AI Generated Persona: How to Create Personas with AI

Netflix’s AI-assisted recommendation system is estimated to save the media behemoth $1 billion yearly. This gets one thinking: if an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) system can create customer personas for you, how much can your business save?

By definition, a customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers – your past, present, and future prospects. It is one of the greatest tricks a marketer can pull to understand the thought processes of their potential buyers.

Companies can develop their marketing budget and communication strategy by building buyer personas.

A lack of understanding of your customers, or not developing personas, can cause many marketing and sales problems. For example, brands won't know what kind of content or messaging will appeal to their target audiences, where they are from, or what their interests are.

Now let’s talk about AI personas or AI generated personas.

IDC forecasts worldwide data to grow by 61% (175 zettabytes) in 2025. Artificial intelligence can collect, process, and analyze massive data sets in real-time. More importantly, it can provide meaning to aggregate data and pass it off as actionable information.

Consequently, the AI market is expected to expand to a $827 billion industry by 2030. One of the biggest drivers for this growth is AI's ability to analyze consumer data from different sources, mainly online.

This makes AI an incredibly powerful tool for persona generation.

With a traditional buyer persona, you initially had to invest countless hours collecting user data through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and rummaging through different corners of the internet. After accumulating this data, you had to analyze it and then create buyer profiles.

AI and ML technologies make the persona creation process easier and faster while bringing you closer to your customers.

What is an AI persona?

As the name suggests, an AI persona or AI generated persona is built using AI and ML systems that analyze public and private customer data to develop buyer profiles. They are easy to create and represent the goals, pain points, hobbies, interests, and purchase patterns of your audience.

Now, there are several benefits associated with AI generated personas:

• Since artificial intelligence can process large amounts of user data and identify complex data patterns, AI personas are more accurate and detailed.
• They allow you to create personas for diverse audiences.
• AI generated personas learn from historical and real-time user data; hence they are automatically updated.
• They reduce the time spent on traditional customer research.
• All your marketing strategies can be data-driven; focusing on your target market.

These points work in favor of brands who want to gain an advantage over their competitors and bring in more customers. With AI personas, they can customize their products, features, and messaging to align with specific customer characteristics.

Personas in Generative AI

Since 2023, the world has seen the rise of generative artificial intelligence (or gen AI), a type of AI system designed to generate content – text, code, images, and videos – as its primary function. All the user needs to do is enter a text-based prompt.

Besides AI content and design, you can use large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to create personas in seconds. It does save time and resources but is only suitable for businesses that have just started out and want to get a rough idea of their customer base.

For example, one can prompt ChatGPT to, “Create a buyer persona for a shoe store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.”

Now, stuff like this is okay but pretty basic; it leaves a lot to be desired. You can tweak your AI prompts for more clarity and precision. Yet, without actual data (information about your target customers), you cannot generate personas that fully represent your prospects.

AI personas do away with this problem because they are based on multiple, verified customer data sources relevant to your products and services.

What are the problems with traditional persona creation?

In the past, marketing professionals used to create pen-and-paper buyer profiles using readily available information, like demographic data and market survey reports. As useful as they were, traditional personas now have significant disadvantages compared to their AI-powered counterparts.

Let's look at some of these disadvantages and learn why the use of AI is better in both product design and marketing.

Online behavior isn't taken into account

According to Statista, approximately 5.44 billion people use the internet, which roughly constitutes 67% of the world’s population.

Most people are active online and constantly share information about their personal and professional lives on different social media networks. Since traditional personas focus on data collected from interviews and demographic surveys, they often lack insights into online customer behavior.

This creates a disconnect between the online and offline customer and prevents you from building effective marketing campaigns.

Low accuracy and efficiency

There was no consistent structure to the traditional method of building buyer personas. A bunch of methods could be used, and their effectiveness depended on the processes selected.

Yet, does this approach work for every company? Not really. If you're lucky, it might work; if you're not, it won't. Nonetheless, it would be a bad idea to leave this up to fate as it could negatively affect your business objectives and growth.

Involves a lot of guesswork

Even with ample research, unless the information you collect is directly from the audience, the data isn’t foolproof. Key decision-makers, marketers, and stakeholders often make the error of assuming what the customers want. This mistake can result in biases and stereotypes in the personas created.

Additionally, the process involves a lot of guesswork to make up for any missing information.

Relies heavily on job titles

Traditional personas often focus on people's designation, like their job title or role. While it is possible to gather some information this way, you ultimately become limited by that data. Titles can also be misleading; someone with the title "Director" might not have any decision-making power.

Keeping personas updated is expensive

The thing with personas is that they need to be constantly monitored and updated. Otherwise, they won’t reflect current trends and user behavior patterns. It’s easy to do if your target audience is small, but that’s rarely the case for most companies.

So unless you have a big budget, the entire process will be a tad too difficult for you, given the fact that you need to keep updating them (or they won't be useful). Consequently, incurring more costs to the company.

Unable to provide personalized insights

AI personas offer valuable insights that can almost guarantee customer satisfaction – manual personas cannot.

In a world where people expect personalized recommendations, anything less feels unsatisfactory. If Company A sends targeted and high-quality content to a potential customer while Company B sends generic content, guess who will win? Even if price is an issue, Company A still has a higher chance of closing the deal.

60% of buyers state they’ll become repeat customers if offered a personalized shopping experience. While traditional personas help you understand customer preferences, their effectiveness fades away as people and markets change.

How do AI and ML technologies change the face of personas?

A customer persona, by definition, is a fictional or semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers. It helps you ascertain the kind of content you need to create, the strategies you should use, the channels you should frequent, and the messaging you need to adopt.

AI persona generators and systems often analyze both publicly available and private data to generate personas for your company. Here are some of the internal and external data types they use to create AI personas:

Internal data:

• Customer surveys
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• CRM information
• Social analytics data
• Call logs
• Emails
• Website and in-app data

External data:

• Social media
• Reviews
• Forums
• Online communities
• Third-party websites

With the help of AI and ML, you can create refined customer personas. This enables you to make data-backed marketing decisions and craft content personalized for different customer segments, increasing the likelihood of converting them into paying customers.

Here’s a step-by-step process on how AI generated personas do this:

1. Data: By using millions of data points, AI easily pulls out relevant information from a wide range of people.
2. Transactional and behavioral analysis: With the help of transactional and behavioral data from potential customers who share commonalities with your target persona, you get to send tailor-made messages.
3. Relevance: AI uses customers' digital experiences to increase the relevance of your offerings to each prospect.
4. Usage: AI generated personas are easy to create and use, making them affordable even to new businesses.
5. Scalability: AI and ML can collect data at any scale. The probability of creating a refined persona increases as the scale increases.
6. Updates: Since AI-based personas quickly fetch results, your strategies can always be updated, ensuring that your messaging and engagement strategies are laser-focused and impactful.
7. Cost: AI and ML-based personas require much less effort to create, drastically reducing the costs of developing customer personas.
8. Account-Based Marketing: AI-generated personas make ABM possible, even at scale.

By automating persona generation with the help of AI, you not only save costs but also increase the efficiency of the entire process. This is why marketers and sales teams prioritize AI and ML more than any other department in organizations today.

Note: How does Netflix's recommendation engine save the brand money?

We thought the Netflix example would help you understand the importance of AI and the personas it creates. The short answer is that it helps retain subscribers by reducing service cancellations.

"Consumer research suggests that a typical Netflix member loses interest after perhaps 60 to 90 seconds of choosing, having reviewed 10 to 20 titles (perhaps 3 in detail) on one or two screens. The user either finds something of interest or the risk of the user abandoning our service increases substantially,” says a source from Netflix.

What can it do in those 90 seconds? In those 90 seconds, Netflix can:

• Quickly analyze a subscriber's past viewing history and interests.
• Its AI recommendation engine then creates a pool of options similar to the content consumed (viewed) earlier.
• Show a curated list of series or movies that align with their interests.

Content that matches viewers’ preferences is critical for user engagement and retention. Netflix has aced this game with artificial intelligence. You too can do the same by developing personas with AI.

Creating AI personas with Delve AI’s automatic persona generator

Artificial intelligence tools can help you generate customer personas with ease. You can use different templates and tools to study user interactions with your site and get actionable customer insights.

Persona by Delve AI is one such software that makes the persona development process easier by creating personas from your web/mobile/CRM/social analytics data.

Currently, we offer four products:

• Live persona (for your website visitors)
• Competitor persona (for your competitors)
• Social persona (for your social media audiences)
• Customer persona (for your CRM)

We use aggregated and anonymized data to automatically segment users based on their behavior leveraging AI and ML technologies.

Your personas are auto-generated and don’t require any manual inputs. Furthermore, they enable you to identify the best-performing audience segments, get targeting ideas, and improve customer experiences to boost business revenue.

To create personas, visit our website and sign up for Persona by Delve AI.

Then, connect your GA4 and/or Search Console accounts. If you want to build a competitor persona, just enter the domain of your competitor's website. For social personas, add the social media handles you want to analyze.

Your data is then processed, analyzed, and enriched with other authentic data sources. It doesn't matter which personas you create, our software will generate accurate, segment-wise personas for you in minutes.

Enriched customer analytics

Data is augmented to give you a comprehensive context, drawn from over 40+ external data sources. We create personas using a diverse set of data sources, like CRM data, web analytics, social media, voice of customer data, and competitor data.

Users are segmented using behavioral factors, such as engagement (context, intent, and actions) and outcomes (conversions and decision phases). The size of a segment is visible as the percentage (%) of users in the entire audience.

Each persona tells you more about your customers, including their:

• Demographics – age, gender, income level, location, education, family status, job title, role, organization, seniority levels, and company size
• Geographics – city, region, and country
• Psychographics – interests, pain points, challenges, motivations, values, and preferences
• Behavior – engagement, events/actions, context, and intent
• Transactional habits – preferred marketing channels, keywords, and mode of payment

Some of these dimensions are available in detail on the Delve AI dashboard.

• How: Device, Search query, Connection
• What: Content analysis, Action, Conversions, Goals, Transactions
• Where: Urbanicity, Territory, Climate zone
• When: Day, Time, Weather, Season
• Who: Organization, Industry, Language

Industry-specific insights

By analyzing user behaviors (mentions, page views, and keywords), Delve AI extracts key structured attributes tailored to the industry your website belongs to.

For example, in the apparel and fashion industry, keywords are organized and presented based on relevant attributes like size, gender, occasion, type, color, age group, and more.

Our analysis systems automatically extract industry-specific insights for over 40+ major B2B and B2C industries.

B2B insights

B2C and B2B customers have different needs and objectives. In our post about B2B buyer personas, we explain the differences between the B2C and B2B purchasing processes, primarily focusing on decision-makers, buying intent, time, and purpose.

Everyone should know these differences since B2B products and services serve different personal and professional purposes. Consequently, they involve multiple people and departments within a company.

It only makes sense that B2B personas and user journeys are structured at the organization level and not at the individual user level. Our software automatically classifies your B2B website visitors into one of these groups:

• Business prospects
• Job seekers/recruiters
• Investors
• Partners/competitors
• Press
• Service providers
• Blog readers
• Government

Additionally, our personas (B2B highlighted in green and B2C highlighted in blue) provide in-depth details about job functions, job experience levels, company sizes, organizations, and industries of prospects.

Customer journeys

We extract and display sample user journeys (user journeys for e-commerce/B2C websites, and organization journeys for B2B websites) for each customer segment, helping you identify and address potential drop-offs and bottlenecks.

Labels are added to tell you users are in the decision-making process – research, intent-to-convert, or process of conversion phase.

• The Research phase is the initial stage in the buyer’s journey where customers are actively searching for information about your products or services.
• In the Intent to Convert phase, the user has shown a clear intent to make a purchase.
• The Process of Conversion phase is where the visitor has started the process of conversion and is very likely to convert.

Humanized consumer representation

Persona by Delve AI transforms segment-wise data into user-friendly formats for easier integration and follow-ups.

We incorporate humanized details such as demographics, preferences, personal lifestyles, interactions, and sample journeys to develop personas. When put together, all of these elements give you a 360-degree overview of your ideal customers.

hifting from data dimensions and metrics, AI-generated personas infuse empathy into your data-driven marketing efforts, placing people at the center of all your decisions and marketing initiatives.

Wrapping up

Many ingredients go into impactful marketing, and creating AI personas is the first step in making that impact.

After all, marketing is about captivating customers so they keep coming back and commit to buying from you when the need arises. You don't ask visitors to buy in the first interaction; instead, you nurture them with content that hits the spot. Trust is built this way, and everything else follows.

Without buyer personas, it's like shooting arrows in the dark. When you spend significant amounts of money on content, paid ads, and design, you don't want it to go to waste – personas ensure that it doesn't.

By creating data-driven customer personas, you are building a strong foundation for business success. Remember, every bit of data you get with the help of AI and ML in creating an AI generated persona comes in real-time. That’s powerful. It will help you understand your prospects in a way that your competitors cannot.