Enhancing Persona Creation Through the Hermeneutic Fusion of Horizons: Business Applications in AI Natural Language Generation

This paper details the creation of a persona often used in business research, product development, and marketing through the hermeneutic fusion of horizons and finally applying it to artificial intelligence (AI) natural language generation platforms. The intent is to discern if hermeneutics has the utility of creating a higher-resolution persona and rendering more accurate data for better integration and insight. The paper first reviews the utility of the persona and the impetus for use in business applications as well as the potential benefits and concerns. The hermeneutic background of horizons and circles is presented, leading to a review of the process of creating the first two horizons and the final fusion. The first horizon is the background of the domain, and the creation of the interview questions is needed to create the second horizon, where the domain members present current sentiment. Fusing the first two horizons summarizes the two data sets by rendering them into a singular narrative akin to a persona. The paper applies an example fusion of horizons crafted over a 14-month research project previously published in 2022 in two specific tests. The first application is where the example fusion is used to create AI versions of domain personas to verify richness and accuracy, and the second application used the example fusion as a means to create a sales strategy for a software company targeting the domain. Four AI platforms were tested, and the results were compared and contrasted. As the research is conceptual, there is no clear conclusion, but it offers a glimpse into possibilities and future research. Received: 22 June 2024 | Revised: 22 August 2024 | Accepted: 24 August 2024 Conflicts of Interest The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://figshare.com/s/56306c9ce5aa2bba26ca. Author Contribution Statement Carl Lee Tolbert: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration.