Verve Adds Five as Personas Offer 'Catches Fire'

In London, insight agency Verve has announced five appointments to the team delivering its fast-growing synthetic personas proposition, VIPS. Chloe Stevens steps into the new role of Growth Director, while Tana-Maria Botezat, Nicole Seow, Benjamin Huaraka and Daniel Zhang also join the team.

Verve was founded as a specialist in community panels in 2008, and has evolved into a firm combining 'human truth', proprietary AI and other technology, cultural intelligence and consultancy expertise. In November 2024 it launched a tech and services platform called Verve Vero, combining proprietary AI with 'real human insight' and cultural understanding, and which is now home to AI-powered response modelling system VIPS (Verve Intelligence Personas & Simulations). In the autumn, the firm integrated this with the technology of business, consumer and location intelligence firm CACI to develop Fresco Live, which aims to bring customer voices directly into brands' strategy, proposition and journey design.

Stevens (pictured) brings more than a decade of insight consultancy experience across FMCG and healthcare to her newly-created role, scaling strategic AI powered insight solutions across key clients. She previously led global brand and innovation programmes and grew complex multi-market and multi category accounts at firms including FiftyFive5 and Human8.

Botezat, who was awarded Quirk's Outstanding Young Researcher in 2025, joins as an Associate Director, with experience in AI-powered ideation and concept development programmes, across global CPG, healthcare, financial services and retail brands, and will accelerate the design of VIPS solutions to boost clients' innovation pipelines and commercial growth.

Seow and Huaraka join as Associate Consultants. Seow holds an MSc in Computational & Corpus Linguistics, and will bring her expertise in language patterns, model behaviour and cultural intelligence to bear on VIPS' context engineering approaches, ensuring all outputs are grounded in contextual realities and nuances. Huaraka brings an MSc in Digital Anthropology from UCL, and AI model training experience from Meta, including a combination of ethnographic research and hands-on evaluation of large language models, giving him a deep understanding of how AI systems interpret human behaviour.

Zhang joins as Technical Product Manager, with experience in both AI research and engineering. In his new role he will lead the development of Verve's VIP validation processes and use them to create new models for quantitative insight.

Founder and CEO Andrew Cooper comments, 'We've seen our VIPS proposition really catch fire after over three and a half years of investment and foundation client success. This is helping us retain and grow existing clients as well as bring new relationships on board - and it's helping our partner agencies do the same. Our new hires bring expanded capabilities, AI-native thinking and a positive, forward-looking approach to research, embracing the opportunity to shape a new model for insight.'

The firm is online at www.addverve.com .