AI models of real consumers could hold marketing insights

When his father died last year, Richard Boyd began using artificial intelligence to model what his dad would be doing today if he had not passed away. "For the past eight or nine months, I can'visit him' and see what he's interested in," he says. The model found that on the Fourth of July his dad would have read about the Air Force, Vietnam, Donald Trump, guns and gun control, and the Santa Fe Railway. He likely would have attended an event at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, and created a home fireworks display. He calls this exercise "oddly therapeutic." Nor is he a character in a "Black Mirror" episode.