Gartner: Companies should create digital twins of their customers as well as themselves

The enhanced experiences driven by DToCs can extend across the physical and digital worlds. For example, DToCs can assist with the design and planning of retail stores and other physical spaces. By letting these virtual customers lose in a virtual store, retailers can proactively optimise layouts and in-store product placement long before they swing open the doors in the real world. An important consideration when employing a digital twin is that organizations are recording data and transferring it via cloud technology.

How Will Digital Twins of Customers Impact CX?

• This includes simulating, and even anticipating a customer’s behaviour, wants, needs and preferences, as well as the ability to test these in different scenarios.
• As third-party data depreciates and becomes more difficult to obtain, organizations must become competent at simulating data (synthetic data generation) to build and augment virtual customer profiles.
• The 3D Digital Twin solution is positioned to play a key role in AssetCare’s rapid adoption.
• Despite those potential gains, the barriers to adoption of DToCs include a lack of awareness of the transformational benefits, a lack of digitalization skills, and concerns about customer trust and data privacy regulations, Gartner said.
• Or airside passengers are asked to change gates as an aircraft at a gate didn’t leave on time.
• Privacy regulations and laws should be discussed regularly, and the team should work on tracking dynamic personas and the stages of their relationships.

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Digital twin enables customer experience renaissance at Rome airport

A DToC is a dynamic, virtual representation of a customer that simulates their behavior and learns to emulate and anticipate it. The goal is to provide customers with better experiences, which result in increased revenue and lasting customer relationships. CMOs aspire to orchestrate contextually relevant experiences across the full customer journey. To do this, many CMOs are prioritizing first-party data capture and seeking opportunities for personalized engagement throughout the end-to-end customer journey. Foo Kune will present additional approaches to customer data collection during AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event on February 7 in New York City. A big challenge facing contact center agents who provide technical support is identifying and resolving customer problems quickly, accurately and consistently.

The Digital Twin Effect: Four Ways It Can Revitalize Your Business

The concept of creating a digital replica of a physical object may sound far-fetched, but it’s no longer science fiction. To date, the company has cut commodity costs by 30% and onboarded 50% of major vendors using digital twins. According to GS1 US, technology improvements can help food retailers meet that rising demand for information, as brands globally begin a transition from the one-dimensional, pinstriped UPCs that have powered price lookup for more than 50 years to new, two-dimensional QR codes. The quick response (QR) codes can share far more information than the traditional zebra-shaded stripes, the firm says. In early July 2025, Morrisons launched a new AI-powered product finder feature in its mobile app to improve the shopping experience for its customers. This approach enables rapid testing of strategies and direct assessment of trade-offs, leading to improvements in efficiency, resilience and customer service.

If your manufacturing equipment is lagging, you can fix or upgrade the machinery before it impacts your company’s efficiency. If a product is under performing, you can make improvements so future releases don’t have similar issues. A GIS digital twin is a framework for merging all kinds of disparate types of data — from real time to historical, from the human world to the natural world. Digital twins are so useful that they are spreading quickly across all kinds of demanding settings — running factories and pipelines, managing airports and city operations, anticipating the impact of climate change. The market for digital twin technology is expected to grow by a factor of 10 by 2030. Vodafone, the second-largest mobile phone company in the world, started a project a few years ago to make a better map of its coverage area in the UK.

DToCs can also be a powerful tool for supporting new products, services and digitalisation efforts. Still, marketers should incorporate the concept of digital twins when they design their long-term plans around customer data collection and use. Organizations should apply DToC across ad targeting, customer journey orchestration and experience optimization.

See digital twins in action

• Zero- and first-party data collected off of branded and owned sites will become the foundation for this profile.
• Our dedicated editorial and research teams focus on bringing you the data and information you need to navigate today’s complex customer, organizational and technical landscapes.
• Once a plan is in place, data collection becomes important to build customer profiles.
• Companies such as Siemens are supporting a revolution in food tech with the digital twin serving as the end-to-end applied tool in both the supply chain and product management.
• Working with digital twins offers retailers a virtual safe space where they can hone their efforts to personalise the customer experience.
• Retailers who embrace digital twins gain a risk-free environment to test, learn and continuously improve.

CJO relies on reinforcement learning to guide customers to a conversion event based on historical data merged with current data as well as similar marketing action behavior patterns. Over time, the system learns what works best for certain situations and responds accordingly. CJO frequently applies learning outcomes to digital representations of a customer before delivering the next best experience in a customer journey to an individual customer. With a swing in consumer expectations, retailers can no longer risk the consequences of a hit-and-miss approach to engaging with their customers. We’re at the point where I believe we’ll start to see strategies that aim to predict, rather than react, rise to the top of the priority list. In a retail environment, digital twins enable a safe space to innovate, and they will become crucial in personalising a richer, more data-driven and captivating engaging customer experience while providing the power for retailers to move from insight to action.

Delays can have far-reaching impacts on the airlines too, if, for example, they suffer insurance penalties or have to accommodate passengers if journeys are cancelled. By sector, workers in manufacturing (71%) and transport and logistics (71%) prefer flexibility over their working hours rather than control over their working location, compared to just over half of financial services (54%) and healthcare workers (52%). These findings emphasize that for industries where remote work isn’t an option—such as manufacturing and transport and logistics industries—flexibility is still achievable, primarily through adaptable scheduling. Healthcare workers (81%) cited the highest preference for employability over the ability to work remotely, followed by workers in manufacturing (75%), financial services (70%), and transport and logistics (65%). Through this strategic partnership, Morrisons aims to lead in supply chain innovation by making informed decisions that support growth and operational superiority while enhancing the overall customer experience.

The term digital twin refers to a virtual representation of a physical object, product, service or system that spans its life cycle, is updated with real-time data and informs actionable insights through the use of simulations, machine learning and reasoning. Gartner’s report on DToCdetails the creation of digital twins, beginning with the immediate actions a brand should take to get started. Because DToC depends on quality data, customer data and sources of customer insights should be audited.