When building a PII detector for e-commerce giant Rakuten, Goodfire AI had to train on synthetic data due to privacy rules. This forced them to solve the difficult "synthetic to real" transfer problem to ensure performance on actual customer data, a common enterprise hurdle.
An AI model trained on public legal documents performed well. However, when applied to actual, consented customer contracts, its accuracy plummeted by 15 percentage points. This reveals the significant performance gap between clean, public training data and complex, private enterprise data.
To ensure AI reliability, Salesforce builds environments that mimic enterprise CRM workflows, not game worlds. They use synthetic data and introduce corner cases like background noise, accents, or conflicting user requests to find and fix agent failure points before deployment, closing the "reality gap."
Enterprise SaaS companies (the 'henhouse') should be cautious when partnering with foundation model providers (the 'fox'). While offering powerful features, these models have a core incentive to consume proprietary data for training, potentially compromising customer trust, data privacy, and the incumbent's long-term competitive moat.
Insurers lack the historical loss data required to price novel AI risks. The solution is to use red teaming and systematic evaluations to create a large pool of "synthetic data" on how an AI product behaves and fails. This data on failure frequency and severity can be directly plugged into traditional actuarial models.
A major hurdle for enterprise AI is messy, siloed data. A synergistic solution is emerging where AI software agents are used for the data engineering tasks of cleansing, normalization, and linking. This creates a powerful feedback loop where AI helps prepare the very data it needs to function effectively.
To break the data bottleneck in AI protein engineering, companies now generate massive synthetic datasets. By creating novel "synthetic epitopes" and measuring their binding, they can produce thousands of validated positive and negative training examples in a single experiment, massively accelerating model development.
A critical hurdle for enterprise AI is managing context and permissions. Just as people silo work friends from personal friends, AI systems must prevent sensitive information from one context (e.g., CEO chats) from leaking into another (e.g., company-wide queries). This complex data siloing is a core, unsolved product problem.
To test complex AI prompts for tasks like customer persona generation without exposing sensitive company data, first ask the AI to create realistic, synthetic data (e.g., fake sales call notes). This allows you to safely develop and refine prompts before applying them to real, proprietary information, overcoming data privacy hurdles in experimentation.
Instead of using sensitive company information, you can prompt an AI model to create realistic, fake data for your business. This allows you to experiment with powerful data visualization and analysis workflows without any privacy or security risks.
Expect 2026 to be the breakout year for synthetic data. Companies in highly regulated sectors like healthcare and finance are realizing it offers a compliant and low-risk method to test and train AI models without compromising sensitive customer information, enabling innovation in marketing, research, and CX.