US Bank partnered with a startup called Supernatural AI that can create AI avatars of key target customers and shave months off the strategic development cycle. “We’re able to get to the answers we need way more quickly than we could through a typical human process only,” CMO Michael Lacorazza said. Supernatural created five different audiences profiles for us based on what we were going after demographically and psychographically. They used multiple third-party data sources to assemble the audiences and then trained them using different models so we could activate against them. You can ask these audiences the same sort of questions as you’d ask humans and get responses back, but you’re doing it through a large-language model chat engine. Say we have a synthetic audience of young, affluent, college-educated people in the first one-third of their career. Maybe they’ve also formed a household and they’re financially stable. We could ask them questions about what’s important to them in their banking relationship, what type of products they’re looking for and what sort of financial decisions they need help with. It was very important to us at first to see if we could validate what we were being told because, you know, these insights are being generated by a machine. So we did some tests with humans and the themes came back with a 90% to 95% overlap with the synthetic audiences. Going forward, we’ll continue to validate, especially as models change and evolve, but we have a lot of confidence in what we’re doing. And, at the end of the day, humans are making the final decisions on all of the work we do. We always apply our own judgment.