Market Research Has a New Competitor: Simulated People

A Stanford spinout backed by $100 million in Series A funding called Simile, is building AI-generated "agentic twins," digital clones trained on real people's preferences, personality, and purchase behavior, and selling access to large companies as a replacement for traditional market research panels.

CVS Health is already using a bank of 2.9 million responses from over 400,000 consenting participants, with accuracy testing against real respondents hitting 95%. The appeal is scale and speed: no panel fatigue, no wait times, and no cap on follow-up questions.

Using the twins to probe hard-to-reach populations like chronic condition patients, CVS has tested customer messaging for pet medicine, and to explore how people manage medication routines, insights the company says would have been slower and more expensive to gather through conventional research. The company plans to expand its roster to over 100,000 agents and apply them to store layouts and product design, with CVS Health Ventures investing directly in Simile.

Gallup is also joining as a partner, making more than 1,000 AI twins available to joint customers for policy research, trend analysis, and well-being tracking. For financial services marketers who rely on customer insight work to drive positioning and campaign strategy, this signals a meaningful shift in how that intelligence gets built and who controls it.

Full story: Wall Street Journal