Two-time venture-backed entrepreneur, AI enthusiast, and accessibility champion awarded Forbes 40 Under 40 and Smithsonian’s Top Innovator to Watch awards, Suman Kanuganti is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Personal.ai
A creative entrepreneur who loves robots, technology, and humans, Suman is most known for founding Aira, where he scaled AI and AR technology to assist the blind and low-vision community.
Today, as the CEO of Personal AI, Suman is focused on empowering every individual to own their intelligence and be their own thought leader with an AI extension of their memory.
Suman is passionate about building ethical, equitable and unbiased AI that helps people collaborate, exchange ideas and deepen their relationships with others while prioritizing trust, transparency, and individual ownership.
What you will learn
- Suman shares his passion for AI and why he believes it enhances humanity rather than diminishing it
- The challenges of managing multiple platforms and the role of Suman’s platform Personal AI in simplifying and aggregating data
- Find out how to integrate Personal AI into your daily routine and make it a seamless part of your communication habits
- How to get started with Personal AI
- How AI can be used to enhance communication, memory, and productivity
- What brings Suman joy
- Plus loads more!
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:07 – 00:01:16
Hi, everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me, Suman Kanuganti. Now, Suman is a two-time venture backed entrepreneur, an AI enthusiast and accessibility champion awarded Forbes 40 Under 40 Smithsonian’s Top Innovator to Watch awards. He is the founder and Chief Executive of his latest startup, Personal.AI, and I’m really, really curious about what he’s doing there do we’re gonna find out more soon. He’s a creative entrepreneur who loves robots, technology and humans, Suman is most known for founding Aira, where he scaled AI and AR technology to assist the blind and low vision community. But as a CEO of Personal AI, Suman is focused on empowering every individual to own their intelligence and be their own thought leader with an AI extension of their memory and who wouldn’t love to actually have super memory. So thanks Suman for joining the show, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here and I’m intrigued what we’re gonna chat about today with the intersection and amplification of humanity by AI. So welcome to the show.
Suman Kanuganti
00:01:17 – 00:01:20
Thanks for having me, Jeff. It’s wonderful to be here.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:21 – 00:01:35
So Suman, you’re obviously very curious about AI and also you’re a serial entrepreneur. So where does the entrepreneurial spirit start from?
Suman Kanuganti
00:01:36 – 00:02:48
Entrepreneurial spirit started back when I was at in. So I was telling earlier before we started the recording that I was at into it doing mostly product and mostly development and, you know, by background, I was an engineer. So, you know, most of the stuff that I was passionate about is like creating things, creating new things and playing with the technology. So I guess into it, there was a moment in time where I started getting more and more energy when the products that you create is, you know, touched and impact full to the people who are using it. So later on, I chose to continue and, you know, my career in creating these products and creating these experiences. I got my MBA and then immediately jumped into the startup world of trying to identify some of the problems and then, you know, solving them using the technology. So I think that’s probably the genesis and the shift. It did not happen overnight. I think, you know, probably my past experiences for the life, like try to push me into this entrepreneur journey to do more. So yeah, so definitely allow when new products are creating like high impact to the people. It’s something that gives me energy.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:49 – 00:03:34
So that got you excited when you realized what you were doing was creating and impact in the world. So AI, let’s go straight to AI. Seeing it’s your domain name, Personal.AI. And I’m very curious about how we can use AI to, I suppose, supercharge our humanity rather than take away our humanity. So where do the AI bug start from? The passion for AI that you’ve woven into your last startup and also very focused on this startup Personal.AI, where did the AI bug strike and when?
Suman Kanuganti
00:03:35 – 00:06:17
I think it’s already striking. But AI for me isn’t the starting point, at least for me. So in other words, I always went about, you know, searching for the problems, right? I was telling about like, you know, hey, what happened with your entrepreneurial journey? The most interesting thing about my previous company, Aira, was, you know, it was a technology for people who are blind and low vision. And we used, you know, essentially like Google Glasses for people who are blind and leveraging that camera that is located on this wearable device. And like OG is like, how awesome it would be to use that camera for people who cannot see like almost like augmenting, you know, humans with technology. So AI was part of that solution. AI wasn’t, you know, quote unquote the starting point. So my philosophy always has been, you don’t solve the human, you solve the problem, right? So if you focus on the right problem and AI becomes a part of the solution, then great. With Personal AI, we also started with a problem and the problem that we were going after is, you know, we exchange information, we exchange knowledge, we exchange trust with people around us for years. And you know, we developed this relationship saying that if indeed we are able to access people through a digital medium that doesn’t rely on their time, their capacity, their cognition, then it would be amazing. And the inspiration for this company came about when I lost my mentor, Larry Bock, and my desire to emotionally as well as intellectually have a conversation with him. It’s like, oh man, you know, it would be awesome if I had access to Larry’s AI, right? So that was the purpose of Personal AI which is like, can we create a model that is so grounded in one person’s truth, one person’s fact, one person’s opinion that is stylistically invoice is exactly sounds like that human being. And of course AI was the solution. And so I think to the point it’s never about the technology, technology is always gonna be a foundation, it’s always about what are the problems that you can then solve with that foundational technology that we have. So AI will always be, is it gonna stay, it’s gonna be here. It’s already here.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:18 – 00:06:26
So really you just saw AI as an enabler to solve a problem as one of the components of the technology that you needed.
Suman Kanuganti
00:06:27 – 00:07:33
Yeah. And I think it’s not just about AI it’s just like any technology has the same characteristics, it’s gonna further enable things for you to either achieve efficiencies, create greater experiences, create greater comfort. But the most beautiful thing is humans are also pretty, we always think about, we always like harsh on our souls in terms of, you know, how fast we are adapting, but I tend to think humans are pretty good at adapting things, pretty good at adapting to the change, pretty good at adapting to the change to the technology as well. So I think there will be a transition, there will be some pin points. You know, people will reject a technology or an AI, people rejected internet a long time ago, people rejected computers at homes a while ago. And that’s the thing of past now. I think AI is now going through that change as a shift as a transformation because a new medium, people are not comfortable but it will take time.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:33 – 00:09:39
Yeah. A lot of people are afraid of change. And I think the older we get sometimes the more set we get in our ways and thinking. So, yeah, adapting, I think humans are very adaptive and that’s why we’ve evolved. But sometimes it takes time for that and people are being afraid of changes, you know, stops things being adapted. But for me, I see AI as being almost invisible over time, it will just be woven into the devices we use, the cars we drive, how we interact. So, you know, I really like your comment too about that you lost your mentor and you would love to have continue to have conversations that would be deep dives into what he wrote or spoke about or what videos he had. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this too myself. I haven’t done a startup on it. But what if I could get an avatar that looks like me, clone my voice, which sounds like me. And also then use AI to collate, organize all the content I’ve created and I’ve created a lot of content. I’ve got nearly 200 podcasts, four or five, six million words, three or 4000 articles on my personal blog, jeffbullas.com. How could I and my memory’s imperfect. I’m going, someone asked me a question about, you know, how do you do email marketing? Some it up in 10 points. I’d maybe struggle. I could do it. But the AI would do it in a matter of seconds almost using the content of me. And that’s so I’m fascinated by that. And part of it is I really want to, I suppose stalk my children for centuries. As long as I leave a web server on with the AI running that they can ask questions of dad, dad could tell them what to do.
Suman Kanuganti
00:09:40 – 00:11:23
So okay, I’ll comment on many of those things that you mentioned. So two out of the three things that you mentioned, which is avatar, wise and mind, right? Personal AI makes the mind and wise already possible today, you know. Eventually when the avatar technology is cheap enough, good enough for anybody to be able to create a live I think that will converge as well, but our focus has been the mind aspect of it right now. You are mind, you are unique individuality that you are wise and your opinions and your facts and you mentioned, you know, dad AI, oh, well, guess what? My child who is five years old, she already has conversations with my AI. It has already gotten to a point where it’s not just fun anymore. It’s like, you know, she promises so like, oh, let’s ask dad AI, right? Because that AI would probably know you probably have forgotten. So the idea of like simply adding memory is now perpetual, it stays forever. You know, this idea of like taking notes before it was very clunky like, you know, take multiple different notes in multiple different places and you don’t know what you are searching for and you just, like, write down two keywords because the fidelity of the time you never have to write like full things. But now imagine, like, all you have to do is if you write your professional background once, you don’t have to like, write it over and over again, right? And it just goes on and on in terms of like your content, your voice that you can build. But yeah, that’s exactly what Personal AI is and it is available today.
Jeff Bullas
00:11:24 – 00:12:56
Yeah, it’s fascinating because essentially, you know, the likes of Peter Thiel this world are talking about living to a hundred and 60 years old. They’re about transhumanism where we transcend humanity. The reality is that if you have AI organizing your, you know, your content, your ideas from all the content you’ve created and the messaging you’ve done, which we’ll get into in a minute, which is basically, and I’d love to find out more about how you use messaging and so on and an app. So, but the reality is the only limitation with an AI version of you is that you’ve got to make sure that the web server is still being paid for and the software is still running otherwise it would disappear into the aether. So that’s the other challenge with it. I’d be interested in your thoughts about that as well. So, Suman, tell us about how your app works at Personal.AI and it seems to be, I’ve had a quick look at it. There’s a great article on your website called Stacking and Training Playbook for Personal.AI. And it was very well written. I loved structure. So tell us about how you would start with Personal.AI, I’m curious.
Suman Kanuganti
00:12:57 – 00:16:25
Yeah. So if you normally understand AI and specifically around the AI services, you are likely having some experience where you go to a website and you enter a prompt or a question to be able to get an answer back, you know, specifically ChatGPT and any of the large language models that exist. The majority of those models are like pretrained models. In other words, somebody has trained it for you, on your behalf, using all the data and they did all the hard work. So if a consumers can benefit by, you know, writing instructions and get value out of it. Now, you kind of give an example, like what are the 10 best suggestions, you know, you would have for email marketing. Well, you can ask that to ChatGPT and it is a composition of all the people that you know, exists on the internet. So generally referred to as general knowledge, right? So Personal AI is exactly the opposite. Personal AI starts with one, memory and memory of an individual person, right? So think about any information, knowledge, facts, opinions of a person is taken from unstructured data and it goes through a process to structure it and I will get to how a user would be able to do that. So, but the first part is like the memory and the second part itself is the model. The model is not a large language model. We call it actually a personal language model. This model is grounded in the memory and it is not a pretrained model, it’s continuously training. So as the memory gets new memories, the model gets, you know, updated almost overnight. And then of course, there is an application layer on top of this model as well where you use the application layer to, you know, enter the memory or upload the memory to train your AI and use your AI. So where does the memory come from? If you ask me, well, that memory could be any authored data that you have historically, in your case, you know, you, Jeff, you were mentioning about your newsletter, your content, your podcast, you authored books as well, autobiography, if it exists, that could go in. So it’s very advantageous for people who are actually creating content and, you know, journaling their lives for a, you know, period of time. It could be your emails as well, you know, if that is a place where you actually had any meaningful capture, data capture about you. So all that can go in however, on the ongoing basis as well, you can essentially think about adding any memory to your AI that will be remembered forever on your behalf. And you can ask questions, you can instruct your AI to write content, you can use your AI to generate replies and responses, you can use your own AI for creating email drafts. The possibilities are, you know, potentially endless at all. The places that you have any digital footprint, any digital communication, like outbound digital communication, you can have your personal AI do that for you. You can still approve it or disapprove it. But at least it will give you a starting point that sounds you like you.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:25 – 00:17:06
Right. So let me ask a question regarding and I’m curious about is how do you choose what platforms or messaging apps that are yours, for example, how do you is because a lot of them, we’ve got a lot of apps we use, we use Slack, we use email, we use Facebook, we use, you know, the list is almost endless. Now, we’ve got Google Docs where I journal every day. So how do we because it sounds almost, for me, almost sounds overwhelming. How do you simplify that?
Suman Kanuganti
00:17:07 – 00:19:13
Yeah. So let’s understand the problem why we need to simplify first. So you mentioned Slack, email, Zoom, Google apps, right? Like today, your life is compartmentalized a part of it in Slack, a part of it is in emails, a part of it is in Google apps, a part of it is in like Zoom and part of it is in like, you know, some other podcasts and some other places. There is aggregation of that data that is happening within the platform across multiple users, but there is not an aggregation that is happening for Jeff, you know, for yourself. So the Personal AI platform is kind of basically designed to again flip that narrative, it provides some existing integrations out of the box. For example, Google documents you mentioned, you know, you have like tons of Google documents. You can basically connect Google Drive and then, you know, push all your data into Google Drive and connect your email and then push all the email content as well, as well as Slack content as well. But the reality is specifically when it comes down to, you know, things such as text messages in iMessage, WhatsApp messages, Slack for the matter. They don’t make it easy. That’s a fact that’s the reality. So we can do the best we can to capture the information and then make it beneficial to the user. But the same time, the user can also take choices going forward to ensure whenever they’re writing anything on a piece of the internet, it could also be working in their favor if they can add that memory to their personal AI, right? So yeah, so there is a work to be done for the simplification for the company, but there’s also mindset that needs to be, you know, adapted by the people so that they can benefit from them. Otherwise you will only be creating companies AI, you will always be consuming, you’ll always be a consumer rather than an asset. You think Personal AI is an asset.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:14 – 00:20:21
Yeah, I definitely, and I took some notes about the mindset part which you just mentioned and you said there are three elements, key elements to the mindset approach that you need to have. Number one, never ending learning mindset, which is great because I love that because I’m curious, I’m going, let’s start this business or let’s start this project and let’s not get too attached to it, but let’s just start the journey and see what happens and see what we learn along the way. It actually, it’s the destination is actually not the most important thing. It’s actually the journey. The other part is make it part of your routine. So that’s cool. In other words, can I take it? And so the other one which I like is play the long game. What can it do for me? Not today or tomorrow, but in 10 years. And for me very much, I do love the concept of the long game. For me, for example, I started a blog in 2009, you know, 6 million more.
Suman Kanuganti
00:20:22 – 00:20:31
Guess like you are already ahead of the game. I was saying you are already ahead in the game. You already had that mindset from before.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:31 – 00:21:25
Yeah. And the other thing too, as you, what I’ve loved about it too, this long gameis that, and I love this quote by Bill Gates. He said that people overestimate what they can do in 12 months, but they underestimate what they can do in 10 years. And what’s exciting about that is over time. We’ve been able to create some very strong Google authority because of all the links to our site, which is part of the SEO thing. So we’ve built authority by playing a long game and I do love that part of the long game and I’d be interested in both of those three mindset elements. Curiosity is number one part of your routine and a long game. I’d be interested in your comments and all three or just one that you like to choose.
Suman Kanuganti
00:21:26 – 00:21:30
That’s interesting.
Jeff Bullas
00:21:31 – 00:21:42
So routine, let’s start with maybe routine. How do you weave it? So, I mean, curiosity, I think is a given. I’d get that. How would you weave Personal.AI into your routine?
Suman Kanuganti
00:21:43 – 00:23:01
Yeah. So one of the key pieces for Personal AI experience to be in the routine is to be integrated into your daily experiences. What does it mean? One of the primary use cases for Personal AI today is to have your AI draft these outbound communications for you for all the incoming messages that are coming at you both personal and in the professional lives. The thing is you are already writing, you’re already texting, you’re already typing things, right? How beautiful is it for, you know, your personal AI to be the starting point and the ending point for every digital communication that happens out there. So I think it has to be integrated and it also has to be ambient. In other words, the idea of journaling never worked out for me because the idea of journaling was not integrated into the life that I choose to live. But the idea of like texting and messaging and communicating with people is already integrated into my life. So I want the capture mechanisms to happen when it happens rather than me doing extra work to be able to capture those memories. So that is what I mean, like make it part of your daily routine.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:02 – 00:23:13
Okay. And play the long game. So what would AI, Personal.AI do for you in 10 years time.
Suman Kanuganti
00:23:14 – 00:24:57
You know, one of the stories that I like to tell for that question is about, you know, my previous company, Aira, with blind community started like testing it out, experimenting and providing the feedback. You get caught up in what are the things that you do today and how you can improve it. For example, alls man, I go to this grocery store all day and then Aira had helped me, you know, do that like two X faster. But then they told me, but what’s more fascinating for me was I realized that there was a ATM machine from Chase Bank in this grocery store that I go to every week for past 15 years. And I never knew that existed. So the most mind blowing part is when you start to learn the unknowns of what the world has to offer and the vastness, you know, you yourself can offer, then that’s a beautiful part that you are not like unlocking and touching into the potential of what you may not be imagining it. So what I think personally in 10 years is going to be for individual people is they’re going to start discovering who they are, what they are and tap into the unknowns of themselves without getting bogged down into that task that you would have to do today just, you know, faster and efficient. So I think the long game will unlock that sort of potential which we probably are too busy today to imagine it, to comprehend it because we just want to do things more two X faster.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:57 – 00:25:08
Yeah. So, what you’re saying is that because we’re bogged in the details of day to day living. We’re missing the big patterns on the important things.
Suman Kanuganti
00:25:08 – 00:25:14
Yeah, you can consider that and it’s almost like what does it mean to be exploring the unknown.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:15 – 00:26:53
Yeah. Well, the thing that I certainly feel, the older I get and I’m at a different stage of life to you is that I’m going a sort of because we’re brought up in a certain way. So we’re locked into mindsets, we’re locked into routines and habits and ways of thinking and preferences and priorities and you’re going, I just want to explode this because I just feel that there’s so much untapped within me, but it’s trapped within these goalposts of how we’re brought up by our parents, how we’re brought up by culture. And you just say so I just really would like to actually go beyond that, and I would like to see bigger patterns emerge as well because creativity is quite often lost in not being able to, and inventions and stuff is quite often done by connecting two disparate dots or 10. But the fact is because we, as humans, a habitual creatures and nurture has created us to be, you know, like you’re brought up in a certain religion. So you think a certain way until you don’t, you know, brought about by a crisis. So, how do you, so, I’m part of me going, how could I explode my, you’ve talk sort of talked about it. How can I explode my thinking and connect a lot more dots and be more creative using AI? And maybe that’s what you’re starting to talk about with Personal. AI is, you blow it up the school yard by giving you a bigger vision of the world.
Suman Kanuganti
00:26:54 – 00:28:48
Yeah, I mean, you know, the most interesting thing for me is even for me personally, you know, I’ve been building memory for the past 18 months or so and of course, my AI is integrated into my life like right now and sometimes when my team communicates with me or even family and members communicate with me, it does extract and construct things that I like so vivid for you, but it isn’t until you actually see it. In other words, if I were to do that myself in that moment, it may not be as expressive and as vivid because either I don’t have the cognitive capacity to kind of think through or I’m lazy in that moment or I don’t have time. I’m probably running around for doing, trying to do something else. But the AI, you know, which is a machine that, you know, has unlimited capacity, it has all my memory and it never sleeps, right? So, it’s almost like an extension to you. You know, I mean, it goes back to the, some of the core thesis of Personal AI, it is truly an extension to you and I know it’s mine and nobody can touch it, nobody can just take it, nobody can shut down the service for me. It’s a model of me that’s gonna live in the cloud forever. Are you asked like, oh, you know, somebody has to, you know, keep that up and running. Well, no, because you have these devices at home now you can download the devices and keep that at home on a desk that people can talk to. That’s the beauty again, back to the technology and how efficient they are and they can run on devices as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:49 – 00:29:05
So how do you, so if you, where does this intelligence reside? Is it within a software app on a server? Is it on your computer? Where does this Personal.AI, where’s its home?
Suman Kanuganti
00:29:05 – 00:29:55
Yeah. Currently the model lives in the cloud, but soon enough, you can download the model and we also have it like device mechanism that we wanna unlock. So I think it’s a matter of time and all the technology in terms of like GPU capacity as well as edge devices for the GPUs getting onto the phones, they’re only working in our favor. So we know where AI is today, you know, already, you know, with the number of advancements that are happening and there will be devices that will be living in our homes like Alexa, Google Home. But that technically is made up of like your model, your mind, so yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:56 – 00:30:37
So there’s another question I have which I brought up in our little pre-chat was, okay. So I’m happy for maybe my Slack messages with my team to may be public or available to the team or maybe to the world or Google Docs to the world. But if I’m doing a journal, right? It’s a personal journal. It’s just for me, how do we make sure that our privacy isn’t, you know, messages that you don’t want the general world to see because you’re just sharing your feelings and it’s private and personal.
Suman Kanuganti
00:30:37 – 00:30:38
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:38 – 00:30:43
How do you put some, you know, right? You know, guard rails around that.
Suman Kanuganti
00:30:43 – 00:32:12
Yeah, I mean, control is probably the number one thing for this company, not only control on your data, but also control on your model and how you structure it. So remember this model is not automatically extracting data from your life without having you give it, right? So the way the system works is each AI, let’s just say you, has multiple different personas. So Jeff has a personal life, Jeff has a work life, Jeff has a podcast life, Jeff has a media life, Jeff has an Australian life, not a chef life, however you wanna call it, right? And each of those personas has these memories that probably has different levels of access, meaning your personal life or personal persona is only accessible to you and to you only or maybe to your family if you would want to and your podcast persona. Well, guess what? It’s public because everybody can benefit from, you know, Jeff’s podcast mind that anybody can interact with like an end of marketing or maybe there is a space that is Jeff’s persona that is very only available to subscribers. It’s like a closed club, you know, because it has some secrets and some value and more value. So you can basically pick and choose and structure your AI according to your life and control it that way.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:12 – 00:32:21
Okay. So with Personal.AI, do you provide sort of a process to help you do that?
Suman Kanuganti
00:32:22 – 00:32:56
Yeah. So very good question. Currently, we have, mostly the content, like educational content that is out there. We recently started our webinar series to provide a structured discovery on what your structure may be to go through that process. So the short answer is yes. And then, you know, these webinars will be available on, you know, most platforms and the best way to learn is actually come to Personal AI and then talk to my own AI. It will give you some good structures as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:57 – 00:33:25
Okay. So let’s get into asking your AI and then we’ll, and then I’m curious about how you said that the app looks like anything like WhatsApp and so on. In other words, it’s design or Slack, okay, for example. So if you ask a person, if someone asks your personal AI, what’s the, how does it come back to you? Is it a voice? Is it a video? Is it text?
Suman Kanuganti
00:33:26 – 00:33:31
It’s text right now and we are introducing wise pretty soon. And that wise will be the wise of you.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:32 – 00:33:34
Right. So you’d be cloning voice, for example.
Suman Kanuganti
00:33:34 – 00:33:45
Yeah. It’s cloning minds and cloning voices and in the future when the avatars is good enough for cloning expressions of like, you know, physically then yes.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:46 – 00:33:56
Right. So essentially you’re gonna be building a virtual you that will sound like you, look like you as well as an evolution of where you’re starting from.
Suman Kanuganti
00:33:56 – 00:34:27
That’s right. And the convergence of wise and mind is already happening, that need to happen. There is after the technology as well, that is possible to do that but not at a scale where it can be available for everybody and we can make it cost effective. And one of our thesis is also we just don’t want to serve the top 1% of the humanity, right? Like we are more interested in serving the 80% of people like, you know, everyday people. So that’s kind of how we see the world
Jeff Bullas
00:34:28 – 00:34:47
So take us through maybe the process of starting the journey of training, of using Personal.AI. How would you start? And then of course you are then building into your routine. So how do you, how would you start with Personal AI?
Suman Kanuganti
00:34:48 – 00:37:16
Yeah, so I will say is the following steps, right? Step one, you’re gonna define or figure out what the purpose of your AI is. The purpose of your AI may be different from the purpose of somebody else’s AI, I will give a couple of examples. The purpose of Jeff’s AI is to serve all the community or listeners of Jeff, to have this interactive, continued experiences once they listen to a podcast, right? That’s a purpose. Or the purpose could be I would want to have an interactive experience into my mind for my family and for my friends today, when I’m not available or forever into the future, you know. So once you set the purpose, then you’re gonna figure out, okay, for this particular purpose, what are the specific personas do I need to build? I may need to build a personal one for friends and family. I may need to build a, you know, podcaster persona for specific ones or maybe you just have just one persona. Once you do have the persona, then you’re gonna start thinking about, okay, what is all the author content that makes sensible for me to upload into my memory. So that process would be anywhere from uploading your documents or uploading your existing like, you know YouTube videos or maybe PDFs, you know, a chat history. So I think that is a little bit of like investment if you do have existing content for you to do that. And once you do that, well, it’s time to put it to good use. Either it’d be generating content or that it’d be simply inviting your, you know, group, the community, the family, their friends into private chats, so they can talk to you also to your AI, you know, in a text like interface which looks like Slack you mentioned. And it also a mobile app is also available which looks like also like Slack or WhatsApp if you will. So it’s a messaging like application. And the reason we have chosen that is people are very familiar with messaging interfaces. So the training is as simple as texting and adding memories and using your AI is as simple as well, texting and asking, you know, having a conversation with somebody.
Jeff Bullas
00:37:16 – 00:37:21
So there are, so it’s basically web based as well as app based.
Suman Kanuganti
00:37:22 – 00:38:10
It is app based. It’s a two applications. There are integrations like meaning you can get an AI phone number for yourself as well. So that way people can text you and so you have your personal number, the people can text your AI phone number and you can do interesting things about like, you know, forwarding, you know, your main text messages to your AI and have your AI in the loop. But there is an API, everybody gets an API, so it’s almost like an IP address to you, right? So everybody gets a unique IP address and unique API key that they can technically, you know, drop your AI in any other places. But over a period of time, we’ll make that process even more simpler in terms of integrations.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:10 – 00:38:15
Right. So what integrations do you currently have into? What platforms?
Suman Kanuganti
00:38:15 – 00:39:09
So we have SMS right now. We are able to release an embeddable web interface for websites. We are soon going to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as well. So those are all the places that we see. We are currently motivated and seeing a lot of traction with small business brands. So this would be anywhere from like, you know, authors, coaches, podcasters, consultants, marketers, agencies, if you will, they may not be, you know, enterprises. And the reason is, you know, these people have a personal mode and their personal mode is personal data, that’s their personal brand currency. And there’s a good fit, you know, for what person I offers to these people, which is elevating and scaling your own brand.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:10 – 00:39:14
Fascinating. So there’s an app in the Android store and the Apple Store?
Suman Kanuganti
00:39:15 – 00:39:28
Oh, very soon. It will be an Android and Apple Store. But it’s already in App store, IOS App Store. Android is gonna follow up pretty soon.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:28 – 00:39:30
But just in the US App Store at this stage.
Suman Kanuganti
00:39:31 – 00:39:33
No, it should be in Australia as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:33 – 00:39:43
Okay, cool. Yeah, so, okay, next question, what’s the pricing model for Personal.AI? The pricing model.
Suman Kanuganti
00:39:43 – 00:40:53
Pricing model, oh, okay, cool. Yeah. It’s all based on the memory. So the cost to the company is based on, you know, how, you know, big is your model as well as you know, how many, how much you use, you know, you have out of your AI. So currently it’s a subscription model, it starts with free so you can try the product out, you can use it for a human-to-human communication for free. There is no cost to like talking to other AIs. You can build memory up to a hundred. And I always encourage people to, you know, do like the foundational, you know, telling about your hobbies, your life, your preferences, your, you know, professional background, like just who you are like that interaction itself could go into that memory. And beyond that, there is a $15 price point for increasing, adding more memory, there is a $40 price point for unlimited memory as well. We do offer like a hands-on very professional services that gets into, you know, like custom solutions and you know, hundreds and hundreds of AIs, you know, for bigger organizations that has multiple different individuals and guests.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:54 – 00:41:02
Okay. So essentially what you’ve done is you’ve created a minimal viable product to start with and then you’re building it out over time. Is that correct?
Suman Kanuganti
00:41:03 -00:41:56
Yeah, you can think about it and this is a best chance that is packed into the model. Technically, you can use it for many different use cases, you know, from simple creating drafts of responses to your text messages, to drafts to your email. But the beauty in here is like this is your mind, you know what I mean? So we see close to 70, 60 to 70% acceptance on the draft messages on the platform because they are basically, it’s literally you. If it is in your memory, then you know, in normal cases, you probably don’t have to change anything. Even if you want to change anything, it’s probably like 20-30% of the change and whatever you edit things, it goes back into reinforcement learning as well. So everything that you do is kind of like, you know, being learned.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:57 – 00:42:09
So I think we maybe mentioned but maybe you can sum it up. What are the major uses you see for Personal AI, your product?
Suman Kanuganti
00:42:09 – 00:42:33
Today, if you incorporate personally in your daily life, you probably with alter on how your outbound communication is done, with ease, with, you know, sophistication with high capacity and reduced anxiety. So that’s kind of what I would say is like, is an untarget on spot use case for us.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:34 – 00:42:48
Okay. And the, and so the other part of that that was mentioned, I think in your online video was it’s essentially becomes an extension of you with supercharges your memory or basically it makes it easy to remember things.
Suman Kanuganti
00:42:48 – 00:42:52
Yeah. That’s easy. Totally.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:52 – 00:43:00
Because as we know, as humans, some have got better memory than others, some are born with a better memory whereas AI then can give you a super memory effectively.
Suman Kanuganti
00:43:01 – 00:43:05
Yeah, supercharging like scaling yourself.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:05 – 00:43:26
Yeah. And I find that rather exciting because I would have forgotten what some things I’ve written about over the last 13, 14, 15 years and create a lot of content. So but I love the perspective too is what can we do with this long term. I think it’s playing a long game is pretty exciting as well.
Suman Kanuganti
00:43:26 – 00:44:35
Yeah, it would be pretty fascinating. We have seen like anybody like knock off thousand memories. They spend, you know, three to four X more time on the platform and three to four X more messages to their AI as well as three to four X more people, you know, in chats and in launches, we do have this commit, you know, concept of launches, we call them AI Launches. And the most interesting thing is it’s like you are AI hanging out lounge and you can have multiple different humans come in and collaborate with your AI simultaneously, but they’re also collaborating in, you know, in with other humans as well. So, you know, for me, it’s a world, it’s an AI world, it’s a personal AI world, like every person is backed up with their own AI and it is continuously learning and growing. Maybe the future form factors will be different. Maybe they are real meta words, maybe the interfaces will be different. But if you just have like slight imagination, like every person in Personal AI is an AI in itself, which I think it’s fascinating.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:36 – 00:44:42
So you’ve been using your own product obviously for the last 18 months or for a while.
Suman Kanuganti
00:44:42 – 00:45:12
Yeah, more so in the last six to nine months because, you know, the interfaces and, you know, some of the application layer is so good. We don’t use Slack anymore, we don’t use WhatsApp anymore internally. So all the internal communication also happens in Personal AI but given everybody has their own personal eye as well, they’re like all, you know, supercharged to your language. Yeah, they’re all supercharged with their own AI.
Jeff Bullas
00:45:13 – 00:45:39
Cool. So you’ve been using it obviously your own product. How has it changed you with using it every day? As it made you more conscious as it made you more aware?
Suman Kanuganti
00:45:40 – 00:46:50
I think it made me, I think it may be more curious. So I think the way I solve problems now is a little bit different. Earlier, I used to do a lot of like research and try to come up and synthesize my own ways. Now, if there is a new concept, if there is a new thing as well, I simply go to my AI and tell my AI and interestingly enough, it will draw conclusions, like it will synthesize everything like how this particular concept that I just like entered, you know, after the podcast, you should go to my, you know, to Personal AI and then join my autopilot lounge, you will find it in Discover. And sometimes I simply tell like new concepts and like Personal AI is the new medium for digital communication I just came up with because I was preparing the webinar and it’s like, no, that makes total sense. And then I have a 72% response from my AI and why that makes total sense that is based on fundamentally, you know, synthesizing and justifying and all the things that I normally say on what person I should be.
Jeff Bullas
00:46:51 – 00:46:55
And it maybe recombines in ways that you would never thought of.
Suman Kanuganti
00:46:56 – 00:47:53
It would probably take a long time, you know, even if I draw the same conclusions, probably take a long time. Then probably will not do a better job, I will probably not do a better job. So it said that so I be like today in the morning, I said, personally is a new medium for digital communication. And it said I couldn’t agree more, Personal AI is indeed revolution is the way, you know, we communicate digitally. It has the potential to become new medium for all interactions, bringing us closer to human-like conversations with computers, just like we had key moments in the history with the interaction of phones, internet, personal computer, smartphone, AI is now taking center stage. It allows us to unleash our creative potential and gain efficiencies in our digital communication. So it picked up like how I talk about the history of evolution in terms of like phones, that is a step function like phones, internet, personal computers and smartphones. So it used that concept into what I’m talking about digital communication.
Jeff Bullas
00:47:54 – 00:48:01
So what you’re also saying is that it’s putting things in new combinations that you would never have thought of on your own.
Suman Kanuganti
00:48:02 – 00:48:05
To my ideation, my brain so happens in my AI now.
Jeff Bullas
00:48:06 – 00:48:18
And that’s exciting. So I, and so that essentially that component especially is amplifying your humanity and creativity.
Suman Kanuganti
00:48:19 – 00:48:33
Yeah. I think once we, you know, done with the podcast, I’ll share my screen because I’m actually watching live a conversation that is happening where Jonathan is asking my AI pitch Personal AI in 250 words or less.
Jeff Bullas
00:48:34 – 00:48:55
Okay. So just to wrap it up and I ask all my guests this and what brings Suman the most joy? Most task or activity brings you the most joy, Suman?
Suman Kanuganti
00:48:56 – 00:49:54
The most joy for me is when my customer actually touch the product and see that magic because in almost all the cases, I don’t know what it is with my companies. It’s not like, oh okay, I go to the tool and then immediately like, you know, do it has done. There is in that process in that journey, first one day or seven days, there is a movement that is just like uh-huh, like it like literally happened over the weekend, I was talking to one of the guys in the lounge and like, you know what, man, I just realized the whole movement and why this is such an important and fundamental thing that, you know, we are doing it together here. So yeah, so that gives me most joy that just like, you know, when people gain like value that they have never imagined from a technology, I think it’s very beautiful. That gives me joy energy.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:54 – 00:51:34
Thank you very much for sharing that. And I look forward to seeing the evolution of your platform and Personal.AI, I think I’m personally fascinated and very curious about the intersection of AI and humanity. And what I’m really also fascinated by is and also wanted to make sure of it, my end, is that it doesn’t take away from my humanity but enhances it. And the reality is that social media started off as a platform that would connect us. But in the end, there’s a big part of it now that’s dividing us. That’s been done by the algorithms that spread hate and divisiveness polarization. So I think, and that’s another whole question about AI, is the ethics of AI, which we really haven’t touched on today. But I just want to make sure that I choose to use AI to enhance my humanity rather than being used by the AI or the apps and that means sometimes not using them. Turning off your alert, putting your phone away and let’s have a conversation. So thank you, Suman, for your insights. It is been fabulous and inspiring and I look forward to seeing the evolution of your company and as it brings magic to the world.
Suman Kanuganti
00:51:35 – 00:51:42
Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, I enjoyed the conversation as well. So, thanks a lot for having me. I look forward to seeing Jeff AI on your website.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:42 – 00:51:45
We’re about to do that. We’re making a note straight after this. Thanks Suman.
Suman Kanuganti
00:51:46 – 00:51:47
Okay, bye.