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Helm Express vs Artificial Societies
Artificial Societies builds networks of AI personas grounded in observations of real people and connects them so that opinion can spread between them. Teams use these networks to test how an audience might react to a decision, and the service is sold through a demo. Helm Express asks simulated twins of a US place. Both are simulations, but one starts from an audience you define and the other starts from a place.
As of September 2026, from each company’s public site and documentation.
| Artificial Societies | Helm Express | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | Simulated personas grounded in observations of real people, from public social platforms, research and optionally your own data, sometimes combined into lookalike profiles, and joined into a network where opinion can spread. A network holds between 12 and 3,500 personas. | In a reading, simulated twins of a place’s residents or businesses; no real person is contacted for a reading. Interviews and short studies with the public and credential-checked experts are run by arrangement, labelled as real people and kept separate. |
| Where | Audiences you define by demographics, organisations and job titles, or from your own data, rather than by place. Its case studies include US policymakers and consumers in several countries. | Any of 12,759 US places — cities, counties, metros and states — with a neighbourhood map for most of them. US only. |
| Questions you can ask | Surveys, focus groups of 6 to 12 personas, follow-up interviews, conjoint analysis, and "multiverse" experiments that show different stimuli to copies of the same personas. It also runs scenario cascades that play out a chain of events. | Yes/no, a pick among up to 12 options, or a belief question; an A/B of two messages or two pieces of news; an interview with up to five twins from a reading. |
| What comes back | Opinions at the level of the population, a segment and a single persona, with a reason written for every answer and themes drawn from focus groups. Clients read the results in the company's own platform. | Which way the place leans, breakdowns by group and neighbourhood, and an interval and a read-quality grade on every poll result. |
| How you start | Book a demo. No public pricing, sign-up or API documentation. | Book a call, or sign in. Planning a question and previewing its cost come before anything runs. |
| Best when | You need to know how a defined group of stakeholders, such as regulators, investors or a customer segment, will react to a high-stakes decision, including how opinion spreads through that group. You also want a team to build the audience with you. | You need a fast, low-cost direction on a local question, with its cost shown before it runs — which way the simulated place leans, and among whom — before spending on real fieldwork. |
Choose Artificial Societies when
Your audience is defined by role or relationship, such as policymakers, analysts or industry peers, rather than by where people live.
You want to see how opinion moves through a connected group, or how a sequence of events might play out.
You want focus groups, conjoint analysis or a guided engagement with a team that builds the audience for you, including audiences outside the US.
Choose Helm Express when
Your question is about a specific US city, county, metro or state, down to the neighbourhood, shown on a map.
You want to see each question's cost before it runs, and a plan you can read before anything is spent.
You want an interval and a read-quality grade shown on every poll result, or a view of the businesses of a place.
What we say about Artificial Societies is taken from its own public site and documentation. Check the current version at societies.ai, and tell us if anything here is out of date.
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