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Rhys Fisher

Rhys Fisher

Rhys Fisher is the COO & Co-Founder of Rally. He previously co-founded a boutique analytics agency called Unvanity, crossed the Pyrenees coast-to-coast via paraglider, and now watches virtual crowds respond to memes. Follow him on Twitter @virtual_rf

Articles by Rhys Fisher

How AI Exposes Our Double Standards

How AI Exposes Our Double Standards

April 29, 2025

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

Why Stated Values Die at Checkout

April 26, 2025

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

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

April 23, 2025

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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I Predicted The Sentiment of +26,044 Post Replies—Before They Happened—With 82.7% Accuracy

I Predicted The Sentiment of +26,044 Post Replies—Before They Happened—With 82.7% Accuracy

April 22, 2025

What if you could see tomorrow’s social-media outrage unfold today—predicting thousands of angry comments before anyone even hits “reply”? I simulated future threads using AI personas, anticipated sentiment with near-perfect accuracy (up to 99.9%), and uncovered exactly how tiny shifts in prompts and audience design can make or break predictions. Here’s the play-by-play of that experiment, and why accuracy alone is meaningless without the context that shapes it.

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GPT Prediction VS Virtual Audience Simulations - What's The Difference?

GPT Prediction VS Virtual Audience Simulations - What's The Difference?

April 16, 2025

In a battle of AI decision-making, we put straightforward GPT predictions head-to-head with virtual audience simulations. Can basic GPT models, relying on pure heuristics, match up to a synthetic audience that mirrors human nuance? In this experiment, we challenged GPT 4o, o3-mini, and a role-prompted GPT 4o-mini against Rally’s tailored virtual audience.

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Fast or Smart: How Do You Choose?

Fast or Smart: How Do You Choose?

April 15, 2025

With synthetic research and persona-driven prompting still in beta, little is known about how different AI models shape responses. In our simulated buying committee experiment, we found that more powerful models can replicate the complex decision-making seen in high-stakes human scenarios. If you want your synthetic research to truly mirror human thought, here's how choosing between Fast and Smart mode can unlock insights that reflect real-world nuance.

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I Simulated The Impossible Buying Committee, Then Convinced Them To Buy

I Simulated The Impossible Buying Committee, Then Convinced Them To Buy

April 11, 2025

Enterprise sales can feel like herding cats—with each stakeholder more impossible than the last. Nail it, and you’re hitting yearly targets; mess it up, and you’re bankrupt in epic style. So I set up the most absurd experiment ever: I built a fictional buying committee in hard mode, then got them all to say, “take our money!”

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