Trailblazers: welcoming the synthetic customer into the room
Matt Wilkinson
Perry Rearick invited me onto Trailblazers, from Follow Your Buyer, to talk about how AI is reshaping sales, marketing and commercialisation, and why the buyer keeps disappearing from the decisions made about them. We started with a lecture theatre in Amsterdam, where a fireworks open day nearly doubled undergraduate intake and left scorch marks on the ceiling, then moved on to organisational gravity: the pull that drags a good campaign back toward whatever the organisation feels safe with.
Most of the conversation is about the synthetic customer itself. What goes into one, from a thin persona used as context to years of coded interviews, survey data and social listening. Why that evidence has to be analysed and shaped before a model sees it, down to how each buyer's job is measured. How a panel can argue an idea out over five rounds and still land on recommendations you can act on. And the book cover test, where four synthetic customers and a LinkedIn poll split along the same lines, and the cover we shipped came from taking things away.
We finished on who stays in charge. I think of AI as the orchestra. I still want to compose, conduct and be the sound engineer, because anything that goes out with my name on it is mine to answer for.
Watch on YouTube · Episode page on Follow Your Buyer · Trailblazers on LinkedIn
If this conversation was useful
My book, The Buyer in the Loop, takes these ideas further. I also speak on them, and I am always happy to join another show.
Get the bookBook me to speakInvite me on your show