PersonaCite: VoC-Grounded Interviewable Agentic Synthetic AI Personas for Verifiable User and Design Research

Abstract

LLM-based and agent-based synthetic personas are increasingly used in design and product decision-making, yet prior work shows that prompt-based personas often produce persuasive but unverifiable responses that obscure their evidentiary basis. We present PersonaCite, an agentic system that reframes AI personas as evidence-bounded research instruments through retrieval-augmented interaction. Unlike prior approaches that rely on prompt-based roleplaying, PersonaCite retrieves actual voice-of-customer artifacts during each conversation turn, constrains responses to retrieved evidence, explicitly abstains when evidence is missing, and provides response-level source attribution. Through semi-structured interviews and deployment study with 14 industry experts, we identify preliminary findings on perceived benefits, validity concerns, and design tensions, and propose Persona Provenance Cards as a documentation pattern for responsible AI persona use in human-centered design workflows.