Persona Conditioning of Brand Recommendations in Retrieval-Augmented Commercial Chat: A Prominence-Stratified Cross-Provider Audit
The same prompt -- "best CRM software" -- reaches AI assistants from buyers in widely different contexts: a solo founder, an enterprise VP, a UK SMB owner. We audit how strongly that contextual variation reshapes which brands the model recommends. The audit samples 2,000 runs over a design space of 10 personas x 8 prompts x 3 model configurations x N=10 reps, with the two OpenAI cells at full 8-prompt coverage and the Anthropic sonnet-4.6 / low cell at 4-prompt coverage. Prefixing the user message with a persona drops the recommendation-set similarity (Jaccard) by Delta = -0.12 to -0.20 relative to a same-persona baseline (clustered 95% CIs exclude zero on all three measured cells; the so...
| Authors | Will Jack, Noah Lehman, Keller Maloney et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 28 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 May 2026 |
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