This article was co-authored by Cameron Fink, Co-Founder and CEO of Aaru, as part of a strategic partnership with Prophet to redefine experience intelligence through AI simulation. Read more about Aaru and their story in their recent Wall Street Journal profile.

What if you could understand your customer’s experience across a journey that spans thousands of touchpoints in just 48 hours?

That’s no longer a hypothetical. With AI simulation, Prophet and Aaru are helping brands model and action on customer journeys, particularly among hard to reach audiences.

This isn’t “synthetic research.” It’s a new form of predictive intelligence: Aaru’s simulations are built on proprietary behavioral and outcomes-based data that mirrors real-world patterns with remarkable accuracy. The result? A clearer, faster, and more granular path to understanding what customers experience, feel, and do —and how to act on it to drive loyalty and growth.

Success Story: From Impossible to Possible

Prophet and Aaru partnered with a leading healthcare company specializing in emergency care to tackle the daunting challenge of understanding the patient experience during unplanned care events. The team simulated 12,500 survey respondents, “agents,” across patients, providers, caregivers, and health system leaders — giving us a comprehensive, 360-degree view of what truly happens in these critical moments.

A simulated patient described their journey this way:

“Treatment was the strongest part of my emergency department visit. The care team was attentive even under pressure, and I felt genuinely listened to. In contrast, discharge was confusing; I left with a sense that key details were missing, which made managing at home more stressful. The journey back to routine life was neither easy nor especially difficult, but I wish the transition out of the hospital matched the quality of care I received inside.”

This engagement surfaced breakthrough insights that would have been nearly impossible to capture using traditional research methods, especially in a comparable window of time and with the same depth and granularity of insights.

Most notably, it exposed a significant disconnect within the organization: While 78% of C-suite leaders believed they had a formal patient experience strategy in place, only 19% of frontline doctors and nurses were even aware such a strategy existed. Additionally, priorities for improving the patient experience varied widely across these groups, showing a lack of consensus and alignment.

The AI-driven simulation revealed four core pillars essential to delivering an outstanding patient experience, each accompanied by actionable tactics to enhance the patient experience.

This research closed long-standing knowledge gaps and equipped the organization with tangible, cross-functional focus areas to drive patient-centered transformation at scale.

Three Game-Changing Benefits: Why AI Simulation Leads to Uncommon Growth

1. Acceleration Without Sacrifice

In a world where customer expectations and market conditions evolve at lightning speed, waiting weeks for static insights is no longer good enough. Simulation can help collapse months of work into 24-48 hours. These accelerated insights empower companies to respond to market signals, emerging risks, or new opportunities in near real-time, fueling not just quick wins but sustainable growth.

2. Access to Insights you Couldn’t get Before

The old approach relied on your ability to recruit a qualified research panel or persuade someone to take a survey. With simulation, you break free of those limits. You can now reach and analyze audiences that were once inaccessible. Whether they are emergency care patients, users of third-party risk management software, or clinical engineers, to name a few examples of engagements Aaru and Prophet have collaborated on. More importantly, audience simulation and predictive modeling unlock a new layer: understanding not just what your customers say, but modeling what they actually do across an expanding set of complex, real-world touchpoints.

3. Anticipation That Drives Action

Simulations don’t just report on the past; they illuminate the path forward. Through advanced modeling, you gain predictive insight into customer behavior — forecasting outcomes, quantifying risk, and testing “what if” scenarios before making big bets. This elevates decision-making from reflective to proactive, enabling organizations to enhance customer journeys, mitigate churn, or unlock new innovation ideas in a way traditional analytics simply cannot match.

You can now answer questions such as:

• How will customers’ experience expectations evolve in 3 years?
• How will changes in pricing or a new feature rollout impact different high-value customer segments?
• Where are the breakpoints in a cross-channel journey that drive churn?

The Future: Growth Through Unlocked Intelligence

AI simulations are not merely efficiency tools. They are growth engines — providing leaders with accelerated insights, predictive models, and access to customer truths that were once off-limits. Through the Prophet / Aaru partnership, the horizon for customer experience has expanded: growth is no longer gated by the limitations of legacy research.

Since the seemingly overnight emergence of ChatGPT, businesses everywhere have been buzzing about generative AI’s impact, particularly on process efficiency and workforce productivity. While the benefits in those areas are indeed transformational, we’ve been struck by how consumers and their perceptions and experience of AI have been largely sidelined in the conversation. Similarly, we see immense opportunities for GenAI to unlock growth, a frontier of AI transformation many businesses haven’t yet reached. 

That’s why we’re launching a study to explore: 

• What are consumers doing with GenAI today, and why?  
• How will GenAI affect them?     
• What are their plans for the future? 

The “tl;dr” on Our Initial Findings  

While the quantitative research is still underway, we wanted to share initial findings from our qualitative sessions because we think the implications are potentially profound. Specifically, we see clear evidence of the rise of AI-powered consumers who are moving faster, doing more and expecting more in terms of fast, frictionless and individualized offerings. They seem increasingly ready to turn over more of their lives to AI, are watching brands’ commitments to ethical AI, and are deeply invested in finding even more ways to benefit from it.  

Thus, firms looking to spark sustainable and transformative growth with GenAI will likely need to accelerate their plans to get ahead of – or even keep up with – the most creative-minded early adopters and power-users. That’s especially true for firms in retail, CPG, hospitality, financial services and healthcare, which are in the vanguard of GenAI adoption. We hope the insights in this article help you connect the dots between your AI strategies and the emergence of the AI-powered consumer.  

What Consumers Are Telling Us 

As is always the case with new technology, consumers have diverse views about GenAI. There are power users actively adopting GenAI across many facets of their personal and professional lives and more passive and cautious adopters. Tinkering is the norm for many in the middle. Each of these groups exhibits different uptake and usage patterns. There is also considerable nuance in their attitudes toward AI ethics and responsible adoption by businesses.  

Despite these distinctions, the initial phases of our research yielded evidence of five meaningful patterns in consumer adoption of AI.  

1. All Types of Consumers Are Moving Surprisingly Fast  

Conventional wisdom says that businesses are leading the way on AI, but our research shows that consumers are moving faster than many companies realize. When talking to us about AI, consumers used their own terms and definitions. They clearly see the value of the apps and tools they use and do not feel overwhelmed by AI’s complexity. That’s true of even the slower and more cautious adopters. Natural language processing – and voice integration – are of great interest to all types of users, because they make GenAI tools feel more accessible than the digital tools and platforms of the past.   

• What consumers say: “With AI, I don’t have to go down the rabbit hole of Googling my ailments but can have a conversation. It says, ‘it could be this’ and I say, ‘no, it’s not that.’ That’s better than having to read and read. AI scans for me and has a conversation,” said a somewhat frequent 60-year-old user.  
• So what: Because consumers are moving fast, there is urgency to identify new ways to engage with AI-enabled experiences that map to consumer needs and preferences. 
• Who’s doing it right: Colgate-Palmolive is leveraging AI to improve consumer experiences across the journey – from enhancing search with AI, to personalizing creative, to rapidly prototyping and testing product innovations.   

Consumers are using generative AI tools before, during and after purchases.

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2. Beyond Personal Productivity, Consumers Prioritize Creativity, Fun and Inspiration

Productivity is a big part of AI’s attraction. But our research shows that inspiration, shopping and fun are other major motivations to use GenAI. One consumer told us about how he enjoys creating AI images on his phone and sharing them with friends.  

• What consumers say: “When I’m on the bus, I will click over to [an AI image generator] and put in some words and just play around for 15-30 minutes,” said an occasional 30-year-old user.  
• So what: For businesses, creative AI-driven marketing activations and experiences can boost engagement by creating joy and delight.  
• Who’s doing it right: Warner Bros.’ Barbie AI Selfie Generator allowed users to design their own unique Barbie. Reaching 13 million users in just a few months, the generator was a hallmark of Barbie’s world-class marketing campaign.  

3. Consumers Have Strikingly Specific AI Aspirations

That old paradigm “if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse” may be less applicable as modern consumers become more tech savvy and have easy access to powerful tools. Consumers don’t necessarily grasp the technical fine points or legal guardrails about AI; but they are pretty clear about the experience they want.   

• What consumers say: “If I could enter what I want to eat and if my fridge could use AI to analyze the ingredients I have, what I need from the shop, and then build a shopping cart I can review and order, that would be great,” said a somewhat frequent 65-year-old user.  
• So what: Because consumers are imagining new ways to use AI, they can help imagine and co-create breakthrough applications as part of clearly defined innovation processes.  
• Who’s doing it well: Coca-Cola’s Creations platform provides a space to engage consumers and capture their input for new product innovations. The Y3000 Flavor of the Future was created by leveraging consumer insight and the power of AI to drive engagement with Gen Z, the brand’s growth target.  

4. In the Eyes of Consumers, ChatGPT is Only the Beginning

The first killer app of the GenAI age, ChatGPT is incredibly powerful for consumers and among the most popular and frequently used apps. But consumers hope to use many other applications in the future, largely because they see the limits of ChatGPT; as one consumer told us, “It only takes me so far.” In fact, they are looking for more nuanced, bespoke answers to the questions they need. 

• What consumers say: “I’ve tried things like ChatGPT for trip itinerary planning. It’s helpful but doesn’t get that detailed. If I want to know details like the safest place to walk around as a woman, it can’t give me that yet,” said a high-frequency, 23-year-old user. 
• So what: Consumers want more precision, meaning businesses can develop bespoke solutions based on proprietary data and look to deliver on unique brand promises. Build, buy and partner – depending on the use case, each of those approaches can be viable.  
• Who’s doing it well: Via a partnership with OpenAI, KAYAK used its historical travel database to train GPT-4, the large language model. The goal is to help users find travel experiences meeting their precise needs.  

5. Consumers Are Paying Attention to How Businesses Talk About AI 

Consumers told us they want to hear about AI, but within preferred contexts and applications. If an experience is piloting or experimenting with AI, consumers appreciate a call out that it’s AI, and that it’s “still learning.”  

Some consumers are annoyed by “overly promotional” language about AI; they are looking for authenticity and transparency instead. We also heard about the importance of brands communicating their commitments to use AI in ways that align to the organizational purpose and values – clear evidence of consumer interest in AI ethics.  

• What consumers say: “I’m thinking about what brand do I want to support with AI? Who is investing and being thoughtful in terms of protection and checks? And which firms are brazenly advancing and not so worried about protection?” said a high-frequency 23-year-old user. 
• So what: Because consumers are paying attention, brands should be deliberate in crafting intentional, authentic messaging around AI, presenting it in the moments that matter. The focus should be on explaining brand intentions and providing helpful and transparent guidance. For more ways Marketers can use AI, see our Four Ways to Maximize Value  
• Who’s doing it well: S&P Global is taking a holistic approach in positioning its brand for the age of AI. It’s developing an AI brand narrative linked to its company purpose, designed to resonate across its wide array of audiences. From there, it’s integrating clear, consistent messaging across all of its brand communications and experiences that stem from that positioning. 

Ethics Matter on the Road Ahead 

Discussions of AI are incomplete without mentioning ethics. And, according to our research, all types of users – from cautious adopters to more pragmatic users – have AI ethics on their mind. The common theme is that ethics and brand intentions matter, though they will influence decisions differently in different contexts and for different users. Consumers aren’t just blindly adopting every GenAI app; rather, they are thoughtfully considering and – in the case of power users – calculating where they want to spend their time and engagement. 

Imagine a world where multiple AIs work in the background to find bargains, negotiate better prices for consumers, and make smart purchase decisions. Or where personal assistants connect accounts and act on consumers’ behalf across financial services, healthcare and other sectors, particularly with those companies that have cultivated trust with their AI deployments.