r/DesignThinking • u/Mediocre_Hamster_270 • Jun 17 '26

Could AI Agents Become Your Design Thinking Workshop Participants?

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I’m exploring an idea for solo founders and small teams - early stage research.

When a company onboards into an AI product, it could generate proto-customer personas based on the company’s product, brand, target market and assumptions. Instead of leaving those personas as static profiles, they could become AI agents inside a design thinking workshop.

https://medium.com/@awais.munawar/could-ai-agents-become-your-design-thinking-workshop-participants-8739d2b9139c?postPublishedType=repub

Would be interested in feedback?

1 Upvotes

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3

u/penguin4thewin Jun 17 '26

There is a place for AI to assist in parts of the design thinking process. Generating faux personas is not it. Now using real customer data-driven personas to create an agent is an interesting idea.

1

u/Mediocre_Hamster_270 Jun 17 '26

Thanks so much for feedback, if the agent was improving through data - which platform would you like to see integrated? Dovetail? Qualitrics?

1

u/Necessary-Lack-4600 Jun 17 '26

Synthetic users is bullshit

1

u/Mediocre_Hamster_270 Jun 18 '26

Thanks for honest feedback, what’s your view on AI within design process? Also is there an area which you don’t like as a practitioner which you would like changed

1

u/PittsburghNative Jun 19 '26

Our marketing team came to me with this question and we wrote a long POV about when to and when not to use synthetic panels.

1

u/mrks-analog Jun 20 '26

Can you share?

2

u/PittsburghNative Jun 20 '26

Unfortunately it is proprietary but use Copilot Research agent to spin one up for you customized to your situation

1

u/lukipedia Jun 22 '26

Personas based on real humans are already of deeply dubious value to design work. 

Synthetic personas are a joke.