consumer research is about to get weird.
a new paper shows you can predict real purchase intent without asking humans.
you prompt an LLM to role-play a specific customer (age, income, etc.), show it a product, have it write a short reaction -> another AI maps that text to a Likert score.
no fine-tuning. 57 surveys, 9,300 humans. ~90% of human test–retest reliability.
the trick isn’t the model. it’s how you ask.