Joana Cerejo

Why Personas Fail AI (And What Works)

Joana Cerejo, PhD

UX lead and researcher shaping human centered AI and anticipatory design

Static goals vs evolving user intent. Narratives hide current behavioral state. Singular focus blocks AI personalization

Spot personas gaps in the age of AI

Personas miss behavior change stages and their triggers. See what TTM + Fogg reveal that demographics cannot.

What personas ignore about behavior change

Replace demographics with audience factors: track stage+motivation+ability states that actually drive AI behavior.

Audience factors as an alternative to static personas

This is not a course you complete. It's a practice you begin. The skill of hearing what your market needs before they have words for it.

AI Research Leader •Ex-Meta, Uber, Apple

Uber

Apple

Google

Canvas8

Abi Awomosu

AI Research Leader • Ex-Uber, Meta •  Bestselling Author of 'How Not to Use AI'

Cohort 8

Cohort 9

Most practitioners don't struggle with access to data. They struggle with knowing what matters — and AI made it worse, not better.Most AI research courses teach extraction: summarize quicker, automate the asking, replacing the human with the synthetic.The Billion Person Focus Group® does the opposite. You use AI as a listening partner to access patterns from places where people actually gather and speak unfiltered— forums, communities, support tickets, sales calls, product data.Triangulate across sources. Bring receipts. Then hand off what you find to surveys, interviews, or experiments.Discovery first. Validation second.This isn't "move fast and break things." It's see first—act once.In two days, you’ll apply this to a real high-stakes decision and leave with:<ul><li>Visual market landscape maps</li><li>3–5 decision-ready hypotheses</li><li>A ready-to-run Listening OS — agents, workflows, cookbooks — customized to your market</li><li>A validation plan you can execute Monday</li></ul>And you keep everything — for the next launch, the next client, the next pivot. Stop renting insights. Start owning the capability.

See what your market really needs — before it's obvious or too late.

See your market as it actually exists— not how dashboards flatten it

Identify emerging market trends before they become mainstream.

Hear what your market needs before they have words for it

Assemble AI advisors that shape decisions  — not yes-machines who confirm

Move at AI speed and still trust what comes back

Stop renting insights or more AI tools — develop internal intelligence you keep

The course is taught primarily using Claude, but the methodology works across platforms. No technical skills required.

Familiarity with AI tools — you've used ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or similar. 

Researchers &amp; Insights Professionals. AI tools summarise fast but insights got thinner. You used to find the unexpected. This brings it back

Strategists, Marketers &amp; Consultants. You're paid to see what's next but AI gives you what's already obvious. This is how you see first.

Founders, Product Leaders &amp; Builders. You build for people but somewhere you stopped hearing their needs. This is the direct line back.

Learn to achieve reliable AI outcomes without prompt packs, system prompts, or agent tricks—use structured inputs for consistent results.

Creator, AIgogy Framework™ | Advisor

Rockford University

Silali Banerjee

Creator of AIgogy Framework™ for reliable, structured AI outcomes

July2026Cohort

Pretty much anyone using an AI chatbot has gone through the frustration of a response that isn't exactly what they wanted. Problems include hallucinated, drifted, generic, and inconsistent output. Sometimes all of these happen; other times, one or more.People try prompt improvisation, prompt tweaking, prompt packs, prompt libraries, trial and error, tries and retries. Sometimes it works; other times, it does not.Too many details in a prompt cause prompt bloating and do not solve the problem. Adding context helps, but too much context creates problems.AI agents and skills do not solve this problem with open-ended work either.People give up, thinking LLMs are probabilistic and cannot work better.That is not true.It may never be as deterministic as systems in terms of consistency and reliability, but it can be mostly consistent and reliable.Similarly, users can create a path with an LLM using the right framework. Users can guide their request through the LLM toward their desired outcome by using the right framework.Learn to use this science-backed, proven framework.It is based on research (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6516618">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6516618</a>) and has been tested in practice.<hr>

User's framework for moving beyond trial-and-error prompting with any LLM.

Achieve More Reliable AI Outcomes

Reflect Your Voice and Working Style

Embed Your Judgment and Standards

Reduce Rework and Increase Leverage

Leaders (Decision Owners) Leaders accountable for outcomes who need AI to reflect their judgment without reviewing or correcting every output

Operators (Execution Owners) Operators responsible for consistent delivery who need AI to produce aligned outputs without repeated rework

Knowledge Workers (Expertise Carriers) Experts who need AI to apply their domain knowledge and standards, not generate generic outputs.

Master a proven system to create clear, persuasive presentations in half the time using AI as your strategic thinking partner.

Ex-JPMorgan VP | Presentation Expert

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Commerzbank

PwC UK

MaryBeth Hazeldine

Presentation psychology expert with 35 years training Fortune 500 professionals

Cohort 4

Cohort 5

You know presentations matter. They shape decisions, win clients, and move careers forward. But creating them? That's exhausting.You spend hours wrestling with structure, rewriting messaging that doesn't land. By the time you're done, you're not even confident it will work.AI promises to help, but most people end up with generic outputs and robotic messaging. The tool saves time on the wrong things.Here's what's needed: a strategic approach combining AI efficiency with presentation psychology—the clarity, structure, and persuasion that makes people act.This course teaches exactly that. You'll use AI not as a shortcut, but as a thinking partner. You'll learn frameworks like AVP (Action-Value-Proof) and messaging psychology that transform unclear ideas into compelling narratives.You'll build presentations faster—yes. But more importantly, you'll build them better. Clearer structure. Stronger messaging. More impact.By the end, you'll have a repeatable workflow that cuts creation time in half while dramatically improving quality. No more staring at blank slides. No more second-guessing. Just confident, persuasive presentations—every time.

Master AI-powered presentations that persuade, save time, and win decisions

Structure presentations that are clear, logical, and impossible to ignore

Craft persuasive messaging that resonates and drives action

Build a repeatable AI workflow that saves 10+ hours per week on presentations

Turn data and complex information into stories people actually understand

Professionals who create presentations regularly and want to save hours while delivering clearer, more persuasive, impactful results

Managers, consultants, and client-facing roles who need to influence stakeholders and communicate complex ideas with confidence

Ambitious professionals who want to stand out by mastering communication skills that position them as clear, strategic business leaders

Master the systems to stop micromanaging and transition from a referee to an orchestrator of a self-running team.

Founder at The Strength Hack

Daimler AG

Airbus

Audi

Toll Collect GmbH

Murk Creusen

Founder & Leadership Coach at Strength Hack

Founding Cohort

You cannot fix burnout by working harder. You have a matching problem.AI is making your team's hard technical skills obsolete faster than they can learn them. You cannot fix this "AI anxiety" or burnout by asking them to work harder. You don't have an effort problem; you have a matching problem.Most Engineering Managers spend 70% of their week trapped in the "Mediocrity Loop" - refereeing personality clashes, fixing broken handoffs, and watching their team's shared knowledge collapse as junior roles vanish. You're bleeding runway and morale.This 30-day accelerator gives you the system to break out. Using the Big Five (or CliftonStrengths) assessment, a proven framework, and the Strength Hack AI, you'll map your team's cognitive architecture and engineer the conditions for psychological safety - not just hope for it.In 4 weeks, you will:<ul><li>Stop Generalist Exhaustion: Identify energy leaks and delegate based on Cognitive Fit, not calendar space. </li><li>Engineer Swift Trust: Use the 6-dimension Matching Compass to translate friction into synergy.</li><li>Drive ROI: Transition from a reactive referee to a strategic orchestrator</li></ul>

Engineer Psychological Safety. Stop Refereeing Your Team.

Shortcut the "Storming" Phase to Engineer Swift Trust

Reclaim 70% of Your Week (Plug the Energy Leak)

Turn Personality Clashes into Solvable Data

Restore the "Who Knows What" Architecture Your Team Lost

Walk Away with a "Plug-and-Play" Facilitation Kit

To get ROI from this course, a real-world team (direct reports or agile squads) is recommended to apply the Matching Compass frameworks.

Team Leadership or Management Role

You must take the free Big Five test (or CliftonStrengths) before to map your personal psychological operating system.

Completion of a Baseline Assessment

The Overwhelmed Engineering Manager / Tech LeadYou lead a hybrid or remote team. You want a data-driven system, not another workshop.

The Ambitious Senior / Staff Engineer<blockquote>You're moving to people manager. You want proven frameworks to lead a team without micromanaging.</blockquote>

The People-Conscious CTO / CPO<blockquote>You own culture and delivery for 10–200 people. Your board wants AI readiness. You need L&amp;D that's credible.</blockquote>

Agentic AI

Coding with AI

AI Workflows

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Vibe Coding

AI Evals

AI Transformation

RAG & Search

AI for PMs

AI for Engineers

AI for Designers

AI for Marketers

AI for Founders

Product Sense

Product Discovery

User Research

Prototyping

Growth

Analytics

Tech Foundations

Strategy

Influence

Leadership

Career Growth

Machine Learning

LLM Ops

Context Eng

Security

System Design

Figma

Design Systems

Visual Design

Design Strategy

Automation

Content Marketing

Demand Gen

Go-to-Market

Product Marketing

Positioning

Social Media

Brand

B2B Marketing

SEO & AEO

AI for Leaders

AI Governance

Communication

Management

People Operations

Exec Presence

Storytelling

Goal-setting

Personal Brand

Fundraising

Everyone

Operators

Data Scientists

Business Analysts

User Researchers

Customer Success

Project Managers

HR Professionals

Sales People

Lawyers

Finance

Investors

Real Estate

Educators

Creators

Product managers who drive strategy, development, and launch of products.

Applying AI tools and techniques to professional workflows — assign alongside more specific AI topics.

User experience design — information architecture, interaction design, usability, and end-to-end experience flows.

Why Personas Fail AI (And What Works)

What you'll learn

Why this topic matters

You'll learn from

Joana Cerejo, PhD