He Built an AI Audience Simulator. It’s the Future of Customer Research. - Ep. 49 with Michael Taylor
Feb 26, 2025
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Michael Taylor, creator of Rally and co-author of a book on prompt engineering, joins to discuss his innovative AI tool for simulating customer responses. He shares how AI can create diverse virtual focus groups, enhancing customer research without the risks associated with traditional methods. Michael explains the role of AI in generating tailored content, such as headlines, and emphasizes the importance of effective prompt engineering. With insights on using AI creatively, he showcases Rally's capabilities, demonstrating its value for market testing.
Simulating AI personas can aid in testing marketing assumptions and ideas before implementation.
AI tools can provide valuable feedback for content creation, improving the decision-making process.
Integration of AI in job roles may lead to reevaluating job significance and potential impact on universal basic income concepts.
Deep dives
AI Simulations of People for Marketing Insights
Using AI to create simulations of multiple characters can provide valuable insights for marketing. By inputting prompts and observing the responses generated by the AI, marketing decisions can be tested and analyzed before implementation. This process allows for risk-free testing of ideas and assumptions, enhancing the decision-making process.
Enhancing Workflow Efficiency with AI Feedback
AI tools like Spiral offer valuable feedback and insights for content creation processes. By utilizing AI-generated responses to prompts, individuals can receive feedback on potential tweets, headlines, or post content. This AI feedback mechanism can streamline the content creation process and provide a diverse range of opinions for consideration before finalizing content.
Impact of AI on Job Efficiency and Universal Basic Income
The integration of AI technologies like language models raises questions about the efficiency of certain job roles. Speculations suggest that AI could potentially optimize job functions currently outweighed by unnecessary administrative tasks. This shift may lead to a reevaluation of job significance and the possible influence on universal basic income concepts in the evolving digital landscape.
Impact of AI on Organizational Processes and Bureaucracy
AI has the potential to streamline organizational processes by reducing the need for extensive rules and middle management. Traditional processes often stem from historical incidents, leading to bureaucratic structures that hinder efficiency. AI's coordination abilities could eliminate the necessity for numerous layers of rules, enhancing collaboration within large groups more effectively.
Enhancing Decision-making with AI in Productivity Tools
AI tools like Cursor offer opportunities to improve decision-making processes. Through features like rapid ideation and automated document generation, individuals can efficiently navigate between high-level concepts and detailed tasks. The ability to leverage AI agents for negotiation processes represents a futuristic approach to enhancing productivity and decision-making.
Michael Taylor has perfected the art of getting AI to speak in tongues. He’s taught it to mimic the voices of your customers—so you can see how they would respond before you ship.
Michael is the creator of Rally, a market research tool that lets you simulate an audience of AI personas. He built a simulator that lets us A/B test Every’s headlines on an audience that mimics the real Hacker News audience. It’s become a part of my writing workflow, and I love it because you test your assumptions quickly, cheaply, and without any of the risks of putting something out into the world.
Besides Rally, Michael co-authored a book on prompt engineering for O’Reilly, and he writes a column for Every about managing AI tools like you would people. In a past life, he founded a growth marketing agency which he grew to 50 people and sold in 2020. One of the reasons I’m drawn to Michael’s work is because he has a tinkerer’s mindset. He’s always exploring the limits of what a new technology can do, and what he’s into today, everyone else will likely discover six months later. We spent an hour talking about using language models to judge your work, best practices for assessing an AI’s performance, and Michael’s flow inside Cursor. He also demos Rally live on the show, testing three different potential headlines for an Every article.
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