Ask Your Audience has launched in Malta, partnering with local market research firm Esprimi to bring its AI-powered “digital twin” platform to businesses on the island.
The platform compresses qualitative research that would traditionally take weeks into a process measured in minutes. AYA co-founder Robin Cleland demonstrated the tool in Malta earlier this month, presenting it as a decision-support system that lets companies stress-test ideas, product concepts and brand campaigns against panels of AI-generated respondents built from real people and get results quickly enough to inform routine business calls rather than only big-ticket strategic ones.
At the core of the platform are what AYA calls digital twins: AI profiles constructed from detailed interviews with real individuals, capturing between 130 and 140 data points per person. Those points span personality, lifestyle, brand sensitivity, environmental attitudes, tone of speech and media behaviour. Each resulting twin is cross-checked against its real-world source, with alignment averaging 87 per cent and reaching close to 95 per cent at the higher end.
AYA currently holds 1,500 twins across multiple countries. Its Maltese panel covers 372 individuals, segmented by age, gender and occupation. The platform offers audience scans across 100 twins, concept tests, simulated focus groups, one-to-one interview formats and brand and advertising evaluators. All twins are anonymised and given AI-generated portraits.
AYA founder Benjamin Zammit said the platform was built specifically for the kinds of decisions that never get formally tested, because conventional research is too costly and too slow to be practical at that level. Most businesses, he argued, end up discovering what customers actually think only after committing to a direction.
Esprimi chief executive Morgan Parnis said the partnership reflected his firm’s view that synthetic data grounded in real people represents the most credible path forward for qualitative research. He framed the tool as genuinely democratising, arguing that combining qualitative and quantitative approaches before a decision has historically been beyond the reach of most business budgets. “That combination is now available at a much more accessible price point,” he said. He added that it would open the door for companies that have never conducted formal research at all, alongside those that already commission it regularly.
The launch event included a live demonstration in which Zammit assembled a focus group of Maltese digital twins and ran a comparative brand analysis of Nike and Adidas. A panel discussion followed, featuring Olivia Rossi of Mdina Partners and Justin Camilleri of the Malta Food Authority, with a case study contributed by Melita.
AYA says it plans to re-profile its real-world participants on a rolling basis, refreshing their digital twins to reflect shifts in attitudes, circumstances and behaviour over time. Custom panels, broader audience scans and live simulated calls are in development.
