Hugo Alves - Let's Get Real About Synthetic Users (with Hugo Alves, Co-founder @ Synthetic Users)

On this episode, I speak to Hugo Alves, co-founder of Synthetic Users, about one of the most controversial topics in modern product development: using generative AI to simulate users for research and decision-making. Hugo has a background in clinical psychology and product, and has spent the past three years building a platform that generates synthetic qualitative interviews to help teams reduce risk and make better decisions.

Episode highlights:

What Synthetic Users actually is - generating in-depth qualitative interviews with AI-powered "synthetic" participants to help teams reduce risk and accelerate discovery
Most companies don't do enough, or any, research in the first place, and they need as many tools in their locker to help with the ultimate goal: making great products.
The pragmatist's view of AI - why Hugo doesn't care whether LLMs are "conscious", only whether they produce useful outputs
The agentic "swarm" approach - using specialised sub-agents (planners, interviewers, critics) instead of one giant prompt to improve quality and reduce drift
B2B vs B2C - why synthetic research works well in B2B contexts, and the harder (future) problem of modelling organisational dynamics
Bias, sycophancy and realism - the technical concerns around LLMs and how to validate responses with pilots and human comparison studies
How to use synthetic research in practice - filtering ideas, informing human interviews, and treating it as an accelerant rather than a replacement
"It shouldn't exist" - the moral argument against synthetic users, reacting to UX thought leaders and their objections, and why some of those objections aren't really about evidence

... and much more.

Contact Hugo

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugomanuelalves/
Website: https://www.syntheticusers.com/
Twitter/"X": https://twitter.com/Ugo_alves

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