Sonal
Bhagria
Lead Product Designer, Economist Intelligence Unit
Ted-like
AI & UX
Mid-level Designers
About The Speaker
Sonal Bhagria is a Lead Product Designer at The Economist, with over 14 years of experience shaping digital products across media, research, and intelligence platforms. With a strong foundation in end-to-end design and agile methodologies, she currently leads strategic initiatives at the intersection of user experience and AI-driven innovation. Passionate about scaling design impact in complex B2B environments, she is focused on exploring new research models where traditional user access is limited—bridging human-centered design with machine intelligence.
About The Talk/Workshop
Synthetic User Research: User Research Without Users
What happens when you’re asked to design for users you can’t talk to?
This session introduces Synthetic UX Research — a forward-looking approach that uses AI-generated personas, internal knowledge, and behavioral signals to simulate user insights. Learn how teams at The Economist are using these methods to support early-stage ideation, feature prioritization, and design validation when direct access to users isn’t possible. You’ll leave with practical techniques, ethical considerations, and a new mindset for research in data-scarce environments.
Key Takeaways
Synthetic Users Aren’t Sentient
AI-generated personas can bring speed, scale, and structure to research—but they still lack the emotional depth and unpredictability of real humans.
AI as a Compass, Not a Captain
Leverage machine intelligence to guide your design decisions—but keep the human in the loop to ensure relevance, ethics, and empathy.
Blended Research is the Future
Discover how combining human intuition with machine-generated insights creates a resilient and adaptive approach to UX research.