Digital Twins and the Future of Market Research: A Conversation with Jason Maddocks

Traditional methods - panels, interviews and surveys - remain essential for depth and validation in market research. But when speed, cost and recurrence of use cases matter most, researchers need complementary tools. That’s where synthetic digital twins fit in: a faster, lower-cost way to gather high-frequency, directional insights alongside human-based methods.

To dive deeper, I spoke with Jason Maddocks, our VP of Engineering at Emporia Research, who has led the development of our synthetics offering and shared how digital twins expand the researcher’s toolkit.

What Exactly Is a Digital Twin?

Jason Maddocks:
“A synthetic digital twin is a high-quality, agentic persona built from a mix of sources - interviews, transcripts, published papers, survey data, and profile attributes. Unlike generic AI personas or aggregated synthetic datasets, Emporia’s twins are one-to-one representations of real people. They behave as their real-world counterparts would, enabling research outcomes that are both fast and trustworthy.”

In other words, digital twins don’t just generate data. They simulate decision-making, recall lived experiences and evolve as the real person does - grounded in authentic memory and behavior signals.

The Problems Digital Twins Solve

One of the biggest challenges in research today is keeping pace with the speed of business while staying within budget. Recruiting participants and fielding studies can take weeks, and costs can quickly add up - especially when the same questions need to be explored repeatedly.

Jason explains:
“With digital twins, you get high-value signal much faster. This lets you unlock quick insights to guide strategy, then use your intuition to decide where deeper human research is worth the investment.”

By using digital twins for the fast, repeatable layers of research, teams free up time and resources to focus their deeper efforts where they matter most.

Why Emporia’s Approach Is Different

Emporia has always been known for low fraud rates and high-quality data. That principle guided the design of our synthetics.

Instead of forking synthetic users from generic large language models, our twins are built on custom architectures:

• Fine-tuned models at the individual level
  
• Memory-hydrated streams of verified transcripts and survey responses
  
• Ingestion of secondary sources (LinkedIn, blogs, company content, browsing/intent data, etc) for added context
  

This means our twins don’t just “sound right” - they benchmark 2–3x closer to real human survey data than baseline models, measured by mean absolute difference.

Why This Matters for Researchers

With Emporia’s digital twins, researchers can expect:

• 50–80% cost savings versus traditional quant sampling
• The ability to launch an unbound number of studies once agents are built
• Purposefully built UI for MRX use cases (survey tooling, reporting, etc)
• 2-3x improvement in accuracy compared to raw model usage
• Consistency across studies - no more waiting weeks for results

As Jason put it:
“Synthetics are the gateway to quick insights. You get the speed and scale to explore a problem rapidly, and then you can dive deep with the same individuals when you need more nuance.”

In practice, this means researchers spend less time waiting and more time interpreting, applying their intuition where it matters most.

Looking Ahead

Jason believes digital twins will reshape the future of research:
“Imagine a world where brand trackers run continuously with both twins and humans, where respondents are rewarded for keeping their twins aligned, and where researchers get real-time, high-signal insights without wasting anyone’s time. That’s where we’re headed.”

The Pilot Program is Now Live

We’re bringing these capabilities directly to our partners through the Emporia B2B Digital Twins Pilot Program.

The timeline:

• Phase 1 (Weeks 0–1): Secure client data transfer and onboarding
  
• Phase 2 (Weeks 2–4): Twin creation, alignment, and micro-survey validation
  
• Phase 3 (Weeks 5–12): Live research sprints - launch unlimited studies, iterate fast, and refine outputs bi-weekly with our engineering team
  
  

Early participants will see first insights in as little as 10 days

👉 Get in touch with us to join the pilot.

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