Digital Twins and How to Love Them

Does this sound familiar?  

You share a brief.
You identify a target.
You provide relevant data.
And in response, you receive a creative idea emotionally compelling enough to shift perceptions and behavior. 

Along the way, you wonder, “is it credible that the target would engage with our idea?” You check that the idea aligns with as much of the provided data as possible — including what’s performed successfully in the past. Everything short of dropping it on the audience points toward success. 

And then, it’s a big, flat flop. 

The good news? There’s a new AI-powered tool to help prevent these outcomes: digital twins.  

What I Mean by Digital Twins — And Why This Definition Matters 

I know, at first “digital twins” sounds a lot like Skynet — a cold and creepy AI threatening to crush your obsolete human talents under relentless advance. But when I talk about digital twins, I’m not referring to fully synthetic audiences generated out of thin, digit al air. I’m talking about digital replicas of real people trained to think, respond, reason, and associate meaning the way actual humans do. 

Some research platforms and consultancies are already showing that synthetic samples, when modeled carefully on permissioned human datasets, can approximate much larger populations with surprising accuracy. So, there will absolutely come a day when creative teams trust purely synthetic audience simulations. But in the near term, even if creatives had that kind of trust in the accuracy of synthetic data – there would still be skepticism.  

The first question any CMO or CCO will ask when presented with AI-powered audience simulations is: “How do you know these synthetic people actually behave like our real buyers or fans?” 

The answer is this: “Each digital twin is a 1:1 replica of a real human respondent.” The process starts with actual people who are surveyed at scale to capture not just demographics and psychographics, but also the linguistic and cognitive fingerprints that make their thinking unique: 

• the words they choose 
• the associations they make 
• how they interpret metaphors 
• how they describe frustrations and joy 
• how they justify decisions 
• how emotions show up in their narratives 

With this dataset, AI models can be trained to behave like that specific human, responding to new questions the way that person would. 

The result: A digital twin that responds like the human it mirrors — offering a trusted, stable, and expressive audience to test ideas with. And because that twin is grounded in real human responses, its feedback is far more credible than a generic “synthetic consumer.” 

How Digital Twins Are Built Today (Without the Science-fiction) 

Here’s the practical version of how this works — 100% science-fact. 

Recruit real human survey respondents at scale. Newer research platforms are making this dramatically easier. For example, Panoplai (formerly Glimpse) uses a mix of first-party data and rapid survey deployment to recruit thousands of qualified respondents worldwide in minutes, not weeks. They emphasize open-ended questions and build “responsive digital twins” that teams can then chat with to test concepts, creative, and messaging.  

Ask both closed-ended and open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions provide structure. Open-ended questions give you human texture. A growing ecosystem of tools and research proves that personality and emotion can be inferred from text alone — not just what people say, but how they say it. Academic work out of the University of Barcelona has shown that AI models can detect personality traits from written text with accuracy comparable to human assessors. On the commercial side, personality-analysis platforms (for example, those used for AI-powered feedback and communication coaching) are already analyzing language patterns to infer traits, preferences, and emotional tendencies from natural language. That same underlying capability is what lets digital twins become expressive, not just statistical. 

Train a digital twin for each human. Each respondent’s linguistic, emotional, and associative patterns become the training data for a corresponding AI twin. That twin can then answer new questions in the respondent’s style, respond to new creative stimuli with similar tastes and biases and, “talk” through its reactions in language like the original person. This means going beyond bar charts to interact with a chorus of digital voices conversationally. 

Validate accuracy by “going back” to the humans as needed. If you want to go further, you can re-survey the original humans later and compare their answers to their twins’ predicted answers. Some digital-twin platforms and UX research groups already use this kind of hold-out testing — removing a portion of the survey data and measuring how closely the twin predicts those missing responses or completely new questions. 

As needed, scale your digital twin audience outward from its human core. Once the twins are validated, you can responsibly extrapolate. For example, from 1,000 humans, you might generate 10,000–20,000 synthetic variants that interpolate between those real patterns. Large research firms are already using synthetic respondents modeled on fraud-free, permissioned human samples to mimic larger populations while keeping the underlying distributions and relationships intact. The key is that every synthetic expansion has a traceable lineage back to real human behavior. 

What Creative Can Do with Digital Twins That They Couldn’t Before 

Digital twins open an entirely new creative R&D lab.  

A low-risk playground for bolder ideas. Want to explore a provocative concept, test a different emotional temperature, or push a visual metaphor further than leadership might initially allow? Test it with your twin audience first. See how they respond. Refine accordingly. 

Faster iteration cycles. Creatives normally get feedback at two points: early, when the work is fragile, and late, when it’s expensive to change. Digital twins fill the massive gap in the middle. They give you real-time reactions so you can shape work in the same moment you’re developing it. 

Better alignment between strategy and creative. Misalignment is expensive. Digital twins help ensure everyone—strategists, creatives, and brand stakeholders—is working from the same understanding of how the audience will respond. This allows strategic hypotheses to be tested with the audience before the creative team invests in full concepts—and again as the work takes form. 

More nuanced insight than traditional panels. Digital twins understand small tonal shifts, subtle wording differences, metaphor comprehension, visual interpretation, sequencing and story logic, and framing effects. Traditional testing panels rarely allow that level of depth without blowing up your timeline and budget. 

Things to do (now) to Leverage Digital Twins 

1. Ask your creative partners to provide you with a digital twin platform. 
2. Submit copy options to a digital twin audience focused on tone & voice experiments – how do different segments react differently to humor levels, communication style, tone, emotional range and pacing or rhythm 
3. Query a single digital individual on storyboard/script reactions. Walk twins through early storylines to pinpoint where engagement rises or falls, i.e., Which beats confuse them? Where does emotional intensity peak? Does the payoff land? 
4. Establish visual style resonance by feeding mood boards, comps, or early frames to the twins and analyze responses across different demographics and psychographic clusters. 
5. Use digital twins to anticipate cultural interpretation and sensitivity including, unintended meanings, cultural misalignments, emotional misfires, language that may alienate certain groups. 

How Can You Get Leadership Buy In? 

Well … the truth is that most leadership folks are hearing constantly – “How are we using AI to get ahead?” You can provide them with the answer. Digital twins as discussed in this blog post are a measurable, scalable and economical way to leverage AI to support human progress. If you start now, you’ll be ahead of the next wave in creative development.