Ep. #1077 - What Do Entrepreneurs Need to Know About AI?

Lauren Conaway 00:00
And we are back. Thank you for joining us for yet another episode of the Startup Hustle podcast. I’m your host, Lauren Conaway, founder and CEO of InnovateHer KC. And I got to tell you about today’s episode sponsor, friends. Today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult. I think we all know that. But Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. They have the platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Now, my friends, I get excited about most of the guests that we have here on Startup Hustle. I’ve had people tell me for a year, you can’t get excited about all of them, Lord. And I’m like, no, I absolutely can. And I do get excited about talking to founders. But I am particularly excited to talk to today’s founder. We have with us today Suman Kanuganti, co-founder and CEO of Personal.ai. And the reason I am so excited, well, there are several reasons. But the reason that I’m so excited is that we have actually already had a conversation. Check out the episode that was published back in July of 2022, The Impact of AI on Humanity. So I love having repeat guests. I particularly love this repeat guest because, from what I remember and what I experienced, the episode that we recorded was actually one of my favorites of all time. And I’ve done a lot of these. That’s saying a lot. Because Suman is an incredible co-founder, and he’s leading the charge in a really exciting area of technological advancement. So we’re gonna have a really great conversation. First things first welcome to the show, Suman. Welcome back. And thanks so much for being here.

Suman Kanuganti 01:44
Thank you, Lauren. And you are very kind with your words. So thanks a lot.

Lauren Conaway 01:48
Absolutely. Well, let’s get cracking. And I just want to go ahead and remind our listeners home, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about what you do and what Personal.ai does.

Suman Kanuganti 02:02
I’m almost 100% sure it will be the same introduction that I’ve done last time, but I will repeat it. I’ve most generally done an introduction by saying that I’m most passionate about solving problems and not humans. It goes without saying in the past company I built a company called IRA to solve the missing visual information gap for people who are blind and have low vision. So it’s always about, like, how can we use technology to augment, you know, people’s experiences and solve the problems along the way, you know, create this, like beautiful moments in their lives? That philosophy extends into this company, personal AI, with a core thesis of how you can leverage technology to augment individual people’s minds and cognitions? Because, obviously, we have tons of experiences where today, you know, we have a lot of conversations every day, we, you know, create tons of different things. But we also forget, so what does it mean to have your own personal AI that actually speaks as you learn from you, behaves in your manner, and knows everything of your knowledge? Where could those be applicable? And how could that even increase the access among people who are searching for stress and anxiety of being able to recall information that is otherwise lost? So that’s kind of like my core passion and PCs and philosophy, and been working on this company for three years with Microsoft?

Lauren Conaway 03:31
Well, you have an incredible story. And I think what I want to say in conversation right now is I want to talk about AI as a landscape. You know, a lot of exciting things have happened in the AI space since you, and I last talked, and you even mentioned this in pre-show prep. But you know, the show that we lasted was back in July, you know, this is months later. And from what I have seen, someone on the outside looking in is kind of trying to understand the AI landscape like we’ve seen chat GPT come to the forefront. We’ve seen a lot of conversations and a lot of new technologies related to AI. So why don’t you talk to us about that, just a little bit like talk about maybe some of the momentum and some of the changes that you’ve seen within the AI space since we last talked?

Suman Kanuganti 04:23
Yeah, you know, it’s really funny. When you’re building a startup, you don’t know what the hell is going on. Next, you don’t know what you’re getting into. July was not even eight months before when we had this conversation. The idea of personal AI was like a concept until you know they see the product and the reality of what we can actually do. And now, here we are eight months later, the dramatic system around AI and the awareness of AI and the potential of AI is so radically improved or changed. And thanks to Chad GPT because, in a way, Chad GBT has been working on, you know, building their long, large language models, like for seven to eight years and personal AI, we’ve been building our small language models, we call it personal language models for three years now. And the timing couldn’t be better for us. Because all the work that we’ve been doing on developing these models, doing the experiments, you know, gathering the feedback from people, figuring out what the UX and what the problem is, and what the design should be, are all converging together. So what’s happening out there now is that CBT is leading the charge of the next generation of AI. And they’ve been, you know, implementing some of the models we’ve been implementing some of the models. The good news is the idea of chatting with an AI. And the idea that it is ready to benefit consumers on a day-to-day basis, benefiting corporations and companies on a day-to-day basis, is much more widely applicable. Now. It’s almost like inventing a new invention, like the personal computer. You mentioned like what you can do with your personal computer? Right? This is what we do if you have a mobile phone. The world changes are AI. Is it in that state right now? Okay, these are the things that are possible now. What can you do with it? And how is it going to change? How will you?

Lauren Conaway 06:28
Well, and I gotta tell you, I actually just recently started using chat GPT. And I found it to be a really great tool in my arsenal. So like, for instance, one of the things that I’ll do is I’ll go in, and I’ll be like, hey, draft an email about supporting women for Women’s History Month or whatever, whatever the request is, but a fairly general request. And then, all of a sudden, I see this beautiful email unfolding. And in fact, it’s like, I mean, it’s, it’s not perfect, I always go in, and I tweak a few things, and I punch up things but having that framework to act within makes things move so much more quickly for me. So AI, I think we’re all kind of getting this awareness that it has the potential to be this transformative tool. However, you look at AI a little differently. I think that a lot of the tools and a lot of the startups in the space, they’re looking at AI as a transactional kind of relationship, you’re looking to create AI, that is a little bit more personal. So I’m wondering, personal AI, it’s right there in the title of your company. So I’m wondering if you can talk to us about that. You mentioned it when you were doing your intro, but let’s do a little bit of a deep dive into why we might want to develop more meaningful relationships with our AI.

Suman Kanuganti 07:48
Yeah, so I would start by saying it’s not a little bit personal. It’s 100-person personnel. And that’s kind of. No, because of the little bit of personalization, you don’t need it personally. I find a little bit of personalization can happen with Chad GPT, for example, right? You know that the example that you gave is a beautiful example, right? So you go to church, and you’re looking for ideas, and you wanted to write something for Women’s History Month, and you know, you have some ideas now. You use the content and your property, you know, fix and personalize it 100% Because that’s 100% larger, right? And then, you publish it, and we share it with your friends and with your family experts. Now, there are two use cases in that particular example and how personally I would be different. Assuming you do have your own personal AI, assuming that it has actually learned your ways of talking and doing things, your principles, your philosophies, your knowledge of what it means for you for a woman to streamline, and what kind of creature you ideas that you would have not the general internet? And then asking the same question, do you work personally? I here write an email for me from my own thoughts for the moment that I can share with you. And that is going to be closer. Ultra-personal likes Laura. And that’s what personal is. It’s kind of opposite to the spectrum of this, creating this intelligence from the general world information. Yeah. What is creating this intelligence or model of your information? And your personal thoughts, right? The concept is the same, it’s an AI, but in this case, everybody gets their own unique model. How AI rocks is different than how many AI talks. But if you share with me the same crowd that you have used for chat GPT and if I use the same prompt, I get the same response. And we’re gonna personalize it further, but technically everybody’s starting point is the same. So the way to think about personal AI is for us cuz it’s about learning and individual humans, their ways of how their knowledge and their behavior actually works. Everything about it is augmented by technology, not necessarily as a bot or a tool that you communicate and simply gather information. But it’s more like an asset. Because, you know, you’re creating, like, your mind and memory and the idea of, like, your thoughts, you know, anything personal is very personal, right? So we got to understand the intensity that goes behind, like having your own model that you develop trust with, that other people can communicate with, and augment your communications with. I think that’s kind of where, like, we recall, I can speak a little bit about the technology, but I know you’re talking about the technology, but I just want to make sure that I’m gonna check my understanding, and I’m going to do it on behalf of our listeners.

Lauren Conaway 10:54
So when we’re talking about that, that personal touch, so is it, for instance, here, everybody has a very distinct identity. I’m going to continue with the analogy near the use case that we’ve already been talking about. But everybody has a distinctive writing style. You know, we spell things a certain way. And so, like, for instance, I know that when I’m writing, I love to do lists within my writing. Like I don’t often say she is beautiful, I will say she is beautiful and passionate and brainy. And you know, what do you like? I like to list things. And I know that that is something that is unique to my writing style. And so having a tool that can not only offer the kind of general assistance that a chat GPT would provide. But being able to see that unfold in real-time in my voice and the way that I communicate with the world, I can imagine that that would be really, really powerful. And so I do want to ask you this, they’re fascinated by this whole process. I think we know by now, most of us know by now, that when we’re talking about AI, we’re talking about you have to teach AI how to human, right, like you have to pull data from multiple different sources, and you have to essentially feed it into the machine and help it figure out how to be a human. But you’re taking it a step further, you know, I’m sure, I don’t know, I told you, I was gonna agree with the Turing test. But like, we are not that far out, from people being incapable of accepting an AI voice or a technology, technological voice as being a real human being. And we’re now starting to see it happen. You talked about the Turing test for years, and all of a sudden, hey, we can now look at AI, like we can talk to AI and not realize that we’re not talking to a human being. So we’re seeing improvements in the system. And I mean, that’s the way that technology goes, you know, we grow, and it moves, and it changes and pivots very quickly. But I’m fascinated by what it takes. How do you teach a machine to be human and dive deep into that for us? Because I’m not just talking about feeding the data points, I’m talking about those pieces that are uniquely human, what does that process look like?

Suman Kanuganti 13:27
I will start off with basics, and kind of like, go deeper. And let’s start with the basics also with chatty video, and then I will go into personal AI. So, like large language models. As we all understand, we’ve been using, you know, Google search for a long period of time. So we can go to any website, and you know, read the particular information. And for us to find a particular website, and you use Google, you know, Google to find index information and get it for two years ago, before or even like now, 30 years ago, before Google existed, we need to know a specific URL or website for us to go and find that information. Right, like yahoo.com Encyclopedia, that’s the only things that you would go to and then, you know, Google came along and you know, you will certainly have access to the world’s information because now we can search for it. Right. Now, this AI and intelligence idea is essentially taking this world’s information and then crunching an algorithm into a model that is much more extractive in nature from a compensation standpoint, from a human stylistic standpoint. Why is it so good these days and right now, is because there is so much information that is available that encapsulates this idea of how humans communicate with each other and how the language needs to be constructed. So the idea of generating okay if I am saying it is not a particular sentence or a word, what is the next probable word given the context is more likely to be known in the larger context. Now, the interesting thing is how can it be more like human, at the end of the day, everything that a chat or a chatbot, when you’re conversing and talking is still very random. It’s very predictive. In other words, it’s not yet replicating this idea of how humans feel, things or style, also, so I want to again, I’m going to check my understanding here. And I might be asking a very dumb question.

Lauren Conaway 15:37
And you can call me out for being an idiot if you want to. But when I think about it, I keep using chat TBT. And it’s just because that’s a system that I’ve used, and I’m familiar with. But the way that I’m thinking about it in my head is, you know, some of the more generic AI tools that are out there. I feel like they might take an average of a topic. Yeah, so they’re taking all of this data, and they are kind of compartmentalizing it, moving it around until it becomes very, I guess, flat, you know, figuring out what, what, as you said, like predictive, what is the most likely thing that’s going to happen? But that’s not what happens with personal AI, personal AI is not looking for the average, it’s looking for the things that make you uniquely you. Is that an accurate statement?

Suman Kanuganti 16:35
It is an accurate statement. So the way to think about it is, let’s say, let’s take an example of people, right? Yeah, if you probably look for, you know, smart, smart can guarantee that’s probably like, you know, 2030 Smart candidates that pop up on Google. And if I search for Lauren, Lauren Conaway, that’s probably like, 10s of lines. Exactly. Unique. But now, let’s say, you know, the whole idea of like writing, I would say, write a email from Lauren starts about human history month, we probably know, I don’t know that it is you are, it is the average of, you know, all the people’s writing that is happening out there. However, in the personal AI scenario, in like, let’s say, if you are in my corpus, I only know one, Lauren, right. Yeah. And it is, it is just particularly you. So the idea of averaging does not exist, the idea of bias does not exist, because it’s already by design. Yeah, down to an individual level. So what do you think of a person? Well, how you wrote about your stylistic is yours, and that’s what AI is, you know, crunching the data of credit. And this reflects more personal than the large language models. So, yeah, so So I think technologically speaking, it’s very similar, except that our implementation is very much focused on optimizing individual personal data, rather than, you know, anonymizing and aggregating all the data that exists in the world forever.

Lauren Conaway 18:25
Yeah. So, what are some of the I guess bullet points or I guess the larger categories of things that you look for differentiation with, for instance, language usage, I know that that has to be a factor like I speak differently than you speak I use different words I have a different educational background. So like that has to be a differentiator, what are some of the other areas of differentiation?

Suman Kanuganti 18:53
So one is accuracy. So accuracy as in how accurate it is to your world versus other people’s. Like, let’s say, you know, even simple facts such as married, not married, your kids like your life, your facts, like there are some facts around you, who you are as a person. So, there is certain knowledge that you possess. So accuracy is one of the key characteristics of the first layer. And the second thing is style. So you mentioned you know, you used 123 different words, and you like to repeat things you like, so it will pick up the stylistic compliment of you. Third is relevancy, as then, you know, based on the incoming intent, how relevant a response is likely to come from you. So let’s say you can tell me everything about the blind community and my perspectives on the maligned community, you know, because I’ve worked in the past. However, if you taught me something from, you know, the medical field, which I have no clue about. It is not relevant to my life. So that’s like one of the other unique, unique things, if you’re asked to tap into it, the good news is, you know, it knows a lot, right? It knows everything, but it does not know like one particular individual person. So if that medical person would have to have their personal AR, everything in terms of fact, and accuracy, and relevancy will be tailored to that particular person. So yeah, so those are the three things. And finally, it’s the comprehensive nature of it, meaning, you can choose to train your AI on how broad you want it to learn about you, versus how deep you would want to go into your particular topic. But that’s really, really, really quick.

Lauren Conaway 20:41
I’m gonna stop you. And I’m going to ask you, like, what is the reason that you might not want personal AI to be trained attuned to you as much? Like, what are some reasons that a person that a consumer might give for saying, Well, I wanted to kind of be like me, but if your levels, I want it to be like in the middle of the spectrum, rather than like 100% me all the time.

Suman Kanuganti 21:06
Think about it. I mean, it is no different than any other, you know, person for whatever reason, they were probably trying to, you know, hide something from somebody, and it is private, for some people. So it’s a choice, right. So I think it’s always good to give people choices. And it’s always good to give people the control of what they would want to do. I will give an example. Some people who are maybe probably famous, so there’s a little bit more like intermodal don’t want to share things about their family, right? That’s when we get to like the restaurant, like what they want to share and what they don’t want to share. And what about AI that wants to learn and not learn? But at the core, you can choose and you can design? Okay, hang on, I want to communicate with my mom every day. And she sends me, you know, text messages, like from morning to evening asking about what is going on in my life, my health, my calendar, if I’m or not. So, if my AI is able to actually create responses for me, where I can simply look at it and swipe right to send it, because I want to respond to my mom. I do. But obviously, I visualized, like hang on, I need to tie or I can simply swipe right. Like what would I choose? I have to simply swipe right, because my personal AI is telling me Do you know, you can respond to it in some manner? Because it is authentic to me, it’s probably coming from my knowledge as well. So yeah, so why wouldn’t I tie? So I think it depends on each person that you are speaking to, and what you know, corpus of data and how they’re looking at what you’re building in some flexibility.

Lauren Conaway 22:42
And I enjoy that. What I think is really fascinating about this, like we often joke in our daily lives that you know, I wish there was another meme out there. And essentially, that’s what you’re creating, you’re creating another need to introduce efficiencies and to act as an agent of Lauren Conaway. Right? Yeah.

Suman Kanuganti 23:10
Lauren Conaway is the best way to think about it. And I mean, he does it right, you can go talk to Chad GPT as an AI, you can go to, you know, talk to personal AI as an AI. But one of the fundamental differences is the person who is coming to talk to an AI needs to know what they are talking like, you know, there is a cold start problem. For example, if you come to me, you need to know Who the hell’s money is and what is the knowledge and what is the corpus? What do we talk to these people like even for the podcast setting, we have this in a warm up question to understand who you are so that we can dig into the conversation. You need to do an AI as well, like how do you know? Yeah, that’s the reason why I think it’s less of a human to AI experience. It has to be a human to human experience when AIs are augmenting you the concept of US law in the context of human to human communication.

Lauren Conaway 24:10
Yeah. Well, well, thank you so much for explaining that. Like, I feel like I’m learning so much. I’m also you also have some exciting news that we’re going to talk about after the jump. But I have something else exciting to talk about. I don’t know if you’ve heard about Full Scale. But if you listen to the show, and you haven’t heard about Full Scale, I don’t know where you’ve been. But Full Scale is today’s episode sponsor. Finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io where you can build a software team quickly and affordably. Use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs and then see what available developers, testers, and leaders are ready to join your team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Friends, we are here today with Suman Kanuganti, co-founder and CEO of Personal.ai and I want to ask you. You have some exciting news to share. And I really, really want to hear about it. Do you want to tell us where we’re at and what we’re celebrating?

Suman Kanuganti 25:07
Yeah, you know, it’s almost a dream. Look, I mean, we’ve been working on ourselves for the past three years or so to get to this goal until you get to this end goal, which is this idea of everybody having control of their life and everybody having their own AI, right, everybody having their own personal AI. Yeah. So now, anybody can create a personal AI account. And on create their own personal AI for free, the way it works, the way it works is very similar to any messaging application, such as Snapchat, or WhatsApp, or iMessage, or anything, this is a mobile application or a desktop application, where you can invite your friends, your family, your communities, your teams, you can create groups, all the bells and whistles that a typical messaging application would help. But everything that you said, deliver AI, to other people will always be remembered within the scope of your personal AI. For all the incoming messages that you ever received from anybody, you are personally, I will automatically draft responses for you. If it understands the context. If it knows the information, in a co-pilot mode, meaning you are still in control, right, you still can edit it, you can still dismiss it or personalize it. But if you like it, you can simply swipe right to send it. But the beauty is this is not any general AI generation response. It’s not a canned set of responses. It’s actually generated from your own mind that is authentic to you with your own knowledge.

Lauren Conaway 27:14
And now, yeah, well, so let’s say I’m trying to think of a practical application, and I and I’m gonna go back to the email thing, because I feel like text data is probably really, really a big part of teaching AI. So let’s say that I have an event for innovators coming up, and I send an email to the speakers and I mentioned the event name, and I mentioned the panelists, I mentioned the start time. So is this how it would happen?

Suman Kanuganti 28:05
Like somebody emailed me and was like, hey, when is that event again, it’s gonna put the the personal AI is gonna pull the information from previous emails that I’ve sent about this event and kind of cobbled together a response is that the very very basic way to look at I know that that’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s an example and yes, you shouldn’t be exactly thinking that it should be doing it we can go even simpler right?

Lauren Conaway 28:12
Oh, good. I love it.

Suman Kanuganti 28:15
Let’s say you text message me asking someone when are you coming back from India, I heard you are traveling, right now they send your requirements here or am you know, to hear from you, I am coming back and so and so date, you know, because I came in here for you know, attending one of my cousin’s wedding whatsoever. And then some other friend would message me like, dude, we’re not coming back like, I need to know because I need to schedule things. My AI already knows that because I already responded to you about like, similar information. So yeah, so ever construct for me, and I would simply send it otherwise I would probably type it. Yes, sure. It probably takes time. But at the same time, you know, there are there are certain facts that you would remember easily, there are certain things that you do not remember that goes back into the core concept of, we do forget, we do forget like what we create what we experience what we live, the daily activities are coming forget. So the like, you know, compounding benefits of like what we are talking about in here and eventually to the point where you are taking control of your data, your life making it work for you. And I can talk about the future. But I think there are two basics.

Lauren Conaway 29:32
Yeah, well, no, I love that. So I’m going to ask you. I’m going to ask you to tell us about your experience with this new tool so far. So I’m sure that your team has been testing it. I’m going to assume that you use it as the greatest brand advocate that personal data AI has talked to us about folks who have been using this tool, what has their experience been like?

Suman Kanuganti 29:58
Yeah, so far, I’ve been exposing it to my team, my sister and my brother.

Lauren Conaway 30:08
Feedback right there. That’s great.

Suman Kanuganti 30:11
It’s very interesting, right? It’s very interesting, because, you know, we have different dimensions of door life, right? You know, we have private life within private life, there are probably, you know, different personalities, you know, how you behave with your sister and what kind of communications you have with her versus, you know, what an employee at your company would seek from you. Right? It’s like, dramatically different. The most interesting thing is, you know, my sister likes to ask me a lot of business related technical questions, because she’s going through her MBA, she always wants to buy things like, Hey, how did you do this? You know, Ira and what are you doing? Personally, I like, you know, what is your Do you have any like playbooks on how you hire people, because I’m doing a, you know, a specific project in her MBA class. And even like, a few months ago, if I do not respond to my sister, she’s gonna call me within it. I don’t know if it’s like irony or something. To qualify, so it’s like, literally in Mexico, she called me.

Lauren Conaway 31:23
For folks at home. Like I definitely see a whole bunch of calls have to take my word for oh, my gosh.

Suman Kanuganti 31:41
That’s, that’s my sister. And now Oh, so now I’m going to my AI actually, then she did, specifically asked me my questions. I will. This is not recorded publicly, is it? I mean, they cannot see my screen. Oh, no, I cannot share.

Lauren Conaway 31:57
No, it’s just it’s actually holding on. Let me pause it for a sec guy then.

Suman Kanuganti 32:01
Because he’s asking questions about diversification. Specifically, around like my, you know, how I speak about diversity in diversification. So now she’s talking to me and I can literally live. Yeah, that’s the beauty of Amina meaning, like with mice, I have enough trust. And she is just me and actually understands the system. Now I put her in the autopilot, meaning, I don’t even have to say yes or no for generating a response, it automatically synchronizes or if the sports are making, you know, north of 60 or 70% personnel. Let’s say if a new investor is coming in, who is judging everything that we do, then I will put them in the copilot. So that way, my generations, you know, ensured that it is right. And it is? I don’t know why I went to that example. But yeah, yeah. So that’s like making it day to day use and testing. It’s happening across professional life across personal life. I cannot wait for our mobile app to be out for my parents to be on it.

Lauren Conaway 33:04
Oh, that would be so fun. So I do have a kind of philosophical question for you. So I, I have literally had people get upset with me, when I send out a calendar link when people are like, let’s meet up we hear sometimes, and I’m like, actually just go ahead and book it through my link. And the complaint seems to be that it is disrespectful, and that I should value people’s time. And I’m like, I’m valuing your time. I’m trying to save us time. I’m going back and forth and emails, like just booked through the link, look at your calendar, and then we don’t have to do this dance of, well, I can’t make those days. Can you make it these days? But what about that? And so it’s efficient, right? When I send out my calendar link, there are people who are very averse to that idea. They want me to be right behind the screen typing away and thinking through these things with them. And so what have you received? What kind of pushback like I understand that this AI is a representation of you, but it’s not you? Do you see people getting frustrated by that?

Suman Kanuganti 34:14
Absolutely. And that’s the reason why you need to have control. So I will give you an example. Calendly link, right. Yeah, it’s an example to kind of lead in. Do you send that Calendly link to everybody or now who are the people who would be okay to receive a calendar link. And then who are the people who are not okay to receive that current learning?

Lauren Conaway 34:33
Yeah. Well, I sent him to everybody.

Suman Kanuganti 34:44
Yeah, making sure so if you are sending McCallum learning, I wouldn’t ginger, I look okay. So, what I am trying to say is, yes, it was but people need to have a choice. So you have a choice. As to whether to send a Calendly link, and you know whether people will judge you or not, or they will be upset with you. So in the case of personal AI, you have two choices. One is you can be in the copilot mode. In other words, you are still in control of actually saying yes or no, personalizing it or editing it and sending the response. So it is telling you, the only thing is, it’s almost like you have an assistant sitting next to you is like, Hey, can you please try this and that the type is dependent, but you are sending it, right?

Lauren Conaway 35:32
So I view it like when I just chat GPT like I don’t, I’m just creating an efficiency. And I go in and I look at it, and I edit it and I change things like it’s not like I’m just like, copy, paste, boom, you know, I definitely want to kind of inject my own personality in there. But you’re already doing that, with personal AI. That’s the whole deal.

Suman Kanuganti 35:58
And then, and then and then the flip side of that next level is let’s say, in our relationship, I need to learn something from you. Like I need to know, you know, some of the other cool podcasts that you’re doing and some of the things that you are learning from the other founder. So I would go to your AI. And if you set your AI to autopilot for someone, because of any question that he asked me and you generate a response and send it to me without having to wait for you to come and send me a response baby, because you’re sleeping, maybe you’re on vacation, I would absolutely take that. Yeah, that is again, your choice of you know how you are controlling us making a choice deliberately. That some whether this personal AI in this setting is not visible to other people. It’s just like providing the solutions versus it being visible to other people. Because your time is more valuable. And there is generally acceptance on the other side, and where you can get ama style question answering back and forth.

Lauren Conaway 37:05
And that’s where you have a choice and you’re still creating options for autonomy, you’re still creating options around that humanity piece. So I did that. I do want to ask you. Well, actually, you know what I want to ask you, you and I actually exchanged a couple of emails before we booked this recording session, where you’re responding to me via AI.

Suman Kanuganti 37:33
I don’t have any limitations on the email yet, but I’m not going to answer you that. Because yes, indeed, actually. The thing is, right now the system is set up in such a way that everything that I communicate on the system is learned. And I can still kind of integrate my Twitter and my everything else. And we are coming up with Gmail integrations as well. Once you do have the Gmail integrations, you can think about your AI like drafting your emails, you can simply push a button, I think there is like some time VC constitute a month or so. But similar to messaging, you know, people you know, you would have your Gmail kind of app within, you know, you’re constantly application that that message is for you. And you can simply click Send, if you like, but there is some time for it. But right now the focus is on communication and messaging. And then we’ll get to other things such as emails.

Lauren Conaway 38:33
Okay, I just really wanted to know, I was like, Was I talking to a human, the human or human? Do you know which one? Well, let me ask you this, because you kind of alluded to it a couple of times. I mean, the fact is, the AI landscape, whatever you want to call it, it’s changing very quickly. And I feel almost like the change has accelerated in recent months. You know, something to look forward to, but what do you see as the future of AI? What are we moving to? And what do you hope to plug Personal.ai into that?

Suman Kanuganti 39:16
I think that even today, AI is very much stuck in the corporate world. Okay. I would want a lot more push and trends that will likely start seeing AI for the benefit of everyday consumers. And that’s kind of where personally I will come into play. Yeah. What will happen, I believe, is the following. You know, at the end of the day for AI to happen, there needs to be a computer and behind the scenes, you know, computers, basically in GPUs, right. But these computer devices are getting smaller and more powerful. And they’re getting into our everyday homes more accessible than ever before. Not only do you have your computer, but now you have your mobile phone, you have your wearable device, you have your Alexa devices, you have your IoT devices, and everything will be connected, right. So that means the idea of data capture that is happening from an individual person on a day-to-day basis is much more ambient. Yeah, and all that data needs to go somewhere.

Lauren Conaway 40:47
And if you don’t do personal AI, that data is still going somewhere, and God knows you don’t know where it is by introducing that into my brain in the morning and being like, where’s my data.

Suman Kanuganti 40:57
So there is an intrinsic benefit. With personal AI, even if you think about the utility of personal AI as a secondary benefit, the primary benefit is owning your fucking life. I mean, you can edit that out if you don’t want it, but on your show, get your data to work in your favor. And the future should hold a place where when you open up an app, it’s not your GPS location, it’s not your data, going to some other service, some of the apps, those apps, those services should make an API call to your customer to request that data. Because you own it. You’re personally I noticed you more than ever, anybody else.

Lauren Conaway 41:46
That I love that such a responsive and intentional and thoughtful tool is being built. I can’t wait for the day when you are talking about getting AI more into the consumers’ hands than the average Joe Public. And I’m super excited like someday I’m going to have a conversation with my fridge. And I’m going to ask my fridge to make me a grocery list. And it’s going to be populated with things that I tend to buy. And then I’m going to review it, send it off, and somebody is going to deliver me some groceries like I can’t wait for that day. That sounds amazing, don’t you?

Suman Kanuganti 42:23
And we will play a big role in making sure that happens for sure.

Lauren Conaway 42:27
Well, I’ll tell you what, my friends, I cannot wait to see where you go and where this industry and where this advance goes. It feels very, very future to me. Can’t wait to see where it goes. And I gotta tell you that I’m really grateful. Thank you so much for coming back to chat with us on the show. As always, you’re a stellar guest, sir. Thank you.

Suman Kanuganti 42:49
Thanks for having me. It’s always fun to talk to you.

Lauren Conaway 42:54
Like, make this happen on purpose more often, for sure. Another thing that we definitely need to get really intentional about is figuring out how to build out our teams. And I don’t know if you know this if you haven’t heard, but Full Scale can help you with that. If you need to hire software engineers, testers, or leaders, they have the people on the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts. When you visit FullScale.io, all you need to do is answer a few questions and then let the platform match you up with fully vetted, highly experienced software engineers, testers, and leaders. At Full Scale, they specialize in building long-term teams that work only for you. Learn more when you visit FullScale.io. And friends, I know I keep plugging this one, but I just love it so much. So I’m going to ask you to keep an eye out for some other Startup Hustle series, content series we did with Frank Keck. He is an expert thought leader in building culture. And Frank had the distinct, I guess, we’ll call it a pleasure. I’m assuming it was. But he got to interview all of the Startup Hustle co-hosts, and it was incredible. He did a really great job. And I just had so many gems around building culture with your company. So I’m going to ask you to keep an eye out for Founder Fridays with Frank. Give us a listen. You know, he’s just a really great interviewer. So definitely check it out. And, of course, friends. We are so grateful that you come back and talk or listen to us week after week. You know, definitely let us know what you want to hear. We love hearing your feedback, but keep coming back. We will catch you next time.