Preferences AI Co-Founders Tamir Abdel-wahab and Jason Lau joined DataInnoLab, one of Taiwan's largest AI communities, to explore whether AI-generated customers can represent real consumers, and how businesses across Asia are already using synthetic consumer insights to make decisions.
Preferences AI Co-Founder and CEO Tamir Abdel-wahab and Co-Founder and COO Jason Lau were invited by DataInnoLab (數創實驗室) to speak at its international talk series on 20 October 2026, in the community's first session featuring speakers from outside Taiwan.
Under the title "When AI Becomes the Virtual Customer: Can It Represent Real Consumers?", the online session brought together marketing, research, product and AI professionals from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to examine a practical question: can businesses test product and market assumptions with AI before committing time and budget to traditional research?
Synthetic consumers, built and validated for Asia
Tamir and Jason walked through how synthetic consumers are created, from constructing AI personas on real population distributions and multi-dimensional traits, to designing questions that do not bias the AI's responses, to the quality controls that determine when a result is ready to inform a business decision. The discussion covered where synthetic consumers can help businesses and where their limitations matter, what it takes to build for Asia's different languages, cultures and markets, and how outputs are checked against real consumer data.
The pair also shared the Preferences AI journey, including why the company set out to build synthetic data for the region and the challenges of bringing an AI product into Asian markets.
The session stayed grounded in practice rather than theory, with examples of how Preferences AI clients are already using synthetic consumer panels to compress a week of consumer research into a day and make better-informed decisions on concepts, messaging and pricing.
Partnering with Taiwan's AI community
Founded by Vincent Chen, DataInnoLab has grown into one of Taiwan's largest AI communities, running live courses, an AI Agent decision bootcamp, meetups and a podcast for professionals putting generative AI to work. Its "Where AI Gets Real" talk series invites practitioners from around the world to share the problems they solved, how they delivered results, and the trade-offs along the way.
