Colgate? The LLM research lab?
A toothpaste company has quietly killed the entire market research industry and nobody is talking about it.
Colgate published a paper showing you can predict real purchase intent at 90% accuracy by simply asking LLMs to roleplay customers.
And this is beyond insane.
If you ask an AI, "Rate this product from 1 to 5," it gives safe, middle-of-the-road garbage.
So researchers invented a method called Semantic Similarity Rating (SSR).
Instead of asking the AI for a number, they asked it to roleplay.
They gave the LLM a demographic profile. They showed it a product concept. And they asked it to write down its raw, unfiltered thoughts.
Then, they used a semantic model to translate those written thoughts into a numerical score.
The results are staggering.
Tested against 57 real corporate surveys and 9,300 actual human responses, the synthetic AI consumers matched real human buying behavior with 90% reliability.
They perfectly mirrored how different age brackets and income levels react to price changes.
And they provided detailed, qualitative feedback that was deeper and more critical than what actual humans wrote.
This destroys the economics of traditional market research.
You don't need to wait a month to see if a product will sell.
You can simulate 1,000 hyper-targeted customer interviews overnight.
You can A/B test pricing across every demographic instantly.
