AI POLLING: HOW SYNTHETIC SURVEYS COULD PREDICT REAL BEHAVIOR

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

People answer surveys as the person they want to be rather than the one they are, and synthetic surveys try to close that gap by simulating behavior instead of asking. AI personas built from interviews and behavioral records can return results in hours at about half the cost of human panels, and incumbents like Gallup and Qualtrics are already testing them. The simulations tend to match overall results but miss on subgroups and on questions outside their training data, where they rarely admit uncertainty.