How AI-Driven Simulated Societies Are Revolutionizing Market Experiments

🎤 Full Interview: James He, Co-Founder & CEO @ Artificial Societies

Founder Story & Vision

James He fuses a deep background in computational behavioral science with a bold vision for AI-powered artificial societies—simulated markets of thousands where product, marketing, and leadership teams can test ideas at unprecedented speed and scale. After research stints at Cambridge and pioneering work simulating social behavior, James co-founded Artificial Societies to build a “sandbox society” tool that accelerates innovation by making experimentation safer, cheaper, and exponentially faster.

Why now? Traditional user research is costly, slow, and limited. With AI advances and increasingly noisy markets, the pressure to find the right product-market fit and message has never been higher. James bets on a future where everyone—from startups to governments—can simulate thousands of social and market scenarios before committing resources, unlocking the golden path to success faster than ever before.

🧩 Real-World Use Cases

• James’s team re-ran a two-month pricing communication experiment—in just two minutes—matching real-world results and layering in rich social interaction data unavailable in traditional surveys.

• Anthropic’s sales team used Societies’ platform to simulate outreach messaging across their YC founder cohort, refining campaigns by conversing with AI personas modeled on real founders before sending a single message.

• Product managers and marketers use the platform to forecast engagement on Landing Pages, LinkedIn posts, and emails—enabling rapid iteration and saving costly real-world mistakes.

What you’ll learn:

• How James avoided “hope-based” launches by creating a dynamic, simulated market for rapid feedback and iteration.

• Framework for thinking about customer behavior as social interactions—not isolated data points—unlocking richer insights.

• Tactics for leveraging AI to augment creative judgment, accelerating experiment cycles without sacrificing nuance or authenticity.

• Lessons on navigating early startup growth while pioneering novel technology in AI-driven market research.

• How Societies tackles the challenges of scaling AI-generated personas with real behavioral fidelity.

Some Takeaways:

• Rapid experimentation at scale drastically reduces risk and time to insight.

• True innovation happens when technology meets human creativity and judgment.

• Democratizing advanced market research tools enables more diverse and confident builders.

• Harnessing AI as a social simulator generates insights traditional analytics simply can’t.

• Next step: Explore how simulating your own market reactions could unpack unknown variables in your product launches.

In this episode, we cover:

00:00 Intro and motivation behind Societies

02:30 The two-month experiment recreated in two minutes

09:50 Using simulated markets to refine sales and marketing

14:00 Live demo of AI personas responding to outreach messages

20:30 Future of artificial collective intelligence and AI-powered experimentation

27:00 The evolving landscape of AI, jobs, and creativity

35:00 Q&A on China vs US in AI race and personal backstory

43:30 How James’s lean team builds advanced AI tools today

47:50 Jobs of the future: creative engineers and attention economy

50:00 Founder’s reflections and community invite

For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email david@thehomabase.ai

Referenced in the Episode:

• Anthropic AI Sales Team

• YC W25 Founder Cohort

• Behavioral Science & Computational Modeling

• Market Research Innovation

Find Case Studies of all other episodes here.