Dr. Olivier Toubia, Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, joins Sima Vasa to discuss his landmark study building digital twins from over 2,000 real participants — and what the results reveal about the genuine limits of synthetic data in market research.Olivier explains why digital twins skew hyper-rational, why a 0.2 correlation with real human behavior is the honest benchmark, and why the “better, faster, cheaper” promise of synthetic data still has a question mark on “better.”Olivier also covers the hybrid panel model for keeping digital twins calibrated over time, the structural advantage of within-person A/B testing with synthetic respondents, and what the neuromarketing hype cycle can teach the industry about moving faster toward evidence-based answers.KEY TAKEAWAYSThanks for listening to the Data Gurus podcast, brought to you by Infinity Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review to help get the word out about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.RESOURCES MENTIONEDColumbia Business School Digital Twins Labhttps://business.columbia.edu/ai-in-business/labs/digital-twins-labProlifichttps://www.prolific.comHugging Face (Digital Twins dataset)https://huggingface.co/datasets/LLM-Digital-Twin/Twin-2K-500Qualtricshttps://www.qualtrics.com#Analytics #Data #MRX