Market researchers have spent decades recruiting consumers, writing surveys, fielding studies and waiting days or weeks to find out whether a new product idea deserves a future or a quiet burial in the corporate archives.
Ipsos thinks AI can help speed up that process. The company is making the case for "digital twins," AI-generated versions of individual consumers that can screen hundreds of product concepts in hours instead of weeks.
The catch is that these virtual shoppers aren’t meant to replace human respondents. They're more like an advance scouting party sent ahead to figure out which ideas are worth the trouble of testing with actual people.