Synthetic Users: The New Frontier of Product Discovery

This session is part of Resilience Days 2026, a digital agile conference like no other! This event brings together industry leaders and innovators to share real-world solutions, stories of success, and the challenges they’ve overcome.
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Product discovery is one of the most valuable practices in product development — and one of the most skipped. Most teams cite the same reasons: it takes too long, costs too much, and requires access to customers who are hard to reach. The result is what this speech calls 'discovery theater': going through the motions without the substance.
Synthetic Users — AI-generated personas that can be interviewed, probed, and stress-tested — offer a new opportunity to change this. This speech presents a balanced, evidence-based case for how product teams can use synthetic user research to accelerate and expand customer discovery, without replacing the irreplaceable role of real human research.

Drawing on a real parallel study that ran synthetic and human discovery side by side, the speech surfaces what AI gets surprisingly right (emotional depth, consistency, willingness to go deep) and what it structurally cannot see (lived edge cases, the specificity of real human experience). It then introduces a practical 7-guardrail framework for using Synthetic Users responsibly — setting the right expectations, feeding models the right data, and knowing when to stop and talk to a real person.
In the hands-on portion of the workshop, we’ll simulate the discovery on a real product, and we’ll use AI to create and interview Synthetic Users.
The core argument: Synthetic Users are the next frontier in product discovery, but they don’t replace discovery: they remove the excuse not to do it.

A product innovator and digital leader, Valerio Zanini is passionate about creating products that customers love and developing the teams that make them a reality. With two decades of product development experience in a variety of organizations, including Capital One, Cisco, [Goozex.com,](http://goozex.com,/) and others, he excels at building new products in the early stages of product innovation, where uncertainty and lack of a clear solution are the biggest challenges. He works with organizations worldwide to spark a culture of innovation and agility.