Episode Overview

Fairgen founder Samuel Cohen on synthetic data, digital twins and how AI is making market research more accessible to more organisations.

Episode Highlights

• A taxonomy of synthetic data — Samuel maps the space across two axes: methodology (directional to foundational) and stakes (low to high), showing why different approaches suit different research contexts.
• Why "boosting" has become standard — Fairgen's augmentation technology is now used by brands including T-Mobile and L'Oréal to dramatically expand the number of segments they can reliably report on, with three years of rigorous statistical validation behind it.
• The problem with fully synthetic panels — Samuel explains why prompting LLMs to simulate survey respondents produces poor results: large language models are "averaging machines" that flatten individual variance and produce near-identical responses.
• How Fairgen builds category-level digital twins — Each twin is anchored to a real person and enriched with category-specific survey data, clickstream, transactional and live news data, refreshed quarterly to maintain accuracy.
• The democratisation of research — AI-powered tools — including digital twins and AI-moderated qualitative research — have the potential to make insights accessible to startups, SMBs and underserved markets that have historically been priced out.
• Founder lessons — Samuel shares two core pieces of advice: challenge every assumption, and invest consistently in building relationships and networks.

About the Guest

Samuel Cohen is the founder and CEO of Fairgen, a synthetic data company serving the market research industry. He studied mathematics at Oxford and completed a PhD at UCL, spending the majority of his doctoral research at Facebook AI Research Labs, where his team built foundational generative models that now underpin mainstream image and video generation tools. He founded Fairgen four years ago, applying that background to the challenges of survey research and consumer insights. Fairgen works with large insight agencies and directly with enterprise brands including T-Mobile, L'Oréal and Coty.

Learn more about the impact of technology and AI on research, insights & analytics at Insight Platforms.