Simile Builds AI 'Agentic Twins' of Real People for Polling
Startup Simile creates digital replicas of real humans to answer surveys for clients like CVS and Gallup.
Forget focus groups. Startup Simile is building AI-powered digital clones of actual people — and using them to run polls and market research at scale.
The company calls them "agentic twins." Each one is modeled on a real person, designed to simulate how that individual would respond to survey questions. The goal: faster, cheaper insights without the logistical nightmare of traditional polling.
Big names are already on board. CVS and Gallup are among the companies tapping Simile's synthetic respondents for research purposes.
It's a bold bet on AI replacing human participation in one of the oldest research methods around. The pitch is straightforward — why wait weeks to collect thousands of survey responses when a fleet of digital twins can deliver answers almost instantly?
Whether those AI-generated responses actually reflect real human behavior remains the billion-dollar question.