AI-moderated interviews are emerging as a scalable market-research method for generating consumer insights and building consumer "digital twins." Yet it remains unclear whether they match human-moderated interviews and whether they improve on simpler, static data collection methods. In a pre-registered study with three industry partners, the authors randomly assign participants to AI-moderated interviews (N = 139), static interviews (N = 154), or interviews conducted by professional human moderators (N = 24). AI moderation matches human moderation in depth, covers more themes, and, at equal budget, recovers more customer needs than either alternative, although participants sound more emotionally engaged with a human interviewer. The authors then build a digital twin of each participant and evaluate it against the participant's own held-out responses to six real-world marketing stimuli. Twins built from AI-moderated interviews predict consumer responses better than demographics-only personas, but no better than twins built from static interviews: the richer conversation does not necessarily yield more accurate predictions. Comparing the open-ended explanations provided by participants and their twins shows that prediction errors arise when twins reason differently than the people they represent and when questions fall far outside what the interview covered. AI moderation thus pays off most for discovering customer needs, and less for predicting customer responses.

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