Every CMO is under pressure to move faster—to anticipate what customers will do next, stay ahead of cultural shifts, and keep pace with Gen Z, a generation that changes direction overnight. Yet the tools built to understand audiences haven’t caught up. Surveys and panels capture what people say, not what they do—and in a privacy-first world, that gap keeps widening.

A Meta analysis found that stated intent explains only 25–30% of real behaviour, meaning most marketing insights still rely on guesswork. As cookies disappear and generative AI floods the industry with recycled data, CMOs need something more immediate and trustworthy: behavioural truth—evidence of what people actually do.

Heatseeker Synthetics, unveiled at SXSW Sydney’s Future Sphere in partnership with KPMG, bridges that gap by fusing large-scale behavioural experimentation with AI. The result: lifelike customer avatars built entirely from verified behavioural data, gathered through statistically significant experiments on Meta and LinkedIn. Each synthetic achieves more than 90% predictive confidence in how real buyers think and act.

Bringing the Customer Into the Room

At SXSW Sydney, Heatseeker and KPMG showcased four lifelike avatars at the KPMG Futurescape—each trained on behavioural data from real Sydney homeowners—demonstrating how brands can interact with a living model of their audience.

In just 120 hours, Heatseeker ran 25 experiments, reaching 250,000 people and capturing millions of behavioural signals. Hundreds of attendees interacted with the avatars to ask about property ownership, smart devices, and everyday tech use—one of the first live datasets showing how real audiences engage with AI trained purely on behavioural evidence.

“Every brand wants to be customer-centric,” said Sudeep Gohil, Partner, KPMG. “This is a world-first that brings that ambition to life—you can now hold a real conversation with an AI avatar trained solely on verified behavioural data.”

Attendees described the experience as “surprisingly credible” and “eerily real,” noting how the avatars’ evidence-based responses built instant trust and revealed emerging homeowner and technology trends.

From Research Lag to Real-Time Decisions

Each synthetic begins as a live behavioural experiment—tens of thousands of verified clicks, sign-ups, and engagements gathered across social platforms. These signals are transformed into interactive avatars that respond in natural language, powered by empirical evidence instead of opinion.

With Synthetics, teams can:

• Test creative, pricing, and product concepts
  
  
• Run “what-if” campaign simulations
  
  
• Surface explanations backed by live buyer data
  
  

CMOs can now ask, “Which headline drives higher trial intent?” or “Why do customers switch brands?”—and get evidence-based answers in minutes, not weeks.

The Cost of Customer Lies

At the Cost of Customer Lies panel at SXSW Sydney, Alison Hill from Pragmatic Thinking said it best: “People believe what they say in that moment. But what they do? That’s another story.”

Alison explained that between declaration and action sits a costly gap:

• Social desirability bias — saying what sounds right
  
  
• Optimism bias — overestimating our future selves
  
  
• Cognitive dissonance — rewriting stories to stay consistent

The SXSW activation made that gap visible, showing how marketers can replace assumptions with proof through behavioural AI.

A New Imperative for Leadership

As Sushant (“Sonny”) Sethi, who’s led insights for Kellogg’s, Nestlé, and Uber Eats, shared on stage: “The CEO and the board should be seeing the same information. Decisions are being made daily that need to keep pace with market changes.”

Traditional research creates lag. Synthetics eliminate it—giving leaders a live, evolving view of how customers think and act before the market moves.

By week’s end, Heatseeker had captured 12K insights on creative, messaging, and products from more than 170 people’s interactions with the avatar at SXSW —proof that behavioural AI can compress months of research into days and redefine how decisions are made.

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