AI Twins and the Future of Research

The Death of Personas — and What Actually Replaces Them

Featured articles: * “Death of the Segment: Why Personas Are Killing Personalization [https://swifterm.com/death-of-the-segment-personas-killing-personalisation/]“ — SwiftERM * “Your Personas Are Outdated. It’s Time to Evolve Your Approach [https://www.forrester.com/blogs/your-personas-are-outdated-its-time-to-evolve-your-approach/].” — Audrey Chee-Read, Principal Analyst, Forrester Every other post on LinkedIn is announcing the death of something. Most of it is alarmist storytelling dressed up as insight. But under the noise, two recent articles — one from SwiftERM, one from Forrester — are pointing at a real problem: personas and segmentation, built for an earlier era of marketing, have become a drag on personalization in the era of AI. Dave, Joe, and Aransas trace where personas actually came from, why they got merged with segmentation, what AI changes about the math, and what should replace the persona as the stable determinant companies are still looking for. The answer Dave keeps returning to: situations. Key Ideas Personas were never built for marketers. Dave opens with the history. The persona originated around 1999–2001 as a design thinking technique to get engineers to think more like customers. It worked. Then it migrated into marketing and merged with segmentation, and the original purpose got lost. Segmentation is the search for a stable determinant. Companies need something they can count on to define a market — geography, demographics, lifestyle, generation. Stable determinants make markets identifiable, and identifiable markets are countable. But the stability is increasingly fictional. Customers are not stable. They want different things at different times. Joe’s arc: mass market → segments → niches → markets of one → markets within one. Joe walks the progression from Henry Ford’s mass market through Alfred Sloan’s segments through the minivan that opened up niche thinking. Stan Davis’s Future Perfect (1987) saw the path to markets of one. What comes next is the flip: multiple markets inside every customer. Joe on a business trip is a different market than Joe on a leisure trip with his wife, even though it is the same person and the same credit card. This is the situational markets argument. Dave’s frame: situations can be the new stable determinant. Friday night with your wife is a context. Monday morning before work is a context. Travel in cold Chicago is a different context than travel in France. The behavior changes with the context, even when the person does not. The SwiftERM line that lands the case. “While your team is busy building a persona for Sarah, the 35-year-old yoga enthusiast, Sarah has already moved on. She isn’t a persona. She’s a dynamic stream of intent.” She bought a yoga mat six months ago. For the last three days, her behavior shows interest in high-end supplements and weightlifting gear. The persona missed the shift. The window of intent closed before the system caught up. Bayesian thinking is the right math for this. Predictive analytics has historically used past behavior to predict future behavior — yesterday you watched a romance, so tomorrow you will too. The newer move is using context, not just history. Yesterday you watched a romance because it was Friday and you were with your wife. The probability updates with every new piece of information. AI makes this practical at scale for the first time. The Apple Watch and Netflix examples make it concrete. The latest Apple Watch update no longer just serves up the workout you did last. It serves up the workout you usually do on that day of the week. Aransas lifts Monday and Wednesday and the watch knows. Netflix recommends romance on Friday night because the pattern holds across the whole user base. Restaurants have understood this for a hundred years — they do not serve breakfast at nine at night because they read the context. Customers have the same AI you do. Joe’s reminder at the end is the one that should make every CMO uneasy. Customers can now vibecode their own shopping experience. They can customize as easily as you can customize for them, and they will configure it for their own context every time. The companies that win are the ones whose offerings can flex to the customer’s situation, not the ones with the most polished persona deck. A Word on “Moments” Dave makes a careful distinction at the end. Moments is the right idea, but 20 years of design thinking have loaded the term with retail-moment-one, retail-moment-two, retail-moment-three thinking — discrete and product-out, not organic and customer-out. Situations carry the meaning without the baggage. Memorable Moments * Joe: “I might be multiple personas, but you never say there’s a person, they’re that persona. That’s just wrong — morally, much less business-wise.” * Joe: “Dave has yet to find a situation in which talking about situations does not work.” * Dave’s bathroom study: weather changed bathroom usage at French gas stations. It did not move the needle at Chicago train stations. Different situational markets. * Aransas on the Paris Marathon: one toilet, a hundred urinals, 20,000 runners — half of whom needed to sit. A persona designed for one imagined customer, and the actual situation ignored. * Joe on the American Girl Place men’s bathroom stocking products that men do not use — because the company actually thought about who was walking in with their daughter. The Strategic Takeaway Companies need something they can count on. Personas have stopped being that thing. Aggregated situations — Friday night, business travel with kids, post-workout, end-of-quarter — are stable enough to plan against and dynamic enough to respect what the customer actually wants in the moment. AI no longer makes one-to-one a scary thing to attempt. The excuse is gone. The companies that move now will be the ones the customer feels actually understands them. Subscribe and Continue the Conversation Find the show on the Experience Strategist Substack [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/], the podcast feed, and everywhere else. Article links in the show notes. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Microshifting, Modes, and the Life Systems Companies Still Refuse to See

Featured article: “I’m Not Doing Laundry on the Clock. I’m Microshifting [https://www.fastcompany.com/91416655/im-not-doing-laundry-on-the-clock-im-microshifting].” by Eve Upton-Clark, Fast Company, October 7, 2025 Owl Labs reports that 65% of workers are interested in microshifting — what the company calls structured flexibility built from short, nonlinear work blocks matched to energy, duties, and productivity. Joe, Dave, and Aransas take the article apart and put it back together in a more useful frame. The term itself gets challenged early. Joe argues most of what the article describes is closer to macroshifting (hour-long, hour-and-a-half-long focused blocks), not micro. Dave reframes the word entirely: a shift is not a period of work, it is a change of mode. And once you read it that way, the whole article becomes a confirmation of two frameworks the show has been working with for years — modes and life systems. The conversation widens into how midlife women, AI-augmented workers, and traditional workplaces all bump up against the same problem: human productivity has never been a flat eight-hour line, and the companies still pretending it is are losing the people who know better. Key Ideas Microshifting is really mode-shifting. A mode is a temporary mindset and set of behaviors. Beast mode is a mode. Podcast mode is a mode. Writing mode is a mode. What the Fast Company article describes — moving between focused blocks of work and the recovery, errands, or walks in between — is what mode-shifting looks like when a worker actually has the autonomy to do it. Routines are permanent. Life systems are responsive. Dave makes the distinction clearly. Joe’s morning is not a routine. It is a life system: PT, breakfast, email, a walk through the cul-de-sac with the newspaper and a cigar, then writing or meetings, then a midday return to email, then a shift to whatever is next. The tools, timing, cadence, and energy levels all interact. Life systems are the hidden architecture under what people now call flexibility. Midlife women have been doing this all along. Aransas’s book research keeps surfacing the same finding: midlife women with shifting hormones, attention spans, and energy levels need flexible work to keep performing at their best. The advocacy community has been making this argument for years without the label. Owl Labs surveyed a different population and gave the same behavior a name. The label travels; the underlying truth was already there. Autonomy is the through-line from YouTube to work. People prefer YouTube because they get to follow their interest in the moment instead of waiting for Channel 7 to air a plumbing show. The same instinct shows up in how people want to work: responsive to the mode they are in, not locked into a schedule designed for someone else’s mode. AI is changing the limits. AI does not get tired. People do. Recent reporting suggests AI-heavy workers are working longer hours, but framing it positively — they are finally getting to things that used to hang over their heads. The question for companies is whether that ends in more output or more exhaustion. Likely both. A new question about vulnerability. Aransas raises something she has not heard discussed elsewhere: people are admitting things to AI they would not admit to other humans. Does that practice transfer back into human relationships and make people better at acknowledging what they do not know? Or does it stay locked inside the chat window? Probably depends on the person. A change is coming either way. And a reminder about privacy. The OpenAI–Musk depositions are a useful warning. ChatGPT history is not a diary. It is discoverable. The Strategic Takeaway Dave’s closing argument: the idea that productivity equals maximum focused time on a single task has never described the human condition unless someone forced it to. What workers and customers actually want is the ability to shift modes — focus mode, recovery mode, creative mode — and to have their life systems supported through the shifts. The companies that recognize this and design for it are personalizing in a way the rest of the market is still missing. Aransas lands the discussion: ask your machines to run like machines, and your humans to run like humans. Joe’s add: there is a real opportunity here for companies to help people spend their time well. Watch the modes your customers move through. Help them get the most out of each one. Memorable Moments * Joe describing his morning walk: cul-de-sac, newspaper, cigar, possibly a future bathrobe and pipe * Dave: “It’s like you’re from a novel. A British novel.” * Joe pushing back on the word “micro” — most of what the article describes runs 30 to 90 minutes per block * The pachinko parlor footnote: Japanese office workers logging the hours without working the hours * Aransas: “Ask your machines to run like machines, and your humans to run like humans.” Mentioned in This Episode * Fast Company, “I’m Not Doing Laundry on the Clock. I’m Microshifting [https://www.fastcompany.com/91416655/im-not-doing-laundry-on-the-clock-im-microshifting]“ by Eve Upton-Clark * Owl Labs flexibility research * The previous episode on YouTube and shifting media attention * Dave’s upcoming workshops This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

‘Subway Takes’ and the Future of YouTube TV

Kareem Rahma built Subway Takes into a hit with 2 million Instagram followers, a metro card as a microphone, and a format that runs in seconds. Now he’s walking away from a CNN deal to put his next show Keep the Meter Running on YouTube — because YouTube, in his words, is where the next Bourdain and the next Lena Dunham will come from. In this episode, Joe, Dave, and Aransas dig into what Rahma’s bet actually means for experience strategy. The conversation moves from short-form content design, to the death of “Gen Z YouTube” as a useful category, to why every brand needs to rethink where and how it reaches customers in the micro-moments that now define modern media consumption. 100% agree or 100% disagree — you decide. What We’re Talking About This Episode * Rahma’s CNN walk-away. Why he turned down a legacy media deal to own his independence on YouTube, and what that signals about creator economics now. * YouTube as television, not social media. YouTube’s monthly share of TV watch-time hit ~12% in 2025 per Nielsen — higher than any network or streamer. Rahma’s read: “this is a TV screen, but right now no one’s making television for it.” * Subway Takes as situational design. The subway isn’t a backdrop. It’s the situation. The format, the duration, the point of view, the 100% agree / 100% disagree script — all of it is built around a specific consumer moment. * The Lorne Michaels frame. Rahma isn’t playing the virality slot machine. He’s building a show. A nice change from all of the influencer content out there. * Why “Gen Z YouTube” is a lazy frame. Dave pushes back on the article’s generational framing. His adult kids watch YouTube over Netflix. So does Aransas. So do millions of others. The situation around the screen has changed. Why This Matters for Experience Strategy Three themes worth pulling out: 1. Content is situational, not channel-based. Dave traces this back to a 2015 Collaboratives conversation with a major media company about designing content for the 30-second, 90-second, two-minute windows that now define daily consumption. A decade later, that conversation is finally mainstream. The companies still organizing around channel rather than situation are the ones being lapped. 2. POV is the differentiator. Rahma’s 100% agree / 100% disagree technique forces you to take strong point of view in every interaction. Brands that hedge — that try to be all things to all customers — are getting outpaced by creators who plant a flag. 3. The CNN ticker is the OG infinite scroll. Joe drops a sharp observation mid-episode: 24-hour news already pioneered the segment-plus-chyron structure we now call short-form. The need hasn’t changed. The means of meeting it has. Which connects to a Clayton Christensen line Dave only partly agrees with — and to Stone Mantel’s view that situations themselves do change, not just the jobs underneath them. Memorable Moments * Joe’s Transformation Economy book made Thinkers50’s top 10 management books of 2026. * Aransas on the invisible load of AI: ideas start faster, but humans still have to finish them — and the cognitive load is going up, not down. * Dave on what Cargo has done to his wardrobe: black t-shirt to medium gray. Things have changed. * The unhoused-person-falling-in-your-lap test for quintessential New York. * Joe’s Easter Bunny / Cargo joke. You’ll know it when you hear it. Quick References * The Talk Show Where Celebrities and Mamdani Share Their Hot Takes [https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/kareem-rahma-subway-takes-keep-the-meter-running-bf6dc591] https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/kareem-rahma-subway-takes-keep-the-meter-running-bf6dc591— Sam Schube, WSJ Magazine, May 12, 2026 * Subway Takes [https://www.youtube.com/@SubwayTakes/shorts] — Kareem Rahma’s hit short-form show * The Transformation Economy [https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+transformation+economy&adgrpid=193184235584&hvadid=792691223706&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9029734&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=7511851690228057744--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=7511851690228057744&hvtargid=kwd-2270182222316&hydadcr=997_1015362972_2342266&mcid=36e5c8b1996a32c18396f32a4d62bf3b&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_22d2s3pd8j_e] by B. Joseph Pine II — recognized by Thinkers50, 2026 Join the Collaboratives Dave’s working the phones — it’s that time of year. The Collaboratives is the Stone Mantel + Cargo partnership exploring situational markets as a growth mechanism in a world where parity is everywhere and growth is harder than ever. Free market analyses are my gift to anyone who joins. Workshop coming May 21. Send me a note if you’d like to be invited to the May 21st Workshop. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Why Spas and Gyms Are Beating Stores — and What It Signals About the Transformation Economy

For the first time on record, experience-based tenants — spas, gyms, wellness studios, entertainment venues — are outpacing traditional goods retailers in leasing shopping center space, with wellness and fitness leading the charge. Joe Pine, Dave Norton, and Aransas Savas unpack what this shift actually means: it is not just a retail story, it is confirmation that the transformation economy Joe predicted more than two decades ago has arrived. The conversation traces the arc from malls to experiential anchors, examines why some brands (Red Bull) rode the wave and others (Nike) missed it, and lands on a provocation for any company still selling goods: if you want to sell products today, sell experiences. If you want to sell even more products, sell transformation. Key Takeaways The bifurcation is accelerating. Post-COVID data from high-end luxury shows goods flattening or declining in price while experiences shot upward. The Economist’s October feature on high-net-worth luxury quietly re-labeled “services” as “experiences” in its TikTok follow-up — a small edit that tells the whole story. Experiential venues are the new anchors. The old mall anchor was a department store. The new anchor is an escape room cluster, a bowling alley that is really an entertainment complex, an NHL team’s practice facility inside a converted suburban mall. Square footage is shifting toward places people want to spend time, not places they pass through. Goods still sell — but best through the experience. Joe’s story about the original Nike Town in Chicago captures the mistake most brands still make: Nike Town had a line out the door and did not charge admission. Over time, goods crept back into the floor space that used to belong to basketball courts and events. Red Bull took the opposite path and became an experience company that sells an energy drink. The trajectories diverged for a reason. Experiences commoditize fast. SoulCycle opened a category; spin studios saturated it within a decade. The same glut is forming in spas and boutique gyms right now. The next move is specialization and bespoke combinations — and beyond that, transformation. Transformation is the durable business model. Experiences are episodic. Transformations are long-term engagements, which makes them long-term revenue. Aransas frames the shift cleanly: not just time well spent, but time well invested. Companies that move from experience provider to journey partner earn a different kind of relationship — and a different kind of margin. Social media is an experience platform. Influencers are in the experience business. Some investors will not touch a product today until the influencer strategy is nailed down. Advertising and packaging are shrinking as a share of how people discover and buy. Memorable Moments * Joe’s recap of his Monaco keynote at the Forbes Travel Guide Summit, where luxury goods manufacturers showed up because they are all getting into luxury experiences now * The Nike Town queue that was not charging admission — and what it foreshadowed about Nike’s retreat from flagship experiences * Dave on the Utah Mammoth buying a suburban mall and turning most of the square footage into a place fans come to watch practice * Aransas on walking out of a spa day carrying products because she had just seen, on her own face, what they actually do * The throwaway that lands: “Gosh, we’re smart.” The Strategic Question for Every Brand If you sell goods, where is your experiential venue — physical or virtual — and what transformation are you actually offering the customer who shows up? The brands that answer this well over the next five years will be the ones occupying the square footage the department stores used to hold. Also In This Episode Aransas’s Substack is now the 30th fastest-rising publication in Health and Wellness on the platform. Subscribe, Share, Comment If this conversation sparked something, share it with a colleague and leave a comment. We read them. And subscribe to the Substack for the written companion to the show. Joe is heading out on book tour for The Transformation Economy. We will be back soon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

AI Twins and the Future of Research

Two Wall Street Journal articles are making waves in the market research world — one asking whether AI can replace human research participants, and another profiling a teenage-founded startup called Aura that’s already attracted McDonald’s and EY. Dave, Joe, and Aransas bring their combined decades of consumer research experience to the question everyone in insights is quietly asking: is this the end of primary research, or the beginning of something more powerful? What We Cover The two WSJ articles at the center of this conversation. The first covers Simile, a startup building agentic AI twins modeled on real people for polling and market research. The second profiles Aura, a company founded by people younger than Aransas’s high schooler, betting that AI bots can predict human behavior better than humans themselves. Dave’s evolving reaction — Worry, skepticism, and then possibility. His first instinct was worry. Stone Mantel has built its practice on deep consumer research, and the promise of AI twins that can answer with 0.5% accuracy at first felt wrong. But the more he sat with it, the more he saw a useful analogy: flight simulators. Simulators serve a real purpose as long as everyone is clear they are not the same as flying the actual plane. The critical flaw in current AI twin models. Both Dave and Joe land on the same problem independently: AI twins are built on static preferences and demographic profiles. They treat people as if behavior is fixed — “this is how soccer moms respond” — when the entire premise of situational research is that behavior shifts with context. What mode is the person in? What situation are they navigating? Those questions are not being asked. Joe puts it plainly: they didn’t ask anything about modes. Where AI twins might actually work well. Trend prediction and aggregate market analysis are reasonable use cases. If you want to know whether fruit-flavored tea is about to have a moment, AI models scanning historical purchasing data and cultural signals can probably get you there. The harder problem — and the more valuable one — is understanding what a specific person cares about in a specific moment, and that requires something current AI twins are not equipped to provide. What AI twins could become with better design. Dave raises an intriguing possibility: after completing primary research with a real consumer, could that data become the seed for ongoing simulation and modeling? Not as a replacement for the research, but as a way to extend its value across time and decisions. He also flags the bias risk — every feedback loop that improves AI accuracy may also drift it further from the original human signal. Joe’s Wall-E scenario. The Terminator isn’t Joe’s fear. Wall-E is. Personal language models hanging out in your Alexa, learning everything you say and do, eventually making purchasing decisions on your behalf — and research shifting to focus on the PLM rather than the person. The result: consumers with no agency, led entirely by AI intermediaries and the consumer goods companies they serve. The consent problem. CBS claimed 400,000 people opted in to being replicated as AI twins. Aransas is skeptical — and direct. That was some very fine print. Companies building AI twin programs need to be serious about how they are collecting this data, not just technically compliant. Key Idea If AI can actually predict behavior change, it is no longer a tool — it is strategy. That quote, attributed to a Coca-Cola executive in the second article, captures what is at stake. Dave frames it through the lens of superpowers: AI gives companies the ability to do things they could not do otherwise. The question is whether the thing they are doing actually reflects how real humans behave. Continue the Conversation Join Dave, Joe, and Aransas on The Experience Strategist [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/]Substack to go deeper on this episode’s themes. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theexperiencestrategist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]