Don’t confuse being “data-driven” with being smart.
Case in point: The Cleveland Browns.
Broadly speaking, the Browns have been viewed as one of the NFL’s most data-driven organizations. They are often named as the team that incorporates analytics the most in decision making.
However, that has not translated to success.
Which brings me to an interesting article in the WSJ about organizations using “digital human twins” as a means to supplant traditional market research and focus groups. It’s interesting because retailers tend to get excited about data and inputs while remaining mediocre at acting on them.
The article describes how CVS Health is using “agentic twins” powered by Simile to test messaging, probe customer experience questions and simulate responses from hard to reach audiences. These AI-built twins serve as a proxy for real people and specific customer segments. Historical survey data along with transaction patterns and other kernels of information are used to build these twins. Then, these are used to simulate how someone or some group would respond to a new question, concept, message or offer and so on.
The clear benefit here is speed.
Why wait to recruit a focus group when you can dial up a survey of a synthetic version in real time?
And CVS Health is not alone.
Colgate-Palmolive is using digital twins of customers for early product testing. As a bonus, also creating twins of their supply chains to proactively identify possible problems.
Finally, go peek at Target’s earnings call transcript from November 2025 to see that the retailer is using “synthetic audiences” for products and campaigns. This, in combination with the Target Trend Brain, is intended to help the retailer react to emerging trends and predict new ones.
Hang on though.
Are we losing sight of the more important, but less glamorous, issue?
The question is not how insights are generated.
The question is whether they are actually being put to work.
As we have highlighted many times before, the feedback loop in the fashion business is rather loose if not broken altogether.
In fact, the organizational silo is where customer insights go to die; buried in an Excel spreadsheet.
If so, then who cares if the insight is generated via:
- A focus group.
- An AI-built proxy.
- Shaking the magic 8-ball
- Cracking open a fortune cookie.
It’s all equally useless if the insight fails to reach the right person for them to act on it.
If we flip back to the Target earnings call for a moment, it says that along with investments in technology, the teams will bring the work to life. This means redefining roles and creating new functions, like their Merchant Roundtable, to help make decisions faster.
Now, take whatever you want from an earnings call transcript; the carefully manicured statements will have you believe everything is chef’s kiss.
But, let’s take it at face value. We can say that Target is taking the right steps to use technology to generate insights and then laying down the organizational tracks to rapidly funnel insights to those to who need them. If so, the feedback loops will tighten up.
A powerful outcome will then be teams killing weak ideas faster, refining stronger ones sooner, and moving with more confidence (aka Merchandising Authority).
Still, a few caveats should be mentioned.
First, these tools are only as good as the data used to train them.
Garbage in. Garbage Out. Duh.
The second is that these insights are probably best suited for meeting existing demand, not generating new demand. That whole quote about Henry Ford and customers wanting faster horses comes to mind.
The other thing I wonder about is if a digital twin audience yields results or answers that runs contradictory to a human focus group. Then what? Does the human focus group get waved away because the AI model can scale? Does the executive who has planted a flag on the AI mountain automatically give the synthetic voice more authority? If so, which voice is really being heard here.
It’s not hard to conceive that organizational dysfunction can get in the way of taking full advantage of new insights and capabilities.
That’s exactly the deal with the Cleveland Browns. Meddling ownership fumbles away any data-driven advantage. The Browns will always be the Browns. Meaning, they’ll forever remain relegated to the basement of the NFL.
But you didn’t need to be data-driven to figure that one out.
