About the Job

From Consumer Insights to Synthetic Consumers: Building and Validating AI Personas for Innovation Decision-Making

Are you interested in combining software development, Artificial Intelligence, and consumer research to solve a real business challenge? At Essity, we are exploring how Generative AI can transform the way innovation projects are evaluated by enabling the creation of synthetic consumer and customer personas. These personas could help teams rapidly test product concepts, packaging designs, and innovation ideas before conducting traditional market research. While creating AI-generated personas is becoming increasingly feasible, a critical question remains: Can synthetic consumers be trusted to provide reliable decision support? This thesis offers a unique opportunity to both build an AI-powered solution and investigate how such personas can be validated and used within real-world innovation processes.

Your Role

As a master's thesis student, you will work closely with experts within Innovation, Consumer Insights, and Digital Development. The project combines software development and applied research. You will help design and develop a prototype application capable of generating and interacting with AI-powered consumer personas while also investigating how those personas can be evaluated and validated. You will develop a working AI application using modern Generative AI technologies, explore how consumer insights can be transformed into synthetic personas, collaborate with business stakeholders, design validation methodologies, and contribute to future innovation capabilities.

Background

Essity continuously relies on consumer and customer insights to guide product development, packaging decisions, and innovation activities. Traditional market research can be costly and time-consuming, particularly when recruiting participants from healthcare institutions and nursing homes. At the same time, Essity possesses extensive consumer knowledge collected through years of market research and insight generation. Recent advances in Large Language Models and Generative AI have made it possible to create synthetic personas based on existing knowledge and data. However, the primary challenge is not creating the personas themselves. The challenge is determining whether these personas accurately represent real consumers and can be trusted to support business decisions. Before synthetic consumers can be used within innovation processes, robust approaches for validation, evaluation, and governance need to be established.

Project

The objective of this thesis is to explore whether AI-generated consumer and customer personas can become a trusted decision-support tool for innovation and concept testing. To answer this question, the student(s) will design and develop a prototype application that generates, manages, and enables interaction with synthetic personas based on existing consumer insight data. The application will serve as the foundation for experimentation, validation, and evaluation. A central part of the thesis is to investigate how AI-generated personas can be validated against real-world consumer research and what level of confidence is required before they can be used to support innovation decisions. Expected outcomes include a prototype application, a methodology for persona generation, a validation framework, experimental results comparing synthetic and historical research outcomes, and recommendations for future implementation within Essity.

Your Profile

We are looking for 1-2 Master's students currently studying at Master level at a Swedish University, who will conduct a Master Thesis during spring 2027. You have an interest in Artificial Intelligence, software development, data analytics, and innovation. Relevant fields include Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning, Industrial Engineering & Management, Applied Mathematics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Business Analytics. Experience with Python, Generative AI, LLMs, statistics, or software development is beneficial. The thesis is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, with approximately 40-60% on-site presence in a hybrid setup.

What You Will Be a Part Of

At Essity, we are committed to breaking barriers to well-being through innovative and sustainable solutions. You will become part of a collaborative environment where consumer understanding, digital technologies, and product innovation come together to create future solutions. This project sits at the intersection of AI, consumer insights, and innovation and has the potential to influence how innovation projects are evaluated across multiple business areas and product categories.

Application

Interested? If you are up for the challenge and think this sounds like you, apply online today. Kindly note that due to GDPR we will not accept applications via email. If you apply as a pair of students, please submit one application each and clearly state in your application who you intend to complete the master thesis with.

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