Uneeq

I’m grateful for @JensenHuang's position and voice on AI safety, especially given that his incentive is to fuel a competitive ecosystem of AI companies. His analogy of water is excellent. Just as we have running water for showers and flushing toilets, that doesn’t discount the need for high-quality bottled water. But a world where we have to use bottled water for everything isn’t better. I believe the same is true for AI. We’re seeing this play out at @UneeQAI. We use the latest and greatest frontier models for high-value, complex tasks, but we also use several open models to better support latency, security, and cost requirements. Different needs require different approaches. Charlie Munger said it best: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” There are many effective ways to approach AI safety, but we should also pay attention to the incentives behind them. Some approaches can easily lead to shared monopolistic effects. Safety is incredibly important. So is making sure the way we pursue it doesn’t limit the competitive ecosystem that will ultimately make AI better.

After hundreds of conversations with many corporations, the consistent theme I've picked up on is this: In-person training and coaching is engaging, fun, and scores high for effectiveness and value. Digital training, however, is often considered boring, unnecessary, low engagement, and not fun in any way. My takeaway: Good coaches understand the correlation between fun and increased learning and engagement. If Digital Platforms are to become more effective, instead of investing in ways to ensure poor souls can't fast-forward the video, they need to find a way to make it more interesting, relevant, and... well, yes, FUN! We recently ran a survey with our trial and pilot customers; over 97% of participants said they preferred the digital human interaction experience because it didn't just feel real and like what they would face in the real world, but they found it fun and engaging and said they would use it again. We’re also seeing people spend half an hour, sometimes more than an hour, practicing with digital humans because they want to get better at their craft. I love that. How many people do you know who voluntarily spend an hour watching corporate training videos and answering multiple-choice questions in their own time? We know play works, we know interaction works, and we know people learn when they actually want to participate. We need to scale more of that. And remember, not all AI roleplays are the same. Try the @UneeQAI free trial and see the difference for yourself. digitalhumans.com

When I first met Ashley, she was working for an awesome company, @veritoneinc - I thought to myself that this is exactly the type of person I would love the opportunity to work with, lead, and empower to “unlock” their full potential. I never imagined a few years later our paths would collide, and I’m so grateful that Ashley joined @UneeQAI to lead our marketing team. She is humble, hungry, and smart - and is just getting started! Look out, world! Her latest piece in @HRFuturemag gets into something we both care a lot about: how AI can help people get better at their jobs. Ashley talks about what this can look like across recruitment, onboarding, and ongoing development, and where digital humans fit into that future. A great read.

Some companies are discovering AI. At @UneeQAI, we've been deep in it since 2016. This may be more technical than my usual posts, but I'm so proud of what my engineering team is doing, I'm going to brag on them a little. Digital humans that hold real-time conversations don't leave room for hand-waving. Every millisecond of latency is visible on a face. That forces a different kind of engineering culture, one where we take nothing at face value and benchmark everything ourselves. A few things we've been up to lately: • We're pushing local inference to its limits. On @NVIDIA's new DGX Spark hardware, we've tuned multi-token prediction to hit 75-80 tokens/sec on a 26B model and swept the speculative decoding budget to find the true throughput optimum, rather than trusting the marketing numbers. •We also caught two bugs in a major open-source inference engine and a silent tool-calling failover trap and shared the fixes with the community. •We're building AI-native workflows. Our engineers run agentic pipelines where a frontier model architects the plan and local models execute the build, full codebases with database layers, payments, and test coverage. We rigorously measure where autonomous execution holds up and where it still needs a human in the loop. And we're going deep on the fundamentals: KV cache optimization, micro-scaling quantization, and the memory engineering that lets models inhabit long conversations without losing the thread. Ten years in, the bar keeps rising. So do we.

Amazing week in Vegas with the @UneeQAI team last week across Gartner CSO and Dell Tech World. At Gartner, we leaned hard into our unofficial motto: don’t be boring. That meant Speedos, ducks, and a digital human in a bathtub on the expo floor. Odd? Yes. Memorable? Also yes. The point was simple: a lot of sales training gives reps a bathtub and calls it practice. But if you want someone to become a stronger swimmer, they need a swimming pool. That was the core of my session: we know practice matters. The question is whether yours actually works. Then over at Dell Tech World, I had a real founder moment seeing the products and demos Dell is building with our platform technology. We’re incredibly grateful for the partnership and excited about what’s ahead across education, healthcare, and government. Great week, great team, great partners. Vegas, you were not boring. @Gartner_inc @Dell

Enjoyed my interview with @nzheraldbiz last week when in New Zealand. At @UneeQAI, we’ve never been trying to replace human connection. The real challenge is scale: teachers, nurses, doctors, trainers, experts, mentors - the people we need most are becoming harder to access. Digital humans are not the same as human-to-human connection. They’re the second-best thing, made infinitely more available. Arguably, "how" we communicate matters as much as "what" we communicate. Large language models are great, but when combined with AI that focuses on expression, emotion, body language, and personality, you then have a winning formula - also known as Digital Humans. Also covered: Austin, anime, Qatar Airways, why every brand might secretly need a mascot, and why New Zealand has punched well above its weight in defining this category. Full interview: nzherald.co.nz/video/herald-…

At @UneeQAI, we are a remote-first company. We invest heavily to optimize remote work to be highly productive and keep the team connected, including collaboration tools, videos, online social events, clear and constant communication across Slack messaging, celebrating wins with surprise gifts, etc. It's good, and when you bring everyone together in person for a week, you do gain an appreciation for what you miss - the speed at which ideas and lessons are shared, alignment on direction, relationships, and feeling a part of the mission - this turbo charges when we come together. Well worth the investment! The goals for our 2026 Summit were to Connect, Align, Inspire, and Collaborate, and do it in style! That's exactly what we did, with the help of the gorgeous Auckland CBD (New Zealand). There was a sense in the room that we'd battled many storms, and the sun was breaking through the clouds. It had formed a greater sense of togetherness and gratitude for the good moments and each other. Such a privilege to be leading a company of incredibly talented, humble, hungry, and smart humans! Fired up and ready to have another big year!

I just learned today that the "U.S. is facing a severe, long-term nursing shortage, with an 8% deficit of registered nurses. By 2030, the nation is expected to be short roughly one million nurses..." You do wonder sometimes if AI came at just the right time. We've done a lot of work in the healthcare space with Digital Humans; however, I believe the underlying AI technology to ensure accurate and helpful responses is now ready. At @UneeQAI, we dedicate time each year to projects aimed at problems like this. The goal is not simply to build interesting technology, but to apply it in places where it can extend the reach of people working in already strained systems. We are not experts in healthcare delivery, which is why the meaningful work happens through partnership. If you are working in healthcare and thinking about how AI might help close access gaps while maintaining quality of care, I welcome the conversation. Many of the most important uses of this technology will come from collaborations that have not been formed yet.

Had a great time chatting with @KenGlass on the NextFrontiers podcast with @DellTech 🎙️ We dove into the future of customer engagement, the journey of digital humans, and how AI is reshaping tech for forward-thinking leaders and brands. 🌐🤖 Catch the episode here 👉 youtu.be/ZBxM87LAVI4 #FutureOfTech #Innovation #GenAI