The Virtual Roundtable: Multi-Agent Personas Simulating the Dynamics of Human Brainstorming

2026-06-06 · Source: cs.AI updates on arXiv.org · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Robotics & Autonomous Systems · Depth: Expert, extended

Summary

The paper introduces "The Virtual Roundtable," a multi-agent AI architecture designed to simulate human brainstorming sessions, addressing challenges like groupthink and limited diversity in traditional methods. This system employs diverse AI personas, guided by an agentic facilitator, through divergent thinking for idea generation and convergent thinking for evaluation. A case study involving 13 AI personas, including "Busy Working Parent" and "Accessibility Advocate," generated consumer ideas for AI smart glasses. The session, lasting approximately 10 minutes, produced ranked ideas and tracked their lineage. Experiments across 34 sessions with six discussion durations showed that longer discussions significantly deepen cross-pollination, increasing "Mean Idea Influence Depth" from 10.8 at 0 minutes to 70.7 at 25 minutes and "Mean Cross-Persona Absorption" from 0% to 83% (r=0.79, r=0.88, p<0.05). However, "Mean Pairwise Idea Distance" remained flat across all durations (r=0.16, n.s.), indicating idea diversity is primarily bounded by persona composition, not discussion length.

Key takeaway

For AI Product Managers or UX Researchers aiming to accelerate early-stage product ideation, you should consider implementing multi-agent brainstorming systems. By carefully selecting diverse AI personas that reflect your target audience, you can generate and stress-test product concepts more efficiently, gaining insights into idea evolution and underlying assumptions. Focus on persona composition to ensure broad ideational coverage, and use discussion duration to deepen the refinement and evaluation of promising ideas.

Key insights

Multi-agent AI personas can simulate human brainstorming, deepening idea refinement through structured discussion but not expanding initial diversity.

Principles

• Separate divergent idea generation from convergent evaluation.
• Persona composition dictates ideational breadth.
• Discussion duration enhances idea refinement depth.

Method

The system orchestrates diverse AI personas with private thoughts and public comments, guided by a facilitator, through Discussion, Ideation, and Voting phases, tracking idea lineage.

In practice

• Craft personas mirroring target audiences for product concept testing.
• Trace idea lineage to validate assumptions.
• Adjust persona pool to target new market segments.

Topics

• Multi-Agent Systems
• AI Personas
• Brainstorming Simulation
• Product Ideation
• Divergent Thinking
• Convergent Thinking

Best for: Research Scientist, AI Scientist, AI Engineer, AI Product Manager

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by cs.AI updates on arXiv.org.