Synthetic users are AI-generated virtual profiles designed to simulate the needs, behaviours, and decision-making logic of specific target segments.

Unlike digital twins, synthetic users do not represent real individuals. Instead, they are constructed from personas and segments derived from research data.

In Pharma, their use is primarily related to customer insight and marketing research, rather than clinical or product research.

Synthetic users can help organisations explore and understand:

• the informational and operational needs of physicians and healthcare professionals
• the barriers and drivers influencing the adoption of services and digital platforms
• reactions to engagement initiatives, value propositions and multichannel campaigns

Today, several solutions exist on the market to create synthetic users, often based on GPT-like models. However, many of these tools generate responses based only on generic prompts and are not grounded in structured research data.

In a highly regulated and complex sector such as pharmaceuticals, this difference is critical. The quality of insights generated by synthetic users depends directly on the quality of the research data on which they are built.

A significant example concerns a project we developed for a major international pharmaceutical company.

The objective was to strengthen relationships and engagement with General Practitioners through services and communication initiatives better aligned with their real needs.

The project began with a structured customer and target research phase, including qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey conducted on a large sample of physicians.

This research made it possible to:

• map the full physician journey
• identify key pain points and decision drivers
• understand expectations at different moments of daily clinical practice
• define representative physician profiles for the main target segments

Based on these insights, physician profiles were translated into interrogable synthetic users.

These synthetic users were built on a knowledge base derived directly from research data, designed to reflect real contexts, behaviours and professional needs.

They were then used to:

• explore and validate service concepts
• simulate reactions to new value propositions
• support the prioritisation of initiatives by balancing perceived value for physicians with operational feasibility

In this Pharma project, the use of synthetic users enabled the team to accelerate decision-making phases by approximately 30–40%.

It also reduced the number of iterations required during ideation and preliminary validation stages.

More importantly, synthetic users helped reduce project risk by improving the alignment between:

• engagement strategies
• physicians’ needs
• business objectives.

Assist Digital has already experimented with synthetic users across multiple sectors.

In travel and consumer industries, synthetic users have been used to pre-test campaign assets and personalise communication for different customer segments.

In banking, they have supported user testing activities and the structured comparison between insights generated by synthetic users and those obtained from real users.

Across all these contexts, synthetic users have acted as a tool for accelerating insight generation and enabling early validation, always grounded in real research data.

In the pharmaceutical sector, synthetic users represent a significant evolution in how organisations generate and use customer insight.

When built on solid customer research foundations, they can support marketing and customer experience teams with greater continuity, speed, and depth.

Through a rigorous methodological approach and real-world application cases, Assist Digital contributes to exploring the potential of artificial intelligence as a strategic ally in Pharma decision-making processes.