Personas You Can Talk To: Turning Research Into Persona Agents
Personas are traditionally static artefacts: a poster, a slide, a section in a report. They can be useful, but easy to ignore once the project moves on. Persona agents change that relationship by turning a persona into an interactive interface; you can ask the persona questions, follow up to dive into details, and retrieve insight conversationally rather than hunting through repositories. In this session I’ll show how persona agents can make research more present in everyday design work, and what becomes newly possible when teams can interact with a persona as dialogue rather than documentation.
I will share practical lessons from building AI persona agents grounded in anonymised qualitative research. I will show how to improve their usefulness through curated verbatims, a coherent persona narrative and instructions that ground responses in evidence. You’ll leave with a lightweight blueprint you can adapt: a simple researchtoagent pipeline, prompt patterns that encourage sensible grounding, and an ethical framing that will help you position persona agents for adoption in your organisation as a way to democratise research, rather than a replacement for ongoing discovery.
Boris Divjak
Boris Divjak is a Strategic & Service Design Lead at ANZ, based in Melbourne. Before relocating to Australia, he worked extensively in London, building his practice across complex commercial and public‑sector environments. He works at the intersection of human‑centred design, systems thinking, and emerging technologies, enabling teams to raise the standard of digital and human interactions with customers.
With a strong focus on sense‑making and practical application, Boris is particularly interested in how new technologies like AI can augment, rather than replace, good design practice, supporting better decision‑making and more meaningful outcomes for both customers and organisations.