Impact TL;DR
- AI moved upstream in the research process. Instead of using AI only to automate interviewing or moderation, IFOP explored how synthetic consumers could contribute before fieldwork begins.
- Hard-to-reach perspectives became easier to investigate early. Teams could map possible attitudes, objections, and segment differences before making the larger investment required to reach people directly.
- Traditional research gained a sharper starting point. Early synthetic findings could help refine hypotheses, stimulus, sampling priorities, and discussion guides for subsequent human research.
Our partner
IFOP is a market research agency helping clients understand consumers, brands, and markets. As AI tools entered the industry, the team looked beyond novelty and efficiency to a more fundamental question: where can AI create research value that existing methods do not already provide?
AI interviewers and moderators can make parts of fieldwork faster. But automating the conversation does not necessarily solve one of the industry's hardest constraints: finding and engaging the right people, especially when an audience is small, specialized, sensitive, geographically dispersed, or otherwise difficult to reach.
That gap led IFOP to iMario.
"iMario doesn't replace traditional research—it makes every stage of it smarter."
Kevin Zhou, Managing Director, IFOP
The problem
Much of the first wave of AI in market research focused on reproducing an existing workflow. An AI moderator could ask the questions. An AI interviewer could operate at more hours and across more conversations. Summarization could happen faster.
These improvements matter, but the underlying research still depends on recruiting participants. If the people a client needs to understand are difficult to identify or reach, a more efficient interview does not remove the bottleneck.
IFOP was interested in a different model: using synthetic consumers to create an additional layer of inquiry around traditional research. That layer could be available earlier, explore more possibilities, and help the agency decide where human fieldwork would create the most value.
The partnership: Adding a synthetic-consumer layer to established methods
The partnership brought iMario's synthetic consumer capabilities into IFOP's research thinking—not as a replacement for people, but as a complement to the agency's existing expertise and methods.
Synthetic consumers could be configured around a target audience and interviewed about a client's brand, product, or market strategy. Their responses gave the research team an early view of the plausible attitudes and tensions it might encounter: what different people could value, where a proposition might lose credibility, and which assumptions needed to be challenged.
IFOP could then use those signals to improve the next stage of research. A discussion guide could probe a newly surfaced tension. A sample could give more attention to a potentially important segment. A concept could be revised before it consumed scarce time with hard-to-reach participants.
The role of synthetic research was clear: expand the hypothesis space and improve preparation. Claims about real-world prevalence, lived experience, or final market behavior still required the appropriate human and behavioral evidence.
Use-case 1: Exploring hard-to-reach perspectives before recruitment
Research with hard-to-reach audiences carries a high cost of opportunity. Every interview slot matters, and teams cannot afford to discover halfway through fieldwork that the discussion guide is asking the wrong questions.
iMario offered IFOP a way to rehearse the research first. Synthetic consumers representing the target audience could respond to early questions, react to stimulus, and expose possible differences in language or priorities. The exercise could reveal whether the study was framed around assumptions the audience might not share.
This did not make a synthetic participant equivalent to a person with the lived experience in question. It gave researchers a broader and earlier set of hypotheses to test when direct access was limited.
That distinction allowed IFOP to use AI responsibly while still gaining practical value from it.
Use-case 2: Stress-testing brand and market strategies earlier
Clients often arrive with strategic options that are still taking shape: alternative positionings, messages, market-entry assumptions, or target audiences. Traditional fieldwork can evaluate those choices, but it is most valuable when the options and questions have already been thought through carefully.
With iMario, IFOP could expose early strategic ideas to synthetic consumers before locking the formal research design. The agency could explore what each direction communicated, what objections it triggered, and whether different audience profiles interpreted the proposition in the way the client intended.
An unexpected response was not treated as a final market verdict. It became a research lead—a signal to revise the idea, add a probe, or investigate a particular audience more deliberately in fieldwork.
"The real value of AI in research goes beyond faster interviews; iMario opens new ways to explore perspectives that are otherwise difficult to examine early."
Kevin Zhou
Use-case 3: Creating a stronger bridge into human research
The value of a synthetic study depends on what it improves downstream.
For IFOP, the most useful workflow connected synthetic exploration with established research practice. Early interviews could help map the range of possible reactions. Researchers could then identify which findings were robust enough to inform the study design, which were uncertain, and which were important enough to validate directly with people.
This created a practical handoff:
- Use synthetic consumers to explore the problem and challenge the initial assumptions.
- Translate the strongest signals and uncertainties into a more focused research design.
- Use human qualitative, quantitative, or behavioral evidence to validate the decisions that require it.
Rather than competing with traditional research, iMario could help IFOP make it more targeted—especially when time with the right participants was the scarcest resource.
A broader role for AI in market research
The IFOP partnership reflects a shift in how research agencies can evaluate AI. The question is no longer only whether a machine can conduct an interview. It is whether AI can expand what researchers are able to explore, help them learn earlier, and improve the quality of the evidence gathered next.
iMario gave IFOP a way to test that proposition in practice. Synthetic consumers added speed and breadth at the beginning of the process; the agency's methodological judgment determined how those signals should shape the work that followed.
Related: what synthetic individuals are, why synthetic research and traditional research work differently, how iMario research reports are built.
