Sparks: AI audience personas for B2B comms

Earlier this year, our CEO Debby Penton explored how AI personas could help teams understand audiences in a more meaningful way. Moving beyond surface-level profiling, the focus was on how people think, decide and behave in real B2B situations.

Today, we’re launching Sparks AI as the next evolution of those AI personas.

Over the past year, I’ve been working as part of Wildfire’s in-house AI Taskforce to design and build Sparks from the ground up. Each Spark has been shaped through hands-on testing with large language models, making sure they behave consistently in pitches, planning sessions, and creative development.

What began as an internal project is now a packaged tool our teams use across new business, planning and day-to-day thinking. Sparks help us sense-check ideas early, sharpen narratives and make more confident decisions before work reaches clients or media.

A lot of brands say they use audience personas in AI. In practice, that often means prompting a model to act like a CEO or B2B buyer. Large language models are good at producing fluent responses to those prompts, but fluency alone does not reflect how decisions are made. Without a structure for behaviour, outputs tend to reinforce familiar assumptions.

That’s why I’ve been working closely with Wildfire’s AI Taskforce to build our Sparks around seven behavioural factors that shape real B2B decision-making. This work has also been informed by close collaboration with Debby, drawing on her MSc in Behavioural Science to stay focused on the core forces that influence how people assess risk, build trust and make choices under pressure. Alongside this, we’ve been able to draw on millions of data points from GWI, whose quarterly research tracks the attitudes, behaviours and decision drivers of B2B audiences globally.

Those seven behavioural factors are:

Together, these factors help guide how each Spark interprets information and responds to ideas. They give our teams a clearer view of why messages land with a particular audience, whether a campaign will resonate with an end buyer, and even if a pitch email will add value to a journalist.

All our Sparks are built using OpenAI and run directly inside ChatGPT. This allows our teams to use them naturally within tools they already know, while benefiting from personas that are designed to behave in a consistent and useful way.

Sparks are now embedded into how Wildfire works day to day, shaping strategy, creativity and modern B2B communications.