Your AI Shouldn't Know Everyone. It Should Know You. | Robert LoCascio

Yeah, Rob Locassio. And uh, Ben, thanks for having me on the podcast. Yeah. Um, I started URAI actually about two years ago, and uh, with the simple premise that individuals should have their own AIs instead of the aggregated knowledge that we have. Each of us should be in control of our knowledge ourselves. Our AIs with the ability to share and monetize our AIs, um, instead of people monetizing our data for us, which is what's happening with the large language models today. So simple premise. Um, we're about to launch the platform, about a week away from launching the platform, and uh, kind of excited to, you know, talk about what we're doing.

I think that when I look at the original concept of the internet, which kind of holds true today, when e-commerce came into play, people's perspective was that the website would be like a vending machine: you put products up, people put the credit card in and they would buy. And especially in those early days, people weren't comfortable with that. And I just saw the idea of putting a human in the forefront, having a way for a customer to interact with the person, ask questions. That's how you build trust, you know, versus like especially back then, like put my credit card, maybe it gets stolen. And so it hasn't really changed when you think about it. There's still people like to talk to people and they want to have a conversation around products and services before they buy. Obviously Amazon went in a whole other direction, which is great, but for the majority of brands, they still have to communicate with those clients one way or another.

Um, I would say, if I could talk to one person, uh, it's interesting. It's like I'd probably talk to Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. I go there first myself.

But uh, yeah, the idea of getting, having a really deep conversation, a very personal conversation with someone who's not here could be a quite fascinating opportunity.

Uh yeah, it was quite interesting because I was putting together, I write all my LinkedIn postings out of my own AI and I do a lot of my communication out of my own AI. And um, I was asking it for what did it think like one of the more, you know, what quotes that would kind of fit me to do something I was posting on LinkedIn. And it brought this Robert Frost quote. And what was interesting about it is I never told it about that quote and why that's a favorite of mine. It's, you know, it's not like you dump everything into it. It's you put a base level of knowledge inside of it and then as you use it, it gets to know you. And I have a framed picture of that poem that actually it's in storage right now. I left it in a box. But it was the poem that I have normally above me. And so it was just so fascinating because it knows me really well and then kind of just figured, I don't know, it guessed at what it would be, but it was interesting. I never looked at it as spooky.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's surprising me with its understanding of me. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, I mean there it's it's just really if I if I think about the broader things I'm trying to do is I think the AI world we have one narrative and that is that AI, you know, is going to take our jobs. It's better than us and all this stuff. And it's creating a world of distrust. Um, and what keeps me up at night is really about, you know, making sure that we're being good stewards about what we're trying to do as a company. And my vision is that everyone owns their own models and their data sets and you should. It makes no sense to aggregate knowledge. I just want you to know that like I get why Claude and ChatGPT are really important today, but they and running processes they do an amazing job at especially Claude, but when it comes to really deep knowledge in many different areas, I want an expert. I was just talking to somebody on our platform who is like one of the best interviewers in the world. I mean this guy has interviewed everyone in the world and I mean Muhammad Ali and all the presidents and Robert De Niro, I mean everyone, Leonardo DiCaprio, just for Esquire magazine. He has a methodology on how to interview people. He actually and even how to do a podcast and ask the right questions. It's his methodology. And the best of ChatGPT and Claude can never do what Cal can do being on our platform and talking to him and giving access to that. So I think there's just such a depth of human. We haven't even seen the beginning of it, but I see a world there. So that's what kind of keeps you. I just want to make sure we get to that world.

Yeah, look I I it's human first. Our whole technology is about human first. So anything that you do as a human, as an individual is first and then the technology is here to support you. So I do both, you know, it's like I do a lot with my AI. I feed a lot into my AI. It helps me with a lot of things, but I take notes and I journal. Um, and because I think there's a process of writing that your brain is a different process than typing or speaking and I want that muscle always. So I just think yeah it's a I you know there's a dance going on between human and technology in my world. It's like a tango and that tango is what's important to me. So humans have to do what they have to do as individuals as unique individuals.

Yeah. So there's when you're talking to your own AI it's just your human life model. So we have this human life models. You put data in, we break it into seven categories and those are like identity, values, goals, all of that is mapped and that's unique to you. We do connect a large language model for you to have world knowledge and you can use any one. We just get the tokens. We give you the tokens to get world knowledge and then we have a real-time feed coming in about everything that's happening in the world, the news and everything that's happening because your AI at all times should be aware and present of all information including its own. When you share yourself with somebody, it's our model. So think of it as your own large language model called a small language model that is being shared. So they're only tapping into the box of your knowledge. So our AIs, they don't hallucinate and do things or make things up. They'll say, 'I don't know.' And then they speak. They also you can hear them talk and they sound like you and I mean you could talk really low, you could talk agitated. It depends on what how you're communicating with your words. But that's how we deliver a full experience right now.

So the big part is we have a thing called services and you can create a service around your knowledge and your AI will actually look at your data sets that I recommend. Like Ben, it's like here's how you would do a digital consulting or here's how you do a podcast or in my case it's like building a company and raising money and stuff like that. You can build out a service. Um we have a tax accountant who has built services on how to create a tax return and that service can be memorialized in an AI that then you can share and you can monetize and you get scale. This gentleman Cal who's on our platform, this writer, he built out a service around interviewing and how you ask the right interview questions and how do you do it? And so you can only get that from Cal and he's memorializing that as an AI, his AI on the platform, and then you could take that in a very structured way and learn from him. So yeah that's cool.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's identity, world, story, mindset, drive, pattern, growth are the seven. So we just found as we did the science on clients and especially as we started to look at people's personal stories, we all have the Joseph Campbell hero journey story in us. I started from nothing and I'm now here and I went through a lot of failure and success and learned that story inside of it has a lot of embeddings around these seven areas. So we look at data from two perspectives. One is your personal data set, life story. The other one is the facts, business processes, the facts of your life. Those things are separate in our world, but they all make up the human life model and then we look at you from SE. So we found this is the best way to manifest a human on the platform to be feel truly unique and individual.

Yeah, I what we're really doing here and working with clients is it's a transformation from the current world and a lot of that I'll call it the web 2 world that they're operating in. So they're using the tools of web 2, could be whether it's social media to promote themselves or they're using CRM systems like Salesforce. All of that is our present past. The future that we are creating is that they take all of that and that becomes an AI on the platform in which they can just sell access to. They create the price that they want to sell access to. And then they can scale that across many people. Now it's a new thing. It's totally a new thing. It's the first to be done. But it really allows these small businesses and professionals. We have doctors, lawyers, accountants. We have creators on the platform like writers and coaches, a lot of business coaches or personal coaches and it allows them to take all of that knowledge and then make a business out of it, but make a true pure AI business, not one that's kind of stuck in the past.

It's pretty straightforward. You come on the platform, you can record your voice that takes about 30 seconds and just through 30 seconds we really can replicate the range of you and your tonality and all that. You can take a picture of yourself and you can decide whether you want to have your face or a normal picture or an avatar or something like that. And then you basically can connect yourself to your social feeds like LinkedIn and all that. We start pulling data in. You can upload data, but you can start talking to your AI and it'll start asking you questions and all that. There's also the marketplace. So you can go straight, you can also look at the marketplace. You can see services that are being sold. We have things called thoughts, which are really ways for people to take small sections of their knowledge and promote them on a feed. And through that feed, you can see pictures and video and you can talk to the other people's AI. So you could talk to the AIs on the platform. If you're talking to your own AI, you can have a conversation. It will bring in other AIs. It will recommend other things on the platform that can help you. So instead of you going out to a large language model and getting your answers to your questions, we look for the knowledge on the platform and that knowledge can help you, but that's always provided from the individual. It's not like we just put a block of text. We put it with the individual and you could then chat further with that individual. So we have this guy Jordan Tom, he's like a great coach for children, speaks at schools, and he's got a million followers on social, but he's built his AI out. So if you have kids, he's a great AI to talk to. I talk to his AI all the time. Ask him questions. My kid does this. What do you think? He's amazing to talk to, but I get access to him immediately. His AI, you know, it's his AI.

Yeah. And on just connecting your previous thought, a lot of people are trying to build things and we call it like a Frankenstein of stuff. So there are some people like your friend who's trying to I'll call it make a platform out of it and we're making a platform so you can make it available to many people and then a lot of professionals I find they're on their own spending 105,000 trying to cobble together a voice model, an image model, a video model, a RAG, a thing. And then they're sitting there with Frankenstein or somebody sells them to do this and they're sitting there with Frankenstein and we just want to make it affordable so people could get the power of a very powerful AI but in a way that's affordable. So yeah.

It's not the business model. I mean they have they're making billions of dollars off of aggregated knowledge and for if tomorrow they said oh we gave up on our business model and they our terms and conditions if you took them and you can and put them into a ChatGPT you'll see it'll say like what's unique about this is you own the data it's not so you can if you want to summarize our terms and conditions you'll see that it's all about you own your data, you own everything, we don't put your data into other models, we don't train models with your data. Even stuff that we don't use, like we use third-party models for video jam. You can make a video of yourself, make a promotional video, make a movie out of something. People are doing that out of their books. We use third-party models for that. But we have terms and conditions with them that they cannot train based on your data set. So everything with us is all about having a closed system when it comes to your data, data privacy, data security.

I think the agent-to-agent stuff is really amazing. So on the platform you have your AI that you're talking to. I can bring in someone else's AI. My AI will talk to their AI and then I'm part of that conversation. You can put multiple AIs in. And I find it quite powerful because you're able to, your AI and another AI will work together on an idea and I think you get to really great outcomes when you do that. So I think the agent-to-agent piece is what I see as a huge unlock on the platform.

No, you don't have to do that. I mean you could do, we're putting in the functionality. Right now I could do a multiple AIs but you could do like a round table. So we don't like in here we all use each other's AIs and even partners use my AI. They've gone on the platform and they're like writing something to me and they're using my AI to ask questions because in the platform I can see people who've chatted with my AI. So I can see what my AI is talking to other people about and we do that here. So you don't really need to make a giant blobby one. You can have individuals and you can bring the individuals together that you want and they could all work collectively like you would in a meeting to get to the best outcome. And I still see that the best way because the large language, what I love about large language models is things like aggregated knowledge around health. I want a thousand scientists' brain, a giant brain, but for most things I want to hear the opinion of the person because they're an expert in their area and then I want to hear multiple opinions around a topic from multiple experts and that's really what we've achieved.

These are tools and that's very different than a platform. And I'll explain that like a tool has a use and a platform can do a transformation because a platform what its nature is that it takes you kind of from soup to nuts on getting to a goal. Our goal is the transformation of a professional from today their current business to being an AI business. That takes a lot of pieces all integrated and then it starts with an integrated view of your data set and the quality of that versus like you could do ElevenLabs, I got my voice, and HeyGen's my image, and then I'm using, and we just found when clients show up to us they don't know what to do with that. It's not, you need something that's growing with you every day and helping you to build a business. Most people are not technologists. You're a technologist, I'm a technologist, but most people are too busy to get their hands in these things and then they end up with the results of a very limited thing. You know, it's like it does very limited stuff for me but it doesn't allow me to transform. And the transformation is where you need a platform or you need someone who like yourself who can bring all those pieces together for someone. So it's either or, you know, that's that.

Which is hard. I was just, I spent my whole life in the enterprise with my previous company. We work with these big companies on transforming contact centers with chat, messaging and AI. And I was recently at a small meeting of 30 enterprise leaders, CIOs and stuff like that. I was invited to talk and I came away from it. There's a lot of talk about token usage and there was a lot of talk about the compliance part of using AI, right? These are the two things they were talking about. And these were the big banks, telcos, insurance companies, big big group there. I walked away thinking some of them will be around because they just will be there, such massive businesses, but I felt that there's a better shot at a smaller business transforming than them because they're so, what I realized is that in between customer and their products or services is a ton of humans and siloed processes that I've never seen change in my 30 years working with the enterprise and I don't think they have the capacity to change.

You see that in like the Blockbuster to Netflix type of dilemma. You even see it in Nvidia versus Intel. Literally, we're going to create something that's going to make our old stuff obsolete. And I think that's a critical piece to all of this. It takes a lot. I mean I did it when I was running LivePerson, even when we were over 200 million in revenues, when I went from chat to AI, and I had to because chat was based on human seats, AI is just scaling that without, so we built a whole new platform. I, you have to really burn the bridge. I stopped developing on the old platform and after about 12 months of not developing on the old platform for our customers, they got pissed, so we were committed. The bridge was burnt. We couldn't go back now because 80% of our resources were on the new platform, 20 were just maintaining the old platform.

But for a giant company, a multi-billion dollar insurance company, a multi-billion dollar whatever with tens of thousands of people, I don't see the will for a leader to do that. A lot of them are public. I ran a public company. It puts a lot of constraints on you. I see that they're going to, some it's faster pace right now. So a company could come out of nowhere and be very disruptive to these businesses, and I think that will be the next set of public companies.

I see. But I don't think everybody. I think that's really challenging, just the go-to-market strategy and some of those other pieces around that. I at least I'm seeing that there's a lot of disconnection there, and the clients I have that are just taking a little more time with it and not trying to ram everything through the fast gear motion are coming back with a better result.

Right, if you're saying this correctly, you can't if you fast gear, you may just you'll have to undo a lot of problems.

The AI slop is real. I still think there are people with visions out there that could bring it together and may have a better shot at making pure AI businesses, not using AI as tools in businesses, but pure play AI businesses. There was pure play web two businesses, so now there's going to be a set of pure play AI businesses. And how we do insurance and how we do all this stuff that can be simplified. I think a lot of this is about simplifying the process between consumer and the product or service you're selling, bringing that much closer than we had in the past.

The number one thing on the platform is you. So like, I don't really, I chat with other AIs on the platform for more or less to get me to be better. It's a different experience on our platform because if it was only AI, let's say synthetic AIs, like Character AI, you could talk to anybody. They make up people. You can talk to the Elon Musk fakey. It's very different. You're always talking to yourself, and then I'm talking to other AIs in relationship to myself, but it's not really built that you're just chatting with AIs all day. It's about chatting with yourself. So I guess, and just because I've been doing it for so long, I'm talking about chatting with myself and the people I have on the platform. It's a different relationship. You're not your own boyfriend. So what happens emotionally, I find because I'm always trying to be aware, I don't like, I don't. I always think there's good bad to everything. So I'm trying to be aware of where we will have places and times of this where we're going to have to rethink things. We're at the beginning. We're launching in a week. We have about 300 people on the platform today. A couple thousand, 6,000 waiting. So we're going to have to see how it plays out and then decide. The number one thing is it's human first. AI is there to support you. So we always have to keep to human first and not like your AI becomes this warped out thing. So I have to see how it plays out.

Yeah. And once again I go back to, we have values in the business. Our number one, our vision is to protect your AI. So we have to keep to that. I think where Silicon Valley, I grew up in New York, I just came here two years ago, but I'm in the middle of Silicon Valley, and there's a mentality of test, break, and learn. And I think this test, break, and learn concept has not been reinforcing to people that they can trust this technology. So I think, for instance, when you put yourself out publicly on our platform, you have to verify yourself as the person. We have a verification that takes two minutes. It's harder. Like we know it creates friction, but we don't want people faking people. We don't want another Benjamin Johnson on our platform. Rob Lassio, it's not us using our voice. So anyway, we got to kind of put the rails around our brand, and that I need to protect you. So that's our goal, that's our vision.

Right. And we, there was a debate about it, by the way, but the debate was a five-minute debate because we want to open it up because people are creating what we call thoughts. There's like these things that go on the feed and they're creative, their videos, and they're really cool, and we're limiting the amount of thoughts that are going on the feed because we put up verification. But it was like we had a two-minute conversation because we're going to break the business model. We're talking about protecting your AI. We're saying that another one is authentic, you know, AI, not artificial AI. Now all of a sudden, not artificial intelligence, authentic intelligence. All of a sudden it's fake, and you're faked out, and they show Elon Musk shows up and Donald Trump shows up as an AI, right? All this weird stuff, and then we're going to lose the business. So we said we can't do it, even though it hurts us technically. It's friction.

Yeah. So I mean, I had a conversation, like every day I'm talking to clients, but I'll bring one up particularly. We have this woman who runs a tax accounting firm, real go-getter, had this really interesting life, like a real, we all have tough life when she was young, has five kids, just amazing what she's done. And we were talking to her. She's been working with us on her AI. And she was in tears the other day, literally. It was an emotional moment. And she's not the only one. I see this a lot. She could start to see her business getting to the vision she's had. She wants to build a big business, but she's been very constrained by old systems and people. And she could see now her business turning into a totally different business and getting to the vision she has in her head. And she was just in, she goes, 'I'm just so grateful that we're able to do this on the platform.' And her daughter's in the business who does like 30 tax returns a day and has stress problems, and she's like, 'We're just going to get relieved of this, and I can focus on building my business while my AI is doing this work that just needs to be done.' So we haven't launched her yet, everything's launching next week, but the savings, it's not savings for her, it's the growth in her business. It's her going from 3,000 clients to 20,000 with the same people she has today. And so our whole business is growth, not cost savings. Automation's happening, but we don't talk about it. We take people and say, 'Can we take your business to 5x, 10x what it is?' That's what gets them excited. And that's what gets me excited because we're helping them get to some dream they have. We've also got people who would be in retirement, they ran a business for 20, 30 years and think about selling it, and all of a sudden they're like, 'I'm going to transform it and get more value out of it.' So to me, AI is not about job loss and taking jobs and automating humans. It's about growing people's ability to be exponential. They can be abundant, more abundant.

Yeah, I've been posting some stuff on LinkedIn about it. The last year, look, I was born Catholic and went to a Jesuit school, but I wasn't really practicing. And after I left my last company, something happened to me. I was asked to create a greater relationship with God, and I'm not embarrassed to say it. I even posted about this. I've been on this journey for the last year. And for a lot of my life, I always did this graph at the end of the year like I'm at the center and I would show all the things I'm working on: my family, my business, my spiritual, my money. And then what do I want to achieve with me in the middle? And through what I've gone through in the last year by putting God in the middle, it's a different thing for me now. I can't explain it, but it's like being an entrepreneur without that is really hard. When you have that relationship with God, and it's ongoing, but if you think you have a friend in Christ and you see through a different set of eyes, I don't know, I can't explain it, but it's important. That I think so. We're meaning factories. We have to establish meaning based on what we believe. It's like we're standing on a table or a platform of legs, and those legs are the things we believe. And you put all those legs together and it comprises our worldview. And to believe that God is in control and that he's a good God and he doesn't pull the rug out from under us every time we make a mistake, and to look back in your life and go, 'Yeah, there are a lot of times he probably could have struck me with lightning or befallen some thing on me because I've made some pretty big mistakes. I've even kind of lived with them for a while. I've enjoyed my sins for a while.' And he was merciful with me. I can look back and know that's true. But to proceed into chance as an entrepreneur, you don't know what's going to happen, but to have a general faith. So my family, we operate on faith, family, fitness, finance in that order. The four Fs. And then because of being an entrepreneur, I put my son on OKRs when he was 16. And just, like you're saying, what do you want to accomplish in these different areas of your life? And not only have I gotten a lot of esteem value, I believe it's honestly helped me grow my business and share more value with people rather than try to do transactions with people. I love it. I wouldn't have it any other way. But it's also benefited my kids tremendously.

It's interesting. I told my kids, I have a nine, eight, and five-year-old. I was telling the two older ones, I did this thing called the Spiritual Exercises which St. Ignatius created when he went through this transformation from being a nobleman to becoming St. Ignatius. I went to Spain a year ago and that was my calling. I ended up going through this whole thing. Anyway, for the last year I've been doing these spiritual exercises and I have someone who helps me each week, and I just completed them. Through that process, having these conversations with God and reading scripture, things I never really did, it's an unlock. It's a total unlock. I told my kids, and my middle son was like, 'Oh, that's like a shortcut to really getting things done in the world.' And I told him, I said, 'If I gave you one or two things in life, and this is one of them, the rest of the stuff you got to find out on your own. Like I had my own life, you're going to have your own life. But if you could have that relationship, if I could have had this 20, 30 years ago, what more could I have done? Not about making more money, but as a person, how would I have felt through the journey?' Who knows? But I said, 'If I can give you this as a gift as a kid, you'll have such a different life than if you just don't have it and you're constantly looking at yourself. It's all about me, I don't feel good, things are not working out, I'm not doing good work, I'm a loser, I'm a winner.'

But you got that. I think if you, at least I learned doing the spiritual exercises, this idea of discernment. As an entrepreneur, a lot of times I would think this conversation of having something that's telling me something is maybe something out there. I always believed in something above me, and the creative process is a lot about something unknown. I would think, 'Oh my god, I'm being told bad things,' and you have that negative talk track. Sometimes you think maybe that's being given to you, something's trying to warn you. But when you think about discernment, God would never speak, God doesn't play a small game. If you look at what's around us from just earth and creativity and the things that humans do, so when I used to have that conversation, I wasn't sure, but I'm like, that's me. That's my little reptile brain. That's not God warning me of something or I'm not doing something right, or I'm beating myself up. That's small talk. And God would never have a small talk conversation. Could you imagine, by any factor, whatever you believe in life, it doesn't have to be a Christian God, it doesn't matter. It's like you got to have a small talk about, 'Oh, I can't believe I didn't make the extra deal this week.' Everything we know about creation.

Yeah. I mean, like, we have the choice to put something in our mouth when we eat. It could be good or harmful to us. So we have that choice. We decide how, on the basics of health, we can decide whether we see our bodies as just something God's working through and would I want to put crap in my mouth? It just changes your idea around dieting and eating well. Just change your mind. So I think you're right. We have choice in the end what goes into our bodies and our minds. That's why I don't really talk, this is the first time I've really had a conversation about it because I'm not here to preach anything. I'm just saying as entrepreneurs, the journey is hard, and if you just want to make it a little easier, or a lot easier, have a relationship with God. Because God is the ultimate CEO. You're reporting into something. If you think you're reporting into something, it changes how you think about you as the leader. You're reporting into somebody who actually wants to see you succeed, really is on your side, wants to be a friend, and wants to see it all work out. Entrepreneurs are the greatest creators in the world. We're reflecting something out there that's greater than us. We manifest ideas into businesses and get people around them. So I just think it makes things easier. Not an easy life, but easier.

And when you, I'll just jump back to one of the reasons you and I are here. I think AI, like I don't think we've been given something powerful. I think we both believe that, and it's only starting. If we are able to put the lens on it around what's God's role in the things we're working on, we may have a different outcome for what we're trying to do. I think the powers that be are just not putting that lens on this technology. This could have entered our world with that lens and with human dignity and the idea that humans have a place and we're a reflection of God. Instead, it came in like the machine is God. The machine is to be idolized. It's better than humanity. It's maybe even smarter than anything. It's intelligent. Once we entered with that narrative, we as humans don't like that. We don't like it. We hear it with our gut. That's why kids in college are booing people when they talk about AI. They can't even put their finger on it. It's not about job loss. It's about something's weird. There's gods, and whether you believe or not, there's something out there. There's this thing that is pure. They have a purity to them, and now you're saying this thing is equal and it just doesn't play for human. Not true. We've seen this before. Every time it happens, bad things happen. People will reject it. They'll reject it 100%.

I'm really enjoying connecting with professionals, small business owners, people who are creators like filmmakers and writers who are creating unique AI experiences on the platform. So for me, those are the people that are going to help build the business. If you want to connect with me, I'm connectable. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can get me at robi. I'm available. I always tell entrepreneurs out there who are struggling with something, just ping me, send an email, or ping me on LinkedIn, and I'll get back to you and we'll set up a call. I'm here to help. It's hard, and sometimes getting just a little advice, because I was fortunate enough to have people help me all the way through. So I'm here to do as much as I can for the community of entrepreneurs.

Yeah, come and join. Get on the platform. It's free. Get started. Don't worry about it and start playing with it.