Best in Track, International Enterprise Educators Conference 2026 Interview a customer who does not simply agree A written debrief after every conversation Questions to put to a real customer next Based in the UK, working globally Works on a phone, nothing to install No accounts, no personal data held
Synthetic Futures

Best in Track, IEEC 2026

Synthetic Customer Persona

Describe your product and the customer you are trying to reach. Interview the persona the tool creates. Leave with a debrief and the questions to ask a real person.

Dr Kadja Manninen receiving the Best in Track award at the International Enterprise Educators Conference
Best in Track, International Enterprise Educators Conference, September 2026.

How a session runs

  • The user describes their product, where they are with it, and the kind of customer they have in mind.
  • The tool creates a persona: a name, a role, what they care about and what they doubt.
  • The user interviews them. The persona holds a position, raises objections and is not easily convinced.
  • The debrief reports how far the conversation moved, what was left unresolved, and what to ask a real customer next.
  • Everything can be downloaded as a PDF. Nothing is stored.

Most people take twenty minutes. Educators run it as a single session or across a module.

A rehearsal, not a verdict

The persona is fictional. A language model invents it from what the user writes and then plays it in conversation, drawing on a broad grasp of how people in a given role and sector talk about their work.

You

Everyone we have shown it to has been really positive about it.

The persona

Positive how. Did any of them change what they were doing because of it, or did they just say it sounded interesting and carry on exactly as before?

A persona declining to accept a vague answer.

That is what makes it useful for practice. The persona asks the awkward question, holds its ground, and refuses to be satisfied by a vague answer. Every debrief ends by sending the user back to real customers, better prepared than they went in.

Recognition

Best in Track, International Enterprise Educators Conference 2026

Grounded in

Rogers' Innovation-Decision Process

Time per session

About twenty minutes

Runs on

Any browser, including a phone

What a licence includes

The tool

For your participants, for twelve months, reached by a shared cohort code. Nothing to provision and no user records to manage.

Teaching materials

Session plans and exercises for running it in teaching, with guidance on leading the debrief discussion.

A briefing session

An online session for the staff delivering it: how it works, how to introduce it, what to expect from participants.

Your usage figures

A private link showing how the tool is being used across your cohorts. Numbers only, never linked to an individual.

Support

An AI support assistant at any hour, and a reply from us within one working day for anything it cannot resolve.

Evaluation instruments

Survey templates to run with your own participants, so any findings about outcomes belong to you.

Also from Synthetic Futures

Two further apps, built on the same principle: useful in the room, honest about what they know.

In development

Ferret

An evidence-based competitive analysis tool that helps businesses understand their market without blurring fact and assumption. Ferret gathers and structures competitor information, separates evidence from inference, and highlights patterns, gaps and opportunities that can inform positioning and strategy.

In development

Architect

An AI system design tool for businesses exploring automation, process improvement or new AI-enabled products and services. Architect asks a short series of adaptive questions, then recommends the right approach, whether that is automation, an AI feature, a workflow, an agent, a hybrid system or no AI at all. It produces a practical blueprint covering the system design, human checkpoints, risks and the smallest useful prototype.

Data protection

The tool holds no personal data. There is no database and there are no user accounts. Nothing a participant types is stored: the persona, the conversation and the debrief exist only in their browser.

What is counted is usage: numbers of personas, messages and debriefs against each cohort code, and the dates of use. These are integers and dates, never linked to an individual.

Read the full data statement