Market researcher Heatseeker announced last week the launch of Heatseeker Synthetics—an innovation showcased in collaboration with KPMG Australia at the KPMG Futuresphere at SXSW Sydney.
Heatseeker Synthetics combines large-scale behavioural experimentation with advanced AI to create interactive “synthetic personas,” living, talking, data-trained avatars that behave like real customers. Each avatar is built exclusively from hundreds of thousands of verified behavioural data points and achieves more than 95 percent predictive confidence in how people think, feel and act in the real world.
The Strategic Imperative
In today’s faster business cycles, customer behaviour shifts daily. Markets are volatile, decisions are accelerated, and leaders can’t afford to be asleep at the wheel. Traditional research methods, static reports, small focus groups, or lagging surveys can’t keep pace with real-world change.
Synthetics bridges that gap. By fusing behavioural science with AI, Heatseeker delivers live, evidence-based insights at the speed of decision-making. For CMOs and strategists, it’s the difference between reacting to the past and predicting the future.
“This changes how decisions get made,” said Kate O’Keeffe, co-founder and CEO of Heatseeker. “For too long, businesses have relied on small panels or stale surveys to represent millions of customers. With synthetics, you can speak directly to living, data-trained versions of your market or potential future market and get real-time answers grounded in what people actually do.
“This is customer obsession made real. Every brand wants to be closer to its customers, and we’ve built a way to put them in the room—responding in real time, grounded in how people actually behave.”
Synthetics bring customer insights to life in an entirely new way. Each persona begins as a large-scale behavioural experiment that captures millions of real-world data points from thousands of verified participants. Each persona is then turned into an interactive AI avatar that can be spoken to in natural language, answering only from the evidence it is trained on.
Synthetics transforms static reports into dynamic, always-on customer panels that evolve as markets do. Teams can instantly test creative ideas, pricing models and product features, run “what-if” scenarios or simulate campaign performance before launching—all within the same interface. The result is faster learning, reduced uncertainty and a step change in how customer decisions are made.
Through a simple conversational interface, teams can ask questions like: “Which campaign headline is more likely to drive trial intent?” “What makes our customers switch brands?” “How would Gen Z respond to a new pricing model?” “What market signals matter most right now?”
Within seconds, the avatar answers, pulling from millions of live behavioural signals collected in real-world contexts.
To demonstrate the power of Synthetics, Heatseeker collaborated with the KPMG Futures team to create a live showcase at the KPMG Futuresphere at last week’s SXSW Sydney.
Visitors met four life-like Heatseeker-powered customer avatars—Liam, the Home Steward (Financial Services), Ben, the Green Pragmatist (Energy), Chloe, the Connected Mover (Telco), and Sarah, the Household Hero (Retail). The avatars were all trained on live behavioural data from real buyers. Visitors were able to ask questions and instantly see how real audiences might respond, bringing customer insight to life in real time.
The collaboration highlighted how enterprise-grade behavioural AI can transform strategic decision-making within businesses.
For the launch, Heatseeker ran 25 behavioural experiments across 60 audience segments in New South Wales and Victoria, reaching 250,000 people in 120 hours, the team captured millions of behavioural signals and over 12,000 insights that powered the first generation of synthetic buyer avatars demonstrated at the KPMG Futuresphere.
“At SXSW Sydney, KPMG showcased Heatseeker-powered AI avatars—human-like customer simulations that can be asked anything from ‘What makes you switch brands?’ to ‘How do you feel about sustainability in your household?,” said Sudeep Gohil, partner, creates, customer and operations at KPMG Australia.
“Every brand wants to be customer-centric. This is a world-first that confidently brings that ambition to life. You can now hold a real conversation with an AI avatar that thinks, talks and reacts like a customer, trained solely on verified behavioural data. It gives leaders the ability to bring the customer directly into the boardroom and the confidence to act on what truly drives customer decisions.”
Each synthetic persona is grounded in what Heatseeker calls “gold-standard data” insights derived only from live behavioural experiments, not public data or stated opinions. This ensures that every response is statistically sound, repeatable and defensible—a breakthrough for organisations seeking to base major investments on empirical evidence rather than instinct.
“For the SXSW showcase, our avatars were trained on fresh behavioural experiments,” said Rutger Coolen, co-founder and chief product officer at Heatseeker. “That’s the point: talking, breathing AI personas grounded purely in what people actually do. It’s like having a focus group that never sleeps and it gets smarter with every question.”
Kate O’Keeffe concluded, “Heatseeker Synthetics brings together speed and statistical confidence so leaders can make decisions that are not just fast, but empirically right. For too long, research has captured what people say rather than what they do.
“By closing that gap, we’re giving businesses a live, evidence-based view of customer reality, enabling them to see and act on the truth before the market moves.”
