Olivier Touba: What would your digital twin say?
From The Age Of Intelligence by Tim Gordon, Theos Evgeniou
March 23, 2026 · 51 min · Season 2 · Episode 3
About this episode
Olivier Toubia discusses the implications of digital twins and AI in marketing and consumer behavior.
Olivier Toubia is a Columbia Business School professor working at the frontier of AI, marketing, consumer behaviour, and digital twins. This was recorded late last year but his arguments are relevant and clear: LLMs drive towards the average which means its hard to mimic the diversity of human existence. Digital twins are promising — but not ready. Synthetic consumers for research purposes (e.g. virtual focus groups) are fast and cheap, but Toubia’s research suggests they are still too biased and inconsistent to trust too far. Learn what happened when they compared digital and human twins' responses to the same questions. Politics is the worst domain to deploy synthetic focus groups: The base model exerts a powerful pull. Twins often reflect the worldview of the model as much as the individual they are meant to represent, especially in politics, where performance is weakest. AI is too sensible - compared to humans it tends to be more moderate: in one study 45% of humans wanted to deport illegal immigrants and only 5% of digital twins agreed. Synthetic personalities reflect a clear pro-tech bias. Twins tend to be more comfortable with algorithms, less concerned…
People in this episode
Hosts: Tim Gordon, Theos Evgeniou
Guest: Olivier Toubia
Topics covered
- AI
- digital twins
- consumer behavior
- marketing
- synthetic consumers
- politics
- technology
Keywords
- digital twin
- AI
- synthetic consumers
- consumer behavior
- politics
- advertising
- LLMs
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Columbia Business School, AI, LLMs, Generative AI, advertising
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