The news: Predictive human intelligence firm Brox is using 60,000 digital twins as instant survey respondents. Its goal is to cut market research times from 12 weeks to a matter of hours, per VentureBeat.

“These digital twins are one-to-one replicas of actual, real individuals," Brox CEO Hamish Brocklebank told VentureBeat. He said the startup recruits real people and interviews them while capturing necessary information with their consent. 

Brox subscriptions range from $100,000 to $1.5 million per year, with unlimited usage during the contract period.

Zooming in: The company is challenging established market research workflows and replacing statistical models with behavioral replicas. 

The digital twins offer:

• Unlimited testing of campaign scenarios before launch.
• Near real-time reactions to economic, political, or cultural events.
• Predictive outcomes and explanations behind consumer behavior.

Pharma brands could use the digital twins to predict vaccine attitudes, financial institutions for modeling depositor behavior during geopolitical crises, and luxury brands for emulating  high-net-worth audiences that standard panels struggle to access.

The problems: These digital twins are frozen-in-time snapshots, which may lag behind real-world events and skew sentiment accuracy.

The $100,000 minimum puts Brox in large-enterprise-only territory—where clients are more likely to be averse to genAI risks, especially given the lack of regulatory oversight. A pharma brand planning a vaccine campaign might still prefer a slower, smaller, real-human pilot over a fast, statistically perfect simulation that may not map exactly to real-world attitudes.

Implications for marketers: Solutions like Brox won’t fully replace traditional research but could serve as a useful force-multiplier during the hypothesis phase. Competition from other digital twin providers or wider adoption could result in more affordable pricing, but likely not by much.

For small and medium-sized businesses, the smarter investment remains rigorous, real-human research—but executed faster and cheaper than the old 12-week model through fewer required approval checkpoints and streamlined processes. One option is to invest in-house and develop proprietary AI solutions, but cost and development time could make this prohibitive. 

This content is part of EMARKETER’s subscription Briefings, where we pair daily updates with data and analysis from forecasts and research reports. Our Briefings prepare you to start your day informed, to provide critical insights in an important meeting, and to understand the context of what’s happening in your industry. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.