How Envision IT Built an AI-Generated 250-Person Demo Organization

Creating compelling software demos is about more than just presenting its features; it’s about creating an experience that resonates with potential customers. When we set out to create a demo environment for our new People Search solution and Extranet User Manager’s guest portal, we knew we needed more than static examples to tell the product story.

We wanted to authentically showcase the solutions’ capabilities by creating a dynamic and intuitive demo environment that showcased our clients' real challenges and complexities. That’s when we decided to build a realistic 250-person organization. But how?

This is where Generated Photos came in. By leveraging AI to generate photorealistic avatars, we built a 250-person demo organization that felt as dynamic and diverse as a real company in minutes. Creating this environment highlights more than just the platform's functionality. It allows prospects to immerse themselves in the story and envision how our solution could apply to an organization like theirs.

Meeting the Challenge: Creating Realism into Demo Environments

We needed an authentic demo environment to connect with prospects and tell our story effectively. This is what we wanted to showcase in our fictional organization:

• Diversity: Representing various roles, ages, and backgrounds.
• Lifelike Personas: Visual profiles that look and feel real.
• Unique Data: Showcasing advanced search capabilities with unique, realistic, and privacy-friendly data.

Creating an environment like this manually would be time-consuming and drain our resources. Since placeholder images and generic text wouldn’t deliver the impact we wanted, we turned to AI.

How Generated Photos Helped Us Build a Realistic Demo Organization

Generated Photos is an AI-powered tool that generates photorealistic, diverse faces without using real individuals. We chose it for:

• Scalability: We generated 250 unique personas in minutes.
• Customization: The ability to tailor attributes like age, ethnicity, and facial expressions made our fictional staff directory lifelike.
• Privacy-Friendly: Since the data is entirely synthetic, we ensured compliance with privacy regulations.
• Cost-Effective: Scalable and innovative solution at a reasonable cost.
• Efficiency: A process that could have taken months was completed in just a few days.

With this tool, we quickly generated a 250-person organization with realistic personas representing executives, managers, and administrators, all customized to fit the narrative of a dynamic enterprise.

Bringing the Demo to Life with AI

Building a visually engaging demo organization was only part of the solution. We wanted it to highlight what’s possible with AI, and that’s where Microsoft Copilot, along with our People Search and AI Search capabilities, came in.

Microsoft Copilot: Generating Employee Information with Ease

Creating 250 unique employee bios can be a time-consuming task. To ensure our personas were realistic and diverse, we turned to Microsoft Copilot. This AI tool helped us generate detailed employee bios for all 250 individuals in our demo organization, including rich, fictional data such as job titles, departments, contact details, and key metadata. By leveraging Copilot, we created a diverse range of personas in minutes. This streamlined our demo organization's population and added to our fictional organization's realism.

People Search: Enhancing Usability

Envision IT’s People Search solution unifies fragmented employee data by making it visible, searchable and easily accessible. People search leverages AI to make search results more intelligent, accurate, and contextually relevant, allowing employees and users to connect instantly, which empowers organizations to break down knowledge silos and foster better collaboration.

Here are the features we wanted to highlight to potential customers:

• Search by Attributes: Users can search by name, job title, department, or other metadata.
• Rich Profiles: Each persona includes a profile picture, name, title, and contact information, creating a fully realized employee directory.
• Dynamic Filtering: Filters allow users to narrow their search to specific categories, such as "Marketing Team" or "Regional Managers."

This capability demonstrates how AI enhances data discovery. The solution goes beyond traditional HR bios, delivering rich, dynamic profiles highlighting skills, expertise, and more.

Benefits Realized in the Demo Organization

Enhanced Realism and Engagement

Prospects can see firsthand how a robust directory and search tools can be applied to their organization seamlessly.

Time Efficiency and Scalability

A project of this scale would have traditionally required months of work. We completed the demo with AI in just a few days, and we can now adapt and scale it for different audiences.

Customer-Centric Storytelling

With a diverse, interactive demo environment, we tailored the experience to resonate with each prospect's unique needs, creating impactful sales conversations.

How You Can Leverage This Approach

We learned a lot from this project, and these are our key takeaways to help other organizations create impactful demos:

1. Use AI for Scalable Demo Data

Tools like Generated Photos enable you to create realistic environments while quickly maintaining privacy compliance.

2. Diverse Applications

Generated Photos offers a scalable and ethical solution across industries and use cases, including AI training, design, media, and gaming.

3. Tailor Demos to Your Audience

Customize your demo data to align with your customers’ industries and pain points to create a more compelling demo experience and more aligned sales conversations.

Redefining Demo Experiences with AI

In our eyes, we’ve redefined how we showcase our solutions. This isn’t just a demo—it’s a testament to AI's potential and how AI can transform how we create, collaborate, and communicate. The lesson from this project highlights what’s possible when AI meets creativity and innovation, and we’re excited about that.

Watch our on-demand webinar, Supercharge Your Search with Azure AI Search and Open AI, to learn more about AI Search and how your organization can benefit from this transformative technology.