CVS Health ran a prescription survey with 400,000 participants last fall, but none of the respondents actually existed. They all came from Simile, a one-year-old startup that creates “agentic twins” of real people. Simile’s head of product, Mihika Kapoor, states that responses are between 85–99 % accurate. That is incredibly high, if true.
The underlying research offers a bit more insight into the methodology. The researchers conducted two-hour interviews with more than a thousand Americans. They then built three kinds of agents per participant: one from the interview alone, one from survey responses that included General Social Survey items and a Big Five personality test, and one from both together. Finally, the agents answered new survey questions, and their answers were checked against how the real participants had answered the same questions. Two weeks later, the researchers put those same questions to the participants once more, to see how closely people match themselves. The results were as follows:
- Participants hit their own earlier answers 79.53 % of the time (that was the ceiling from now on).
- Interview agents hit those real people’s answers 65.67 % of the time, which is 83 % of that ceiling.
- Survey agents reached 82 % of the ceiling, and agents built from both sources reached 86 %.
Therefore, Simile’s numbers seem a little exaggerated, but not too far off. And they may have found a secret sauce to achieve better results than the researchers. Either way, it’s quite impressive and will likely profoundly change market research.