By Mary Hatch, User Experience Research Lead, Cisco & Sarah Hopkins, Design Partner, Cisco
A Unified Perspective on Personas
A persona is a powerful artifact that takes abstract data about user behavior and attitudes and forms it into a solid, empathetic, relatable character that can be used to drive better business decision-making, marketing, and product development.
While marketing professionals often rely on demographic-based personas, our approach as user experience (UX) practitioners focuses on behavioral data within systems to understand what users truly want to accomplish, drawing from frameworks like Jobs to be Done. Unlike marketing personas, this method focuses on a nuanced view of user motivations and pain points as they navigate through experiences.
Marketing and UX share a common perspective: personas built on behavioral insights are valuable models for finding pain points and ideating on new features and experiences. This approach enables product and marketing teams to empathize deeply with users and tailor content and experience features accordingly.
The Hybrid Workflow: Combining AI with Primary Data and Validation
Next-gen UX research methods using hybrid workflows balance the speed and scalability of AI with the rigor of established methodologies. By starting with real primary data, we utilize AI for proto persona generation that we can then validate and shape with additional qualitative and quantitative data over time.
The workflow starts by creating a data foundation of authentic behavioral and attitudinal data from user interactions, system logs, surveys, interviews, and other primary sources. This foundation ensures that personas are grounded in actual user behavior and attitude rather than assumptions or stereotypes.
Using AI tools, we analyze and synthesize this data to quickly generate initial persona archetypes and journey maps. Once these baselines are established, we validate them with real representative users and stakeholders to arrive at V1.
After that point, we continue to apply outputs from our research and data sources to refine the AI-generated personas. This practice ensures ongoing accuracy, relevance, and depth, anchoring the personas firmly in real current user experience. This hybrid approach allows teams to scale persona creation without sacrificing quality— a critical advantage in B2B spaces where user roles and needs evolve rapidly and the number of personas can be very large.
Benefits of the Hybrid Approach in Complex B2B Environments
• Speed and Efficiency: AI’s pattern matching capabilities and synthesis possibilities dramatically reduces the time needed to process vast behavioral datasets and utilizing generative AI to produce initial persona drafts, enables faster iteration and the agility to respond quickly to market changes.
• Accuracy and Validity: Anchoring in authenticated primary data and validating with traditional UX research, the personas remain trustworthy and actionable.
• Lifecycle Management: Personas are not static; they require ongoing updates as business contexts and user behaviors shift. Our hybrid workflow supports continuous refinement, helping teams maintain relevance over time.
• Handling Complexity: B2B environments often involve multiple stakeholders, diverse user roles, and intricate journeys. The hybrid method scales to manage this complexity effectively.
Why This Matters for Marketing and UX
This approach bridges the gap between marketing’s need for scalable, actionable personas and UX’s commitment to deep user understanding. By integrating AI with foundational UX principles, teams can create personas and journey maps that are both fast to produce and rich in insight, empowering better product decisions and more targeted marketing strategies.
Embracing AI as a Tool in Persona Development
Utilizing AI for personas isn’t inherently problematic when used thoughtfully within a hybrid workflow: starting with real primary data sources and followed by rigorous validation can save significant time while producing valid, reliable personas. This balanced approach leverages the strengths of both AI and human expertise, enabling teams to keep pace with the fast-changing B2B landscape without compromising quality.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mary Hatch
Mary is a User Experience Research Lead at Cisco, where she leads mixed-methods research initiatives for the IT Design Team. With over 10 years of experience across startups and global organizations in industries like healthcare and robotics, she focuses on uncovering insights that inform strategy and solve real user challenges.
Sarah Hopkins
Sarah brings over 20 years of diverse tech experience, from running cable, front-end development, and database creation at startups to interaction design, experience strategy, program management, and operations at large corporations. As a Design Partner in Design Operations at Cisco, Sarah collaborates with VPs and senior leaders to solve complex design and organizational challenges. Previously, Sarah led Experience Strategy across employee experience at Vanguard.