AI tools such as Chat GPT and Copilot give us inspiration, and we discussed how creating personas in workshops is the start of the mapping process. So of course, getting inspired and getting started can be a small hurdle, that AI technology can help with.

Generative AI is an LLM (Large Language Model) which means that humans can use our own natural language to explain some key concepts to AI to produce a structured piece of content. In this case CX teams can describe their target customer in a prompt containing contextual information you already have such as demographic data (gender, geography, age etc.) and ask your AI assistant to generate a whole persona with not just criteria suggested but the content completed.

No longer working with a blank piece of paper (or rather screen in your platform), a CX professional can choose to edit, approve or request more detail to achieve a rich persona in minutes that may have taken days or consumed valuable hours in a journey mapping workshop.

Enriching personas with an Artificial Intelligence assistant

In your customer journey mapping exercise, you may already have multiple personas created within your CX platform; these will contain certain criteria and characteristics such as demographics, expectations, needs, challenges etc.

But whilst you may re-evaluate the personas based on real customer feedback data from your VoC program; how often do you refresh or enrich these to truly reflect your market and in turn challenge your journey maps?

By adopting AI within your platform, and asking it to analyze your existing personas, the technology can look within internal and external sources of data to either enrich your existing criteria with more content or to suggest new criteria that will make the persona more relevant and relatable.  All you need to do is to create the new criteria such as “Financial information” and AI will look at the persona and the new name of the criteria and suggest detailed content for you to approve.

A task that could either be forgotten or carried out sporadically now takes minutes, simply by leveraging the data you already hold. All a CX team member has to do is review the suggestions, edit or approve.

Creating personas with AI in Cemantica

This is just one example of the power of Artificial Intelligence that combined with human control, can save valuable resources when executing Customer Experience programs. 

In Cemantica, our AI Assistant Alex is ready and waiting to create and enrich personas for busy CX teams, why not ask us to show you Alex in action in a demonstration online?