Creating audience personas with generative AI

Long time ago I wrote a post about creating personas for audience-centric story design.

Personas are fictional characters you may create to represent different user types within a targeted audience. They are used in various fields like marketing, product design, and user experience design.

Typically, a persona description (minimally) contains:

• Name and demographic details.
• Job title and responsibilities.
• Goals and motivations.
• Challenges and pain points.
• Any other relevant details.

Identifying and fleshing-out personas will help you to personalize your presentation and build a audience-centric narrative that resonates with as many as possible ‘archetype’ people in the room. Putting yourself into the shoes of (some in) your audience will let you better understand what these people think, believe, do, feel, and need. And establish an emotional connection with them to tell a better story.

Obviously, persona creation can be done on the back of a napkin but, today, Generative AI has entered the scene and will let you create audience profiles in seconds.

Consider this very simple question you could ask a publicly available tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, and look at the answer you might get in return:

Of course, you can add more details to the prompt about the subject of your presentation, about the people and companies you expect to come listening to it, and about the profile information you’re interested in. The more you refine the questions you ask the chatbot, the more accurate response you will get from it.

As a cherry-on-the-cake, you may use an AI image generator like Dall-E 3, Midjourney or Gencraft to provide you with lifelike but fake photos of Maria, Eric, Chloe, Samir, and Fiona…

(I wrote this article with a little —but not too much— help from ChatGPT, while I created Fiona’s headshot using Gencraft. It was originally published on my Business Storytelling blog on 23 January 2024)