Persona Conditioning of Brand Recommendations in Retrieval-Augmented Commercial Chat: A Prominence-Stratified Cross-Provider Audit

ArXi:2605.30207v1 Announce Type: new 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.