Benchmarking the Personalization Capabilities of Large Language Models

Abstract

Personalization, the act of varying a message to induce action from a specific receiver while keeping sender, channel, and time fixed, has a long tradition in psychology and marketing as a two-party problem in which sender and receiver have independent objectives. Large language models remove the bounded-inventory constraint of classical retrieval-and-ranking approaches by generating a continuum of message variants conditioned on inferred receiver state, raising the question of how well current models perform personalization in the classical sense. Existing LLM personalization benchmarks measure sender-side adaptation, in which the receiver is the same user the model is serving. The two-party question, whether a generated message induces its intended action in a third party, has been investigated only through A/B tests and small-scale human studies that cannot be re-run against a new model on demand. We adapt the Bayesian Persuasion framework of Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011) to generative agents and instantiate the formulation in sales, where receiver actions are routinely logged against the outreach that induced them. We release SDR-Bench, a public corpus of 6,279 customer success stories spanning 22 industries and approximately 200 enterprises, served through a temporally constrained simulation that prevents future-data leakage. Across frontier LLMs and deep-research agents, we observe a consistent personalization plateau and on a Fortune 100 tech cohort no model statistically separates successful from unsuccessful outreach. A field deployment with 12 professional sales representatives validates the framework, with 48 percent of model-generated content rated immediately useful and senior-expert agreement at Pearson 0.82. We release SDR-Arena and SDR-Bench publicly to support reproducible study of generative personalization at scale.