Artificial Reality

Net Road Show’s Robb Lillie breaks down how ElevenLabs replaced 3AM banker recording sessions, why Microsoft Copilot drove employees to use unsanctioned AI tools, and the EU AI Act compliance gap he calls “fast car, no seat belt.”

Robb Lillie has spent 22 years at Net Road Show, the platform behind investor communications for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. He joined when the company was part of broadcast.com before Yahoo’s $5.7 billion acquisition, and now leads AI adoption across text-to-speech, proof-of-concept building, and training for a team that powers IPO roadshow and M&A deal workflows worldwide.

In this episode, Galina Fendikevich and Robb cover what’s working, what’s broken, and what still needs to be built in AI adoption for financial services infrastructure:

• How ElevenLabs text-to-speech eliminated overnight recording sessions for international bankers, including a Korean banker in tears at 3AM trying to get through an English script
• Why Microsoft Copilot is so weak inside enterprise environments that employees go around IT to use ChatGPT and Claude, creating a shadow AI problem that governance and compliance teams cannot track
• Robb’s framework for evaluating where AI belongs in enterprise workflows: “Coordination collapses, but the context doesn’t.” AI handles logistics, but judgment and creativity stay human.
• A wish list for AI builders: unified search across seven enterprise systems, compliance tooling for AI-generated video under the EU AI Act, and a correction memory layer for translated audio
• How Robb discovered his company’s best AI use cases by polling his team on their biggest pain points instead of asking what AI could do for them

This episode is for anyone working in financial services, capital markets, or regulated industries who wants to see how a 22-year deal event production company is adopting AI tools like ElevenLabs, Lovable, and Synthesia without cutting corners on compliance.

It’s also for business leaders evaluating enterprise AI who need a practical framework for deciding what to automate and what to leave alone. And if you’re a builder or developer, Robb names specific unsolved problems in enterprise AI, from search layers across legacy systems to compliance verification for AI-generated video to audio correction memory that learns business terminology.

Follow Robb Lillie:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robblillie/

Website: netroadshow.com

Email: [email protected]

Artificial Reality:

Website: artificialrealitymedia.com

Instagram: instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media

Galina Fendikevich: linkedin.com/in/gfendi

Keynote speaker James Taylor breaks down how he runs his speaking business on Claude, why cheap AI pricing won't last, and how 1,000 people made a Taylor Swift reggae theme song with AI in about 15 minutes.

On Artificial Reality, I ask business owners what's working with AI, what's broken, and what still needs to be built. This episode is a behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world's busiest keynote speakers uses AI across sales, marketing, speech writing and delivery.

James Taylor is an international keynote speaker on creativity, artificial intelligence and innovation, and the author of SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. He started his career managing rock stars, moved into tech in Silicon Valley, and now gives 50 to 100 keynotes a year in 25+ countries for clients including Apple, Deloitte, Visa and McDonald's. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

In this episode, I ask James what's working, what's broken, and what still needs to be built with AI in his speaking business:

• ● How a keynote speaker uses AI day to day: James has an AI chief of staff built on Claude that briefs him every morning and, 24 hours before a sales call, sends psychometric profiles of everyone joining. A Claude "story bank" of every story, framework and quote he has used drafts the first version of each keynote. He then rewrites it himself.

• How to get recommended by ChatGPT and Claude: his team builds thousands of highly specific landing pages optimized for AI answer engines, using Claude for research, Perplexity to create pages at scale and Gemini for quality checks. James says chatbots now name him a top AI keynote speaker in Amsterdam, a city he has never lived in.
• Why cheap AI won't last: James argues today's AI prices are subsidized by venture capital, like early Uber, and that businesses should plan for higher rates by matching cheaper models to simpler tasks. He also sees low-cost Chinese models putting pressure on US AI companies.
• Is AI replacing jobs: his own team shrank, including a video editor role, while a customer service hire was retrained in SEO, AEO and GEO. James believes efficiency is only phase one of AI. The bigger opportunity is creating things that don't exist yet.
• What Silicon Valley should build next: James wants an AI coach that reviews presentation videos across 100 factors, plus live translation so non-native English speakers can ask questions. I share why nearly every guest I've interviewed wants better voice AI.

This episode is for you if you're a speaker, consultant or creator who wants AI to handle the business side of your expertise, or a business owner figuring out where AI actually saves time and where it still falls short. It's also for founders and developers building AI tools who want to hear what a power user running five AIs at once still can't find on the market.

Follow James Taylor:

jamestaylor.me

youtube.com/@JamesTaylorMe

linkedin.com/in/jameskirktaylor

instagram.com/jamestaylordotme

SuperCreativity: geni.us/QiDBu

Artificial Reality:

artificialrealitymedia.com

instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia

linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media

luma.com/artificialreality

Hosted by Galina Fendikevich

Steven Webster sold his company to Adobe, consulted for NASA, NATO, and Nike, and built a full AI operating system for his next company. Here's how.

Steven Webster is the founder and CEO of Asensei, the movement recognition company that does for physical movement what speech recognition did for voice. Before Asensei, he sold his first company to Adobe, built their worldwide design consulting practice, and opened an innovation studio for Microsoft. He was also the UK's youngest junior jiu-jitsu black belt and coached Edinburgh University's Karate Club to 10 consecutive national championships.

In this episode of Artificial Reality, I ask Steven what's working with AI, what's broken, and what still needs to be built for CEOs running real companies:

• How 5 martial arts principles (Shoshin, Keiko, Mushin, Sensen no sen, and teaching others) became a white belt to black belt AI adoption framework that any business leader can follow step by step

• How Steven built an "agentic office of the CEO" with AI agents running sales, contracts, RevOps, product insights, and a Friday performance coaching session with an agent named Wendy, modeled after Wendy Rhodes from Billions

• Why he compares AI adoption to driving a Model T Ford. Users are still stuck managing context windows and model selection when they shouldn't have to be. His prediction: AI tools will go from manual to automatic

• The moment he caught himself saying "you're using it wrong" and stopped. His design thinking background at Adobe taught him to never blame the user, always fix the product

• His vision for "multiplayer mode" where AI agents join meetings as participants, teams share versioned skills across departments, and memory travels with you across different AI models instead of being locked inside one

This episode is for you if you're a CEO or founder looking for a concrete AI adoption framework from someone who already built one, if you want to understand how to go from basic AI chat to a full agentic operating system across your company, or if you're a builder trying to understand why business leaders struggle with AI tools and what needs to change.

Follow Steven Webster:

Asensei: asensei.ai

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevenwebster

Five Principles for AI Leadership: webstersensei.substack.com/p/five-principles-for-ai-leadership

AI Leadership and Agentic Office of the CEO:

webstersensei.ai

Substack: webstersensei.substack.com

Artificial Reality:

Website: artificialrealitymedia.com

Instagram: instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media In-person events: luma.com/artificialreality

Host: linkedin.com/in/gfendi

Chris Madden's agency hit 1 billion views in 3 years. He breaks down why AI clipping tools still fail at the most important part of short-form video, how he cloned his voice and now ships content daily without recording himself, and why he believes social media matters more than AI.

Chris Madden is the founder of Good Future Media, a podcast editing agency whose clients include All In, This Week in Startups, Pirate Wires, and Solana, and Clipstastic, an AI voice cloning content agency.

He spent 10 years teaching English across Thailand, France, Korea, and China before building an unofficial TikTok fan account for the All In podcast that hit 30,000 followers in a month and landed him the role of Head of Content at Twenty VC. He also hosts the Imagine AI podcast with over 150 episodes.

Galina Fendikevich asks what's working with AI, what's broken, and what still needs to be built in podcast editing, AI voice cloning, and content production at scale:

• How ElevenLabs voice cloning lets founders and thought leaders post daily content in their own cloned voice without recording themselves. Chris calls your voice "an extension of your brand" that can now exist across six platforms at once
• Why AI clipping tools like Opus Clip, Riverside, and Descript still cannot write hooks, add context, or give viewers a reason to stay past the first three seconds. His agency builds every clip by hand in Premiere Pro and CapCut because the human judgment gap has not closed
• The origin story: how an unofficial TikTok fan account for the All In podcast launched a career at Twenty VC and became a billion-view content agency in three years. Jason Calacanis, the inspiration behind the business, is still hiring human clippers because AI cannot do it either
• Why Chris wants an "AI brain of your business" that holds full company context in one place. The current friction: you make a decision, change it three minutes later, and your AI still thinks the old goal is active. Memory and context management remain the biggest barriers to using Claude and ChatGPT as real business tools
• Chris's closing argument that social media distribution is just as important as AI itself. His framework: posting across multiple platforms "increases your surface area for success," and without that distribution layer, no AI tool delivers results

This episode is for you if you run a content agency, podcast, or video production company and want a clear breakdown of where AI saves time and where human editors still outperform every tool on the market.

It is also for founders, thought leaders, and business owners who want to build a social media presence and post consistently without recording themselves on camera, and for anyone building AI tools for content clipping, voice cloning, lead generation, or recruiting who wants to hear exactly what is failing from someone producing 140 videos a week for the biggest shows in tech.

Follow Chris Madden: youtube.com/@ChrisMadden_ instagram.com/chrismadden365 linkedin.com/in/chrismadden365

Work with Chris:

https://www.cliptastic.ai/ 

https://goodfuturemedia.com/

Artificial Reality:

Website: https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media/

In-person events: https://luma.com/artificialreality

Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfendi/

NYC store co-owners Sara Rojas and Luisa Ramirez break down how a $37 AI tool replaced $1,000 marketing agencies, how ChatGPT cut their email time from ten minutes to under one minute, and the AI failures that still cost them days of work every week.

Sara and Luisa are co-owners of char-CUTE-rie by Bohemian Picnics NYC, a store steps from Central Park where customers build their own charcuterie boards and rent picnic baskets for the park.

Sara handles creative direction and all finances for both the store and their sister event planning business, Bohemian Picnics. Luisa is the executive chef behind the menu and runs all marketing and social media.

Here is what is working with AI, what is broken, and what still needs to be built for small business owners running a store and catering company:

• How Sara uses ChatGPT to plan flower arrangements by screenshot. She sends a photo of what she wants and it breaks down quantities, seasonal availability, and cost per bouquet, replacing hours at the wholesale market.
• Why AI-generated marketing flyers still come out with garbled text and wrong spelling, and why the tools keep forgetting basic business information like the store address and logo after months of use.
• Luisa's discovery that being firm with AI gets better results than being polite. Her approach: "What are you doing? This is not it." She says it corrects faster when you push back.
• Why Sara still spends two to three days building each event proposal by hand, and what a tool that knows rental prices, food costs, and labor hours would mean for every event planner losing time on quotes.
• The gap Galina names on air: the people building AI have never opened a store, never run a catering company, and never had to manage a business like this. That disconnect shapes what gets built and what gets ignored.

This episode is for you if you run a small business in food service, catering, event planning, or retail and want to see exactly how two non-technical owners use AI to handle emails, marketing, finances, and vendor planning.

It is also for business owners who have tried AI but get frustrated when the tools lose context or produce unusable output, and for builders and developers who want to hear from operators about what saves them time, what breaks on them daily, and what they would pay for tomorrow.

char-CUTE-rie by Bohemian Picnics NYC: https://www.instagram.com/char_cute_rienyc/

Artificial Reality: Website: https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media/

In-person events: https://luma.com/artificialreality

Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfendi/

SwipeFile owner Neville Medhora breaks down how AI destroyed his copywriting business and built him a better one, why AI-written newsletters are losing their audiences, and how he runs a million-dollar solo operation on $20 a month.

Neville Medhora is the owner of SwipeFile and founder of Copywriting Course. He started selling glow sticks online, ran the emails at AppSumo until he hit 750,000 users, and has put his writing in front of over 280 million people. Noah Kagan featured him as one of the entrepreneurs doing over a million dollars a year with zero employees.

What's working with AI, what's broken, and what still needs to be built in copywriting, content, and the one-person AI business:

• How AI automated every operational task at SwipeFile, from titling to image generation to categorization, freeing Neville to focus on human curation, the one part AI can't replicate
• Why his consulting clients went full AI on their email newsletters and watched readership quietly collapse, and what that signals for every creator automating content right now
• How his brain couldn't process 100 AI-generated ad variations at once, leading him to build SwipeFile Remix: one curated marketing idea per day, $200 a year, no login required
• How Kit (formerly ConvertKit) built an AI connector nobody used, then discovered the real product: showing creators their most influential subscribers with one button, no jargon required
• Why he predicted prompt engineering would die a year before it did, why he thinks AI agents will fade next, and why vibe coding doesn't just work the way people claim

This episode is for you if you're a copywriter, content creator, or newsletter operator trying to understand what AI actually changes about your craft. It's equally valuable if you run a business and want to see how one person built a million-dollar operation by using AI for everything except the judgment that matters most, or if you're building AI tools and need to hear why your users don't know what to ask and why invisible features outperform flashy ones.

Follow Neville Medhora:

SwipeFile: https://swipefile.com

Newsletter: https://swipefile.com/newsletter

Kopywriting Course: https://kopywriting.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neville-medhora-654749/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neville_medhora/ 

 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kopywriting/videos 

Artificial Reality:

Website: https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media/

In-person events: https://luma.com/artificialreality

Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfendi/

After interviewing 6 operators across 7 industries about AI adoption, Galina Fendikevich found 3 patterns nobody could see from inside their own corner.

Galina Fendikevich is the creator and host of Artificial Reality. She did machine learning on Wall Street, was on a team that exited to a $9 billion company, and ran US go-to-market for one of the first generative AI unicorns.

She spent Season 1 asking executives across construction, yacht charter, luxury hospitality, deep tech PR, M&A, restaurants, and health coaching the same 3 questions: what's working with AI, what's broken, and what they'd pay someone to build next.

In this episode, she covers what's working, what's broken, and what still needs to be built across 7 industries:

• A yacht client screenshotted ChatGPT saying it was safe to anchor in 25-knot winds, circled it in pen, and argued with the captain. An M&A client walked in with an AI-generated $5 million valuation on $125,000 of net profit. Claude had counted expenses as assets. Every real failure this season was public. Every real win was invisible.
• A restaurant founder handed her 45-page lease to ChatGPT and saved $1,000 in 3 minutes. An M&A broker cut her payroll by 83% and prices what Claude does at roughly $40,000 a month of labor for a $100 subscription.
• 6 executives across different industries all described the same missing product without knowing the others asked for it. A private, structured memory layer for client profiles in high-trust businesses. The yacht broker wants it to remember which wine a guest drank. The hospitality CEO wants scattered guest intelligence made usable. Way beyond a CRM. Nobody has built it.
• AI adoption isn't stalling because of interest. The demand is desperate. A yacht broker tried building her own intake tool and described it as jumping through 500 hoops. An M&A adviser is duct-taping her own deal room. A health coach hired a developer to wire her backend. The translation layer between what operators need and what exists is missing.
• All 7 episodes are packaged into 2 free reports. One for operators. One for AI builders. Both linked below.

This episode is for you if you run a business and want to know what your peers are doing with AI before you spend a dollar finding out yourself, if you need a filter for serious AI vendors versus tourists, or if you build AI products and want customer discovery from 7 industries for free.

Download the Free Reports:
https://arc.net/l/quote/lnabmwxw

The Dream 100 List:
https://arc.net/l/quote/nbvswfzr

https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/
https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/partnership
https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/speaking
https://www.instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia
https://luma.com/artificialreality
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfendi/

Dr. Nikki Siso built 15 Claude skills to assess your toxic load. One client's root belief surfaced in just 3 questions. The holistic health practitioner and Conscious Kitchen founder breaks down how her TALKS assessment cut client intake from hours to 45 minutes with a 10-page report, why she banned all FDA and EPA-approved sources from her AI, and how a client reached the root of a lifelong belief system in 3 questions after years of therapy never got there.

Dr. Nikki Siso is a certified holistic health practitioner and the founder of Conscious Kitchen in Westlake Hills, Austin, Texas. She developed Type 1 diabetes at 29 despite being vegan since 15, which launched a quest through a Harvard master's in sustainability, a PhD in holistic health, shamanic work, and every biohacking tool she could find. She now runs TALKS, a total toxic load assessment powered by Claude.

In this episode, we cover what's working, what's broken, and what still needs to be built in holistic health coaching:

• Nikki's TALKS assessment walks clients through 15 body systems, then hunts through their bathroom, kitchen, and thought patterns for toxins. It generates a 10-page report in minutes. Before AI, the same process took hours and was never as thorough.
• She trained Claude across 15 disciplines and directed it where not to look. No FDA, EPA, or pharmaceutical-approved sources. The EPA approved 86,000 chemicals by letting companies self-certify safety.
• A client who worked with therapists for years said the assessment reached the root of her lifelong belief system in just 3 questions.
• The assessment took hundreds of hours to build. The 10-page report crashed the chat when it exceeded token limits. The team had to move report generation to the backend and deliver it by email.
• Nikki wants real-time voice conversations in her cloned voice so clients can walk through their home during the assessment. The current 5-8 second delay makes the experience too jerky.
• This episode is for you if you're a health practitioner or coach looking to scale without losing your personal approach, if you're a business owner curious about what it actually takes to build an AI product from scratch, or if you're building tools for practitioners and want to hear what's missing in deployment, voice, and backend orchestration.

Follow Dr. Nikki Siso:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nikkisiso
Conscious Kitchen: consciouskitchenatx.com
TALKS Assessment: consciouskitchenatx.com/talks

Artificial Reality:
Website: artificialrealitymedia.com
Instagram: instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media
In-person events: luma.com/artificialreality
Hosted by Galina Fendikevich: linkedin.com/in/gfendi

Dr. Nikki Siso used AI to open a raw restaurant. Some tools saved thousands. Others cost her $30,000 and a full month. The Conscious Kitchen founder breaks down how ChatGPT caught 8 harmful clauses in a 45-page lease in 3 minutes, why AI completely missed the local permitting steps needed to pass health inspection, and how she built 15 custom skills in Claude to assess toxic load across food, homes, and thought patterns.

Dr. Nikki Siso is a certified holistic health practitioner and the founder of Conscious Kitchen, a raw, organic, plant-based, gluten-free restaurant in Westlake Hills just outside Austin, Texas. She holds a PhD in holistic health and nutrition with a specialty in peak performance and co-founded the restaurant with her mother, a master chef of 30 years.

In this episode, we cover what's working, what's broken, and what still needs to be built in holistic food and restaurant startups:

• Nikki told ChatGPT to "act like a commercial real estate agent" and review her 45-page lease. It flagged 8 risky clauses and drafted a letter to the landlord. An attorney reviewed the letter for free instead of his usual $1,000 fee.
• AI had zero structured guidance on restaurant permitting. It didn't know that hiring an MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) engineer should be step one. That gap cost a month of delays and $30,000 on an unnecessary contractor.
• The opening budget was $30,000. The final cost was $85,000. Nikki was on Facebook Marketplace buying chandeliers for $50 and driving to Dripping Springs to pick them up.
• She wishes someone would build an AI tool that pairs your blood work and dietary restrictions with a restaurant menu and tells you what you can safely order.
• AI-generated label designs came back looking generic. A human designer made microscopic adjustments that gave her brand a sophistication AI could not replicate.

This episode is for you if you're opening a restaurant or food business and want to know which AI tools save real time, if you're exploring AI for the first time and want honest stories instead of hype, or if you're building AI products and want to hear what's missing in local permitting, budgeting, and personalized nutrition.

Follow Dr. Nikki Siso:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nikkisiso
Conscious Kitchen: consciouskitchenatx.com

Artificial Reality:
Website: artificialrealitymedia.com
Instagram: instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media
In-person events: luma.com/artificialreality
Hosted by Galina Fendikevich: linkedin.com/in/gfendi

M&A adviser Christine McDannell says her $100/month Claude subscription does the work of $40,000 in monthly payroll. She breaks down how she trained Claude to draft every client email in five days, why a seller walked into a meeting with a $5 million AI valuation on $125,000 in net profit, and what Claude told her after analyzing 18 months of her Slack messages.

Christine is the founder of The Magnolia Firm, a boutique M&A brokerage specializing in selling profitable tech companies. She built and sold multiple companies of her own before launching the firm five years ago, running her own exits and deal processes from start to finish. She also runs an AI implementation club in Austin.

In this episode, we cover what's working, what's broken, and what still needs to be built in mergers and acquisitions:

• How Christine trained Claude to draft all her client emails. It checks every 30 minutes, writes meeting briefs from her calendar, and got so good that she and her team couldn't tell who wrote them.
• The $5 million valuation disaster. A husband and wife team used Claude to value their business and it counted every department's payroll as an asset instead of an expense. The real number was a 3 to 4x multiple on $125,000.
• She exported 18 months of Slack messages and every Trello task, then told Claude not to hold back on leadership feedback. It pointed out she said "sorry" 148 times compared to her team member's 14.
• Why she built an AI voice phone agent but hasn't fully deployed it. The latency creates awkward pauses that make callers want to hit zero for a human. She is waiting for the tech to catch up.
• Her pitch to Silicon Valley: build one end-to-end marketing tool. Right now it takes five separate tools for keywords, captions, branding, and posting. She is still the bottleneck at every micro step.

This episode is for you if you work in M&A, business brokerage, or professional services and want to see how one adviser automated nearly her entire workflow. It's also for business owners testing AI tools who want real examples of what saves money versus what still falls short. And if you build AI products, you will hear exactly where the tooling gaps are from someone deep in the workflow every single day.

Follow Christine McDannell:
Website: https://www.christinemcdannell.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinemcdannell/ 

Artificial Reality:
Website: https://www.artificialrealitymedia.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artificialrealitymedia
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artificial-reality-media/
In-person events: https://luma.com/artificialreality
Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfendi/