{"paper":{"title":"Persona Conditioning of Brand Recommendations in Retrieval-Augmented Commercial Chat: A Prominence-Stratified Cross-Provider Audit","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Keller Maloney, Noah Lehman, Sarah Xu, Will Jack","submitted_at":"2026-05-28T16:43:38Z","abstract_excerpt":"The same prompt -- \"best CRM software\" -- reaches AI assistants from buyers in widely different contexts: a solo founder, an enterprise VP, a UK SMB owner. We audit how strongly that contextual variation reshapes which brands the model recommends. The audit samples 2,000 runs over a design space of 10 personas x 8 prompts x 3 model configurations x N=10 reps, with the two OpenAI cells at full 8-prompt coverage and the Anthropic sonnet-4.6 / low cell at 4-prompt coverage. Prefixing the user message with a persona drops the recommendation-set similarity (Jaccard) by Delta = -0.12 to -0.20 relati"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.30207","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.30207/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}