Savanta’s free consumer research platform combines the power of AI with emotional intelligence, giving clients faster, more affordable access to insights they can trust
Savanta – the consumer insights and market research company – launches Virtual Personas by Savanta, an AI-powered research platform that makes previously impossible research achievable, reaching hard-to-access audiences and delivering reliable insights quickly.
Virtual Personas by Savanta gives marketing and insight teams on-demand access to their target audiences for one-to-one interviews or focus groups with multiple personas, enabling them to interrogate audience behaviour, probe motivations, test hypotheses and simulate reactions to campaigns in seconds. The platform is designed to complement formal research rather than replace it, filling gaps in and between studies and informing real-world research design.
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In a move to democratise access to data for teams under pressure to act faster, cut costs and prove ROI, Virtual Personas by Savanta launches with a robust free access tier. Providing immediate access to eight pre-defined personas structured across four critical segments, the free tier enables both focus groups and interviews, allowing users to observe social dynamics and values-based conflicts in real-time. Paid tier offerings allow full customisation of personas, deeper interactions, and creative asset exploration and generation, including video.
Human-like accuracy is achieved by the addition of behavioural models to tie it together. Validated against real-world respondent data across multiple sectors, Virtual Personas by Savanta are built for trust as much as speed, achieving 99% factual recall and 84% logical inference accuracy.
Designed and developed by Savanta’s team of product technology and research experts, Virtual Personas by Savanta is the first platform to integrate both the OCEAN Big Five personality traits and the Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values. This combination simulates reasoning and motivational-drivers as well as personality, resulting in the friction, hesitation and resistance that precede real consumer decisions – like the moment messaging loses the audience, the feature that creates doubt or the pricing language that triggers a walk-away. Every persona is also grounded in over a decade’s worth of Savanta’s proprietary real-world data, and can be highly customised by client data. The result of this hybrid approach is personas that model how audiences actually think and feel, not just what they are likely to say.
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Virtual Personas by Savanta is not a black box, it has been built with transparency at its core, giving users the confidence to act on results. A robust trust score is shown on every response, acting as an EQ-audit and instantly providing visual guardrails and fully documented sources around the reasoning and reliability behind each response. Users can explore which datasets and research inform outputs, understand why a persona responded as it did, and benchmark results against established quality standards.
Christine Petersen, Savanta CEO says: “Virtual Personas by Savanta is the natural evolution of Savanta’s legacy and continued investment in rich consumer data. Grounded in over a decade of proprietary data and the robust methodology of behavioural science, accelerated by AI, brands can maintain an always-on view of their audiences rather than relying on periodic snapshots. Our confidence scores enable fast, evidence-backed decisions, giving businesses a scientifically grounded conversation with their customers on demand, in real time. We’re not here to replace traditional research but to make it sharper, faster and more cost-efficient.”
Dr Nick Baker, Chief Research Officer at Savanta, adds: “Synthetic data without emotional intelligence is just noise. Virtual Personas by Savanta is not a chatbot – it is a sophisticated psychological simulation that preserves human complexity, modelling how consumers feel rather than simply what they say. The real power of this technology is identifying what you don’t know, and using that to augment real-world research: narrow your options with Virtual Personas, then validate emotional resonance in one focused group session. The goal is not more data – it is faster time-to-decision, backed by evidence.”
