Building AI Customer Clones: How to create products people actually use
Description
Your personas are fiction. Beautiful, well-researched fiction – but fiction nonetheless.
They tell you Sarah is a "tech-savvy marketing manager who values efficiency" but can't explain why she abandoned your onboarding flow at step 3. Surveys tell you what people claim they want, not what actually drives their decisions or stops them cold.
Here's what actually works: Digital customer clones built with AI that think, respond, and behave like your real users. Not avatars or chatbots – actual reasoning agents you can interrogate about edge cases, test controversial ideas with, and explore the messy reality of customer behavior.
In this session, I'll demonstrate how to build these clones and use them to make product decisions that actually stick. You'll see a live build: from training data to having real conversations.
What you'll walk away with:
- Why your current personas are sabotaging product decisions
- A practical framework for building AI customer clones that actually work
- How to surface the hidden "why" behind user behavior and requests
- A new approach to validating ideas, prioritizing features, and shipping products people actually use
Live demo included: Watch me build a customer clone from scratch and interrogate it about a real product decision.
Speaker
Marin Niehues
Independent Principal Consultant
Marin Niehues is an independent consultant with a track record of over 20 client projects and two startups of his own. He works with VC-backed scaleups and DAX40 companies alike, advising on organizational design, operational performance, and management structures that actually scale.
In the past three years, Marin has been a featured speaker at conferences in more than ten countries across three continents - including repeated invitations from Google and Microsoft.