Can AI build better personas? A skeptic's proof of concept (starring Christopher Walk'n as Dial-Up Internet)

I wanted to know if AI could build a decent marketing persona. Something that marketing and admissions teams could actually use to understand our prospective students and test messaging against. I was skeptical. AI is great at summarizing and processing data, but personas require more depth, thoughtfulness and the messy stuff that makes humans human. I worried the output would just reflect whatever I fed it and not go deeper. So I ran an experiment. I used Claude.ai to build a persona from the ground up. Things got a bit messy, but I did walk away with a persona that I could compare to my own hand-crafted versions. Did the AI version hold its own? This talk guides through that process and the results. You'll leave with a realistic sense of what AI can do and enough practical insight to try it yourself. Oh, and Christopher Walk'n (misspelling intended) plays the role of a Dial-Up Internet persona. It'll make sense when you get there.