Synthetic Users Alternative for a Quantitative Measure With Confidence Interval

AI driven participants have existed for a few years now in user research. Synthetic Users built its reputation on that ground, but its main use does not always overlap with what a team wants when it needs to know how many potential customers would actually buy at a given price.

What Synthetic Users does

Synthetic Users Inc generates AI driven synthetic participants, with a multi agent architecture combining large language models and document retrieval, for fast qualitative research: problem exploration, concept testing, scripted interviews. Billing is per interview, and the positioning leans toward agencies and enterprises, with SOC 2 compliance. The company has offices in the United States (Los Angeles), Portugal (Lisbon), and the United Kingdom (London).

It is a tool built for the interview: a conversation with a synthetic persona, from which you extract qualitative insights, much like you would with a real user in a semi structured interview.

The difference: interview versus measured distribution

This is exactly where Panelia takes a different direction. An interview, even conducted with ten or twenty personas, gives rich insights but remains hard to aggregate into a reliable numerical measure. Panelia does not hold a conversation: it surveys hundreds of synthetic respondents on a concept, price, or message, and returns a purchase intent distribution on a Likert scale, with a calculated confidence interval, not a qualitative impression.

The calibration method is published on arXiv (identifier 2510.08338) and tuned against real human data, which lets you display a margin of error rather than a raw figure with no statistical context.

Two complementary research logics

Both approaches answer different questions. To explore a poorly defined problem, understand a segment's deeper motivations, or test the language of an interface before it exists, qualitative interviews still hold real value, whether through synthetic personas or real users. To know whether a 29 euro price converts better than a 39 euro price across a large sample, or to compare three headline variants, a quantitative measure with a confidence interval gives a more actionable answer.

What Panelia delivers in practice

Describing a concept, price, and target market takes a few minutes. The answer arrives in roughly 10 minutes, at a cost of around one euro, with hundreds of synthetic respondents distributed according to the target profile, a purchase intent distribution, verbatims, and an executive summary.

Choosing the right tool for the right question

A synthetic panel, whether conversational or quantitative, remains a decision support tool, not a substitute for a human test when the stakes are genuinely critical. The question to ask before choosing is not which approach is better in the abstract, but whether the need at hand is deep exploration or measuring intent across a large sample. In the second case, a measured distribution with a confidence interval answers the decision more directly.