Sentient Joins the Festival of NewMR 2026: Connecting AI Innovation with Human Understanding

AI is transforming the insights industry. But as researchers explore synthetic data, Digital Twins, AI personas and increasingly autonomous research tools, an important question is emerging: how do we make AI better at understanding and predicting people?

Sentient will explore that question from two different perspectives at the Festival of NewMR 2026, with presentations from Aaron Reid, Founder and CEO, and Jeremy Clough, EVP of Product and Marketing Strategy.

On November 18, Aaron will present The Role of Emotion in Predictive Intelligence as part of Innovation Day.

The event brings together industry leaders exploring many of the issues defining the next generation of research, including synthetic data, AI personas, Digital Twins and AI that can observe human behavior.

Aaron’s talk addresses a fundamental challenge behind many of these developments.

AI has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in logic-based problems, yet predicting human behavior requires something different. People make decisions based on emotional, implicit and psychological mechanisms that are often difficult to capture through what they consciously report.

The presentation will provide case study evidence for three areas Sentient believes are important to the development of more predictive Digital Twins: incorporating the unspoken, training on psychological mechanisms and validating predictions against market outcomes rather than survey responses.

The ultimate benchmark is not whether an AI can replicate what someone says in a survey. It is whether it can accurately predict what people will actually do, including when they encounter new situations.

Showcase Day shifts the conversation toward practical applications, with short sessions demonstrating the products, platforms and capabilities changing how insights teams work.

Jeremy will demonstrate how Sentient is already applying these principles through SubtextAI and the Sentient Insights platform.

The platform measures changes in implicit attitudes, emotional responses and subconscious motivations following exposure to marketing communications. This helps teams understand why creative works, predict its impact and identify opportunities to improve performance.

It also creates another opportunity.

The resulting real human behavioral data can provide a new dimension for training AI, giving them access to audience-specific subconscious associations, emotions and motivations that traditional stated data does not capture.