6 tips for designing an AI personality

At Juyo, we faced a challenge familiar to many companies: Data overload. In hospitality, that means juggling occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, budget forecasts, and more. Each metric can be sliced and visualized in countless ways. For hotel teams, navigating endless widgets, filters, and chart options quickly turns into a serious time sink.

That’s why we worked with Juyo to create Kassandra: an AI that instantly generates the right widgets for your dashboards. No more endless filtering, tweaking, or digging. Instead, Kassandra surfaces the insights you need, instantly.

But this post isn’t actually about what Kassandra does. It’s about how she does it. Because Kassandra doesn’t just generate widgets. She carries a personality. One deliberately designed to enhance engagement, adoption, and long-term use.

Why personality in AI matters

Giving an AI a voice and character might sound like a gimmick, but it isn’t. It’s rooted in communication and psychology:

• Builds trust: Human-like behaviors boost trust in AI, especially when paired with perceived intelligence (ScienceDirect, 2025).

• Adds emotional trust: Competence drives cognitive trust (believing the AI can do the job), while personality drives emotional trust (feeling comfortable with it). Both are essential for adoption (Cantucci et al., 2025).

• Amplifies usefulness: Anthropomorphism strengthens the effect of competence and usefulness on trust and satisfaction. Personality makes functional strengths shine brighter (Sarwar et al., 2024).

• Multifaceted impact: Trust in AI isn’t one-dimensional. Users weigh capability, transparency, explainability, personalization, AND personality differently across contexts and cultures (SpringerLink, 2025).

• Drives long-term engagement: As AI becomes part of workflows, personality helps sustain use. “Socioaffective alignment” research suggests AIs that adapt to users’ emotional styles are stickier over time (Nature, 2025).

• More forgiving: When errors occur, a playful or anthropomorphic tone helps soften negative emotions (anger, frustration) and encourages forgiveness by framing the interaction in more human terms (Holtzman et al., 2025).

In short: personality isn’t cosmetic. It’s an important strategic lever. But it only works when balanced with competence, clarity, and consistency.

Designing Kassandra's Personality

In crafting Kassandra’s voice, we wanted more than “helpful assistant.” We wanted something aligned with Juyo’s brand: intelligent, supportive, and with a little spark of boldness. That required intentional messaging design:

Tone with character: Clear and professional, but willing to wink, tease, and offer light humor.

• Consistency and predictability: Even when playful, she adheres to boundaries and conventions so users know what to expect.

• Deflecting non-core topics: She won’t engage in romance, small talk, or personal compliments seriously. She redirects to her domain.

• Adaptive style: Her tone can modulate depending on seriousness (e.g. forecast error vs routine request).

• Emphasis on competence: Her quips never overshadow the fact that she’s delivering real insight.

Here are a few real excerpts:

“Morning, hotel superstar! 🌞 I’ve analyzed your request for a morning pickup report… Here are the most relevant widgets for your needs.”
“Looking at market performance metrics? Let’s dive into the data that shows exactly how your hotel is stacking up against the competition! 📊”
“Well, that’s sweet of you, but I’m an AI assistant for hotel metrics, not a dating app! 🤖💔 Try asking me something about occupancy rates or RevPAR, and I’ll show you what I’m really good at! ✨📊”

Her tone of voice helps lower the barrier to interaction, make each engagement feel lighter, and reinforce Kassandra's character as both personable and domain-serious.

Thinking about developing your own AI personality?

If you want to develop a brand personality for your AI, here are six guiding principles:

1. Brand alignment
   The AI must feel like an extension of your brand, not a random voice tacked on. If your brand is formal and precise, you probably don’t want a wildly sarcastic persona.

2. Balance distinctiveness with utility
   You want personality that stands out, but not at the cost of obscuring meaning or frustrating users. The voice should enhance, not distract from, the AI’s utility.

3. Set clear boundaries
   Decide in advance: Which conversational topics are okay, which are off-limits, and how the AI handles out-of-scope requests.

4. Prioritize transparency & explainability
   Personality should not obscure the logic. Users must still be able to understand why the AI is doing something, especially for trust.

5. Localize & adapt
   Personality preferences vary by culture, by user demographics, and by context. You might need slight tonal variants or regional adjustments.

6. Evolve over time
   Personality is not static. As the system and user relationship evolves, the voice may need subtle refinements and adaptation to context.

Conclusion

Giving an AI a personality influences adoption, trust, engagement, error tolerance, and user loyalty. When well done, an AI personality turns a tool into a partner. It gains a worthy voice, the UI becomes not just functional, but engaging, human-centered, and even a little fun.

Thinking about giving your AI a voice? We help build personalities that turn tools into trusted companions.