Beyond ChatGPT — What Digital Twins Mean for the Future of Customer Understanding
The risk with AI is not that it sounds wrong. It is that it sounds right.
Which AI error costs you more? Killing a good idea, or funding a bad one?
Simulated customers, synthetic data, digital twins. Whatever the label, these tools are already shaping what gets built, what gets funded, and what gets launched. Most leaders are being asked to trust outputs they have no way to evaluate.
Earlier this year, Heidi Dickert co-authored a validation framework for digital twins and synthetic data with Panoplai. Since then the academics, the providers, and the associations have all weighed in, and they do not agree. Nobody is going to hand you a definitive answer.
What this session provides is a framework for judging whether simulated data fits the decision at hand, and for evaluating the tools on offer, so you are less likely to kill a good idea or fund a bad one.
What you will take away
A plain language map of the spectrum from AI personas to synthetic data to digital twins, and why the differences change what you should use and trust for decisions.
The updated criteria for evaluating any simulated data tool.
A way to judge whether simulated data fits the decision you are making before you go looking for a tool.
Guidance on which product and marketing decisions simulated data can support today, and which ones still need real people.
A view of who these models represent well, who they do not, and why that matters for every decision built on them.
Who this is for
Anyone who approves or influences product and marketing decisions. No research background required.
Speaker
Heidi Dickert is the founder of Heidi Dickert Consulting, where she coaches executives and organizations to turn AI from a source of anxiety into a source of leverage. Her work spans AI fluency coaching, hands-on AI training, organizational AI readiness assessments, and AI strategic planning that turns scattered capability into a clear roadmap. Two decades of leadership across Fortune 100 companies, agencies, and small businesses shape her point of view.
She has run brand-tracking, innovation, segmentation, and pricing studies and delivered AI-enabled research firsthand in both brand and supplier roles. More about her background can be found at www.heididickert.com.
Bring a decision you would not want simulated data anywhere near. We will work through several of them live.