> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getversive.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# AI personas

> Build reusable AI participants from scratch or from your own research data

Personas are the AI participants in your tests. They live in an organization-wide **persona library**, organized into folders, and are reusable across every test and [study simulation](/studies/launch-and-sharing#simulate-ai-test-participants).

## Creating personas

There are three ways to create a persona:

<Steps>
  <Step title="Write it">
    Describe the persona in free text — up to 500,000 characters, so you can be as detailed as you like.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Upload research">
    Attach real research files — interview transcripts, survey exports, research reports — as PDF, DOCX, TXT, or Markdown (up to 10 MB per file, 50 MB per persona).
  </Step>

  <Step title="Distill">
    Versive's AI distills your text and files into a structured persona, preserving specific details, numbers, and quotes from the source data.
  </Step>
</Steps>

You can also write a quick **custom persona inline** while configuring a test, without saving it to the library.

## What's in a distilled persona

| Field                    | What it captures                                                                         |
| ------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Summary**              | A 20–120 word portrait of who this is.                                                   |
| **Identity**             | Demographics and background — age, location, education, income, family, role, lifestyle. |
| **Context**              | Why they're looking for a solution right now.                                            |
| **Goals & outcomes**     | What success looks like for them, including concrete KPIs.                               |
| **Friction points**      | Known pain points and obstacles.                                                         |
| **Behavioral patterns**  | Habits and typical workflows.                                                            |
| **Interaction style**    | Communication style, technology comfort level, and decision-making process.              |
| **Psychometric profile** | Big Five traits — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. |
| **Unique factors**       | Distinctive details, real quotes, and behavioral instructions.                           |

Everything is editable after distillation.

## Using personas in tests

* Add any number of personas to a test; each has its own **execution count** (how many independent runs it performs).
* Each persona execution is a separate test run and consumes one credit (website runs with the extended step limit can cost up to two).
* Results are attributed to their persona, so you can compare how different user types experience the same design.

## Best practices

* **Source personas from real research.** A persona distilled from ten actual interview transcripts behaves far more specifically than one written from imagination. The distiller keeps real quotes and numbers — feed it real data.
* **One persona, one segment.** Don't average two audiences into one persona ("busy parents and enterprise admins") — make two, and run both.
* **Use execution counts for consistency.** Running the same persona 3–5 times shows which findings are stable and which were one-off.
* **Maintain the library like a team asset.** Name personas by segment, keep them in folders, and update them as new research comes in — your plan includes a persona limit, so prune stale ones.