How a Fake Movie Scene Crushed Demand For Mass-Market Blends And Made Ethiopian Coffee Feel Like Art

June 03, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

What if a movie scene could reshape consumer preferences and you could test it before releasing your campaign? Using AI personas and implanted memories inspired by Sideways, I simulated a media-driven market shift that made virtual shoppers abandon Folgers for premium Ethiopian coffee.

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How To Replicate Tim Ferriss's Famous Title Test Using AI Personas

May 28, 2025 • By Mike Taylor

Tim Ferriss turned a rejected book title into a data-driven naming experiment that birthed “The 4-Hour Workweek.” and sold millions of copies world wide. Today, AI persona testing lets anyone speed-run that same market-validation magic for pennies.

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Synthetic Personas Don’t Replace Real Humans - They Supercharge Your User Research

May 27, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

Research with synthetic personas lets anyone make smarter decisions fast, cheaply, and with good-enough accuracy. Instead of interrupting real humans for every idea in your head, you can spin up virtual crowds instantly, ask them questions 24/7, then take the best ideas and test them with real humans.

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How To Prevent Churn With Open-Loop AI Persona Simulations

May 27, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

Feed your AI personas authentic, lived-experiences, and closed-loop sims break open: you can watch sentiment shift in real time, flag churn risk months early, and pressure-test your renewal strategies before you commit.

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Correcting Bias in LLMs with DSPy

May 21, 2025 • By Mike Taylor

Left unchecked, large language models can massively distort reality. Our baseline simulation showed 90.6% of AI personas voting Democrat, a 40-point deviation from expected. But with DSPy optimization, we achieved near-perfect political balance, proving that prompt calibration isn’t optional, it’s essential.

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Cheaters, Speeders, and Repeaters

May 20, 2025 • By Mike Taylor

Traditional surveys are overrun by cheaters, speeders, and repeaters, warping data and devouring your calendar. Validated AI personas slash the noise, delivering human-level insights with 85 % accuracy—no bribery, no burnout.

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How AI Exposes Our Double Standards

April 29, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

Polls say most of us believe in “equal justice,” yet the moment a headline names our hero or our villain, our moral math flips. In my latest experiment, I fed Rally personas a stream of fake social-media posts and hard coded them to have a favorite between Kanye and Will Smith. The result? Turns out AI has double standards. So do humans. We witnessed how virtual audience simulations could be used to pressure-test in silicon before PR teams click publish.

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Why Stated Values Die at Checkout

April 26, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

When it’s your money on the line, do you really pay double for "Made in USA"? Ramon tested it with real shoppers and walked away empty handed. We tested real-time buyer decisions using role-playing agents, and the results might surprise you.

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How to Prompt in Rally: It’s Different Than GPT

April 23, 2025 • By Rhys Fisher

Prompt engineering got its hype moment when Anthropic flashed a $225 K salary for anyone who could bend words into gold. Rally raises the stakes. It lets you address a stadium of GPT personas at once—but that power demands a new playbook: virtual-audience simulation prompting. Treat the crowd like a poll (“How many of you prefer …?”) and you get lukewarm averages. Challenge them like a panel (“Pick A, B, or C—defend your choice”) and every agent steps up with sharp, contrasting takes that expose blind spots, trade-offs, and hidden opportunities. The gap between those two sentences is the difference between genuine market signal and background static. This article shows you how to close it.

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