From buyer persona to behavioural intelligence

A behind-the-scenes look at how preparing for a university guest lecture made me rethink everything I knew about buyer personas and CRM, thanks to AI.

I recently gave a guest lecture at Hult University to final year Business students. The topic? Customer relationship management and how it links to customer experience. I used Fortnum & Mason as a real-world example; a brand that nails emotional loyalty because it doesn’t treat CRM as just a system, but as a strategy. At Fortnum, customer experience is the outcome, joy-giving, story-led, and deeply personal.

Preparing for the session really made me reflect on how much the role of a marketeer is changing.

Let me explain.

As part of the talk, I covered buyer personas, once the holy grail of building out journeys and tailoring touchpoints. When done well, they make sure every interaction connects. Not just with the customer, but internally too. Because I honestly believe when you put people at the heart of a business, employees are happier, and that shows up in service. It becomes circular.

But while prepping, I found myself asking: What’s the future of buyer personas, really?

They’ve traditionally been demographic-based. “Sophie, 32, digital marketer, shops on weekends.” But in today’s data-obsessed world? That just doesn’t cut it. You open Instagram and your feed is full of things you only thought about in passing… it’s spooky. The bots, the cookies, the trackers... we’re being followed by algorithms. So what does this mean for personas? Do we still need them?

We live in the age of hyper-personalisation. So in B2C, do we really need buyer personas? In B2B, are Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) still useful? I think yes, but. We’re heading into something much more dynamic. Something more behavioural.

This is where it gets exciting.

We’re moving away from fixed personas and into real-time modelling. AI doesn’t need Sophie to fill out a form, it learns who she is from what she does. It’s predictive, not prescriptive. We’re entering a phase where we can start to understand what customers need before they know it themselves.

And as a marketer, that means my job starts to feel more like behavioural strategy. I'm not just creating journeys anymore, I’m interpreting journeys already in motion. With AI dashboards, emotion trackers, real-time data flows… we’re seeing patterns and spikes before they fully form.

Someone asked me during the session; “Do you think AI will take your job?”
My honest answer? Parts of it, yes. The admin, the repetitive stuff,I’m fine to let go of that. It’s what it frees me up to do that’s exciting.

I remember how long it used to take to build a decent set of personas; the research, the surveys, the desk work. And then you'd blink, and your customer had changed again. Now, we’re agile. Dynamic. Data-led in a way that actually enables more creativity, not less.

That said, I’m not blind to the ethical concerns. Hyper-personalisation and “dark data” raise questions about privacy, manipulation, and consent. That’s a whole other conversation — and one we need to keep having. But I wanted to acknowledge it here.

So here’s where I landed in the end:

As marketers, we used to shape the customer journey. In the future, we’ll be interpreting one that’s already in motion, one that’s written in data, shaped by emotion, and built in real time.