Case Study: AI - Synthetic Audience

AI Innovation

INDUSTRY: Logistics Leader, B2B

Logistics Leader, B2B

Designing a CFO roundtable series supported Synthetic Audience Intelligence

25+

CFO priorities synthesised

Sector: Multiple sectors

Roundtable themes developed

Geography: UK, Ireland and further international markets

AI-VALIDATED

Programme design

Project: CFO roundtable series research and theme development

Context
A global logistics enterprise wanted to launch a senior CFO roundtable series engaging finance leaders at strategic accounts. The programme needed to be built around what those CFOs were genuinely interested in, not what the organisation assumed would resonate.

Reframe
The opportunity was to design the programme around genuine audience intelligence rather than informed assumption. Without this, theme selection risked reflecting internal priorities instead of the realities CFOs were navigating. The task shifted from planning an event to first understanding what this audience actually cares about and what would earn their time.

Solution
We built a structured view of what CFOs across the UK and Ireland are actively navigating, combining primary insight from the client’s CFO with deep market research into the priorities, pressures and decisions shaping the role today.

This audience intelligence was used to develop three distinct roundtable angles, each designed to reflect real challenges finance leaders are facing and to create the conditions for valuable peer-level discussion

To strengthen confidence in the direction, AI-supported synthetic personas were used to validate the insight and test each angle through a simulated roundtable experience. This ensured the final recommendation was grounded not only in research, but in how the audience would engage in practice.

Innovation
The client faced challenges accessing a sufficient number of senior finance leaders within the required timeframe, limiting the ability to validate themes through traditional primary research alone. Rather than slowing the programme down, we built on the primary insight already available and extended it to the specific brief.

The Impact

Three roundtable angles were developed, each grounded in documented CFO priorities across the UK and Ireland. The programme was positioned around the decisions CFOs are actively navigating giving it the credibility to earn attendance from senior finance leaders at strategic accounts, and positioning DHL as the valued facilitator of such a discussion.

Read the full case study

A global logistics enterprise wanted to design a senior CFO roundtable series targeting finance leaders at strategic accounts. The programme needed to be grounded in what those executives were genuinely interested in.

Magnus developed a structured view of CFO audience priorities by combining primary insight from the client’s CFO, deep market research across leading surveys and networks, and behavioural analysis of how the finance leader role is evolving. This created a clear understanding of the strategic, emotional and operational pressures shaping CFO decision-making across both markets.

This audience intelligence was used to develop three distinct roundtable angles, each designed to reflect real challenges finance leaders are actively navigating and to create the conditions for valuable peer-level discussion.

AI-supported synthetic personas were then used to validate this intelligence and test each angle through a simulated roundtable experience, ensuring the recommended direction would resonate in practice.

The output was a clear recommendation on where to focus the programme, grounded in a deep understanding of what the audience genuinely cares about and what would resonate most strongly. This gave the client confidence that the series would engage senior finance leaders and earn their attendance.

The CFO Vision Series was a peer engagement strategy for existing customers which placed specific requirements on theme selection. Participants already had a relationship with the client. The programme therefore needed to deliver genuine value, not just access, by focusing on discussions CFOs would actively prioritise.

The angles had to earn their time by offering something they could not get from their own networks or from generic CFO forums.

That required a precise and current understanding of what CFOs were navigating in 2025 and 2026, such as the fiscal shocks reshaping the UK cost base, the talent constraints limiting growth ambitions and the anxieties around cyber risk, PE counterparty opacity and expanding mandates.

The challenge was not just to understand these dynamics, but to translate them into a focused programme that would resonate with senior finance leaders and create meaningful peer-level engagement.

The value of building that understanding lay in the synthesis, turning primary interviews, market research, and behavioural analysis into a structured model that could inform clear decisions on where to focus the series and how to position it to drive attendance and engagement, rather than sitting in a research file.

The original brief was to develop discussion angles for a senior finance leader roundtable series. The focus from the outset was that selecting the right angles required a deeper understanding of what the target audience actually cared about and would prioritise.

Without that foundation, there was a risk the programme would be shaped by internal perspectives rather than the realities CFOs were navigating, limiting its ability to engage senior leaders.

CFOs are operating in divergent economic environments, the UK in a defensive, cost-protection posture following the Autumn 2025 Budget, Ireland in an expansionary mode constrained by acute talent shortages. A generic “CFO as strategic leader” theme would not serve either profile. The task required market-specific intelligence before it could produce programme design.

This meant building a structured understanding of CFO priorities that could directly inform theme selection and ensure the series would create relevant, high-value discussions.

1. Primary Interview

Magnus conducted a structured interview with the client’s own CFO – a senior finance leader with direct visibility of the UK enterprise landscape. The interview surfaced the lived realities of the role and their challenges in today’s market. This layer anchored the synthetic research in specific, firsthand professional experience.

2. Market Research Synthesis

Primary insight was combined with a structured synthesis of secondary research across leading CFO surveys, alongside professional network discourse and executive salary data for both markets. This layer provided the quantitative scaffolding. Research was mapped directly to persona dimensions rather than aggregated into a standalone report.

3. Psychological and Behavioural Analysis

A dedicated analysis examined the identity and psychological dynamics of the CFO role in both markets, drawing on executive podcast content, professional forum discourse, and FP&A influencer networks where finance leaders speak candidly. This layer surfaced the emotional reality of the role; it is the layer that distinguishes a psychologically accurate persona from a professionally accurate one.

4. AI-Optimised Research

The three research layers were synthesised into two structured personas – one for UK CFOs (the Defensive Protector) and one for Irish CFOs (the Constrained Expansionist). Each persona encoded the executive profile across five sections: identity and market context; strategic priorities including jobs to be done, active pains, and KPIs; decision-making architecture including buying criteria, objections, and preferred evidence types; messaging and engagement preferences; and behavioural intelligence including emotional triggers and their intensity.

AI handled the synthesis of the personas across four research sources. Human judgement defined the architecture, governed the output, and applied the intelligence to programme design.

5. Roundtable Angle Development

The three roundtable angles were derived directly from the two AI-Synthetic Personas built across the preceding four research layers: one for UK CFOs (the Defensive Protector) and one for Irish CFOs (the Constrained Expansionist).

That depth of audience intelligence made it possible to evaluate potential angles not just on topical relevance, but on psychological resonance, asking for each angle, whether it reflected something the CFO was actively wrestling with, whether it created the conditions for an honest peer conversation, and whether it gave the client a credible practitioner contribution rather than a host role.

All three angles were then taken into a simulated roundtable experience, using the AI-Synthetic Personas as stand-ins for the target audience. The simulation tested which angle generated the strongest engagement across both profiles, refined the framing of each, and produced a clear recommendation.

The client’s event team gained a structured, differentiated model of the CFO audience in two markets, one that could be applied directly to programme decisions. This gave the team clarity on where to focus and how to shape the series to drive relevance and engagement.

Theme selection, session architecture, discussion guide development, and facilitator preparation were all grounded in documented CFO intelligence rather than working assumptions about what finance leaders care about.

This ensured the programme was built around real audience priorities, creating the conditions for more relevant and valuable peer-level discussion.

The divergence between UK and Irish CFO profiles, different risk postures, different strategic priorities, different emotional drivers, was considered when working on the AI-Synthetic Personas, making it straightforward to design angles that resonated across both audiences without flattening the differences that mattered.

Audience intelligence became embedded in programme design, informing decisions rather than sitting as standalone research.

The programme was built on structured audience intelligence that gave the client confidence in its theme selection and programme design. This ensured the series was focused on what CFOs genuinely care about and where it would resonate most strongly.

The three roundtable angles were positioned around decisions CFOs at strategic accounts were actively navigating, giving the series the credibility to earn attendance from senior finance leaders rather than requiring it through the client’s commercial relationship.

This positioning strengthened the value of the programme, creating more meaningful engagement with senior stakeholders and increasing the likelihood of sustained participation across the series.

The recommended theme gave the client a specific and differentiated contribution to make as a practitioner.

The project moved from event brief to programme intelligence. The series was designed around what the CFO audience care about – with each roundtable angle traceable back to documented research on what UK and Irish finance leaders were navigating.

AI-Synthetic Personas replaced assumption as the foundation for programme design. CFO intelligence became structured and directly operational – connected to session architecture and discussion guides rather than sitting in a research report.

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