Product
Test demand, feature tradeoffs, pricing, and switching behavior before committing engineering to any of them.
Messaging
Positioning, creative, and offers, evaluated against a population rather than a focus group of twelve.
Segmentation
Find the groups that actually behave differently, instead of the demographic buckets you inherited.
Scenario planning
Stress-test a strategy against competitive moves and economic shifts that have not happened yet.
Communications
Preview how an announcement reads to the people who will actually receive it.
Policy
Model the second-order response to a rule change before the rule ships.
Why we think this belongs on a behavioral backbone
The companies doing this well right now are worth studying. Simile built generative agents grounded in interviews and survey responses. Aaru frames the pitch precisely: ask people and they answer, simulate them and they act. Demosyne runs long-lived worlds where the consequences compound over months rather than resolving in a single prompt. The shared insight is that stated preference is a poor substitute for revealed preference. People misremember, rationalize, and tell you what they think you want. Our angle is on the substrate. Most simulation today puts a language model in a persona and asks it to behave like a person, which inherits everything the language model knows about how people describe themselves. A foundation model of behavior is trained on sequences of what people actually did. If that model is good, it should be the better engine to simulate from, because it never had to route through self-report. That is a claim, not a result. It is the one we most want to test.How it would work
Ground a population
Construct a population from real behavioral sequences, not from written personas. Sampled to match the distribution you care about.
Change a condition
Introduce the new price, the new feature, the new message, the new competitor.
Run it forward
Each simulated actor produces a sequence of actions, not an opinion. Aggregate over the population.
Validate against holdout
The only thing that makes this useful is correlation with a real outcome you withheld. No engagement runs without that check.
On validation. A simulation that cannot be scored against reality is a very expensive way to produce a confident number. If we work on this with you, agreeing the holdout comes before agreeing the scope.

