{"id":227199,"date":"2026-06-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/06\/sorry-im-not-available-talk-to-the-a-i-me\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T08:10:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T12:10:59","slug":"sorry-im-not-available-talk-to-the-a-i-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/06\/sorry-im-not-available-talk-to-the-a-i-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorry, I\u2019m Not Available. Talk to the A.I. Me."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sorry, I\u2019m Not Available. Talk to the A.I. Me.<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/06\/business\/dealbook\/ai-digital-twin.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-06 08:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. It started as a writing assistant. Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the stablecoin company Circle, trained an A.I. agent to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications.He called it the \u201cJeremy Allaire skill.\u201d The bot helped him compose drafts. And Allaire was impressed by how well the artificial intelligence captured the way he thinks and writes.So impressed that he decided to let the bot talk to his more than 1,000 employees. Because while Allaire can\u2019t meet with everyone, he realized that the A.I. version of him can.\u201cPeople can interact with the Jeremy Allaire skill on their own before they actually, you know, bring something to me,\u201d he told DealBook, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s available to everyone in the company who wants to have a dialogue with me.\u201dAcross the business world, many leaders are experimenting with similar tools.Consultants and executive coaches who don\u2019t have the bandwidth to address every inquiry are referring some clients to their A.I. doubles. Harvard Business School professors have incorporated A.I. versions of themselves into courses and office hours. And executives are using their A.I. avatars to address employees in other countries in their own languages.Whipping up an A.I. chatbot or avatar is easy. Allaire built his using Claude. A handful of start-ups provide interfaces that make it even easier and offer more control: Delphi takes your content and instructions and creates a voice and text chatbot that mimics you, while A.I. video generators like HeyGen and Synthesia will do the same for a digital avatar that copies your appearance.\u201cIt\u2019s just a new kind of artifact of your mind,\u201d said Dara Ladjevardian, the C.E.O. of Delphi, which raised a $16 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital last year. \u201cThe same way a book is, the same way a painting is, it\u2019s a new way that people get to experience you.\u201dA.I. doublesLenny Rachitsky hosts a popular podcast about product management and writes a newsletter with more than 1.2 million subscribers. A lot of people want to pitch him or ask him for advice.His A.I. double, Lennybot, now fields some of these inquiries. \u201cI even tell them, \u2018This is awkward to say, but you should actually ask Lennybot about this,\u2019\u201d he said. His chatbot has about 100 conversations a day.When I called Lennybot, I asked for advice on launching a hypothetical peanut brittle company (there\u2019s a bag of the candy on my desk). A voice that sounded much like Rachitsky asked me who my target customer was (I said children), and then disagreed with me (it argued I\u2019m actually targeting their parents).Rachitsky likes the bot version of himself enough that last year, he became an adviser to Delphi, the tool he used to create it.Alisa Cohn, an executive coach who has worked with companies like Google, Microsoft and Pfizer, said she had long referred prospective clients who couldn\u2019t afford her fee to resources like her podcast and book. Now she also points them to her A.I. double.\u201cI\u2019m able to also say, \u2018Try this A.I. avatar who might be a helpful almost like a collaborator with you as you\u2019re going through this journey,\u2019\u201d she said.Greg Buzek, the founder and president of IHL Group, an advisory firm specializing in retail and hospitality, provides research for enterprise customers, but has used his A.I. double to create a subscription for individual users. In January, he launched Just Ask Greg AI, a chatbot version of himself that for $30 a month will chat with you about some of that same research.Some start-ups see cloning expertise in this way as a potentially profitable niche. BuddyPro, one start-up that creates A.I. doubles, puts it like this on its website: \u201cIf AI replaces expert advice, make sure it\u2019s YOUR AI doing the replacing.\u201dAnother early start-up, Sensay, plans to help companies capture the knowledge of departing employees by creating an A.I. version of them that sticks around as a sort of consultant.Virtual stand-insSean Greenhalgh, who manages digital content at the cloud storage company Wasabi, first used an A.I. avatar to solve a practical problem: He\u2019s based in Boston. Wasabi\u2019s head of sales, Jon Howes, is based in Switzerland. That made it difficult to coordinate filming a video of Howes for an internal meeting in Dallas.So Greenhalgh built an A.I. video avatar of Howes, putting the rather staid, British executive on top of a horse, in a ridiculous cowboy costume.It was a joke, but the use of A.I. avatars caught on at the company. When a marketing executive lost her voice at the same conference, she asked Greenhalgh to make her an A.I. avatar. About a year later, she used it to address the Tokyo-based sales team in Japanese. And Wasabi\u2019s chief marketing officer recently \u201cpresented,\u201d via a video of his A.I. avatar, at a board meeting he could not attend.\u201cIt is kind of a fun way to say, hey, I can\u2019t be there, but I sent my avatar,\u201d Greenhalgh said.Harvard Business School is using chat and video avatars of its professors in an online boot camp, called Foundry, that it launched in April. Students can pull the A.I. versions of H.B.S. professors into a group text chat to help advise them on their start-up ideas.They can also practice their pitch to customers or venture capitalists with A.I. video avatars that look like the professors. The avatars ask follow-up questions and dispense advice based on both their own expertise and a body of Harvard Business School research and frameworks.Elise Bates, the managing director of the program, said the A.I. avatars gave students access to \u201clow-stakes reps that they don\u2019t get before they talk to a real investor.\u201dNot quite a substituteLou Shipley, a former technology C.E.O. and a senior lecturer at H.B.S., teaches more than 500 students a year, and he has limited office hours. So he tried to offer his A.I. double for student meetings. \u201cThat didn\u2019t go very well,\u201d he said. \u201cThey actually want to meet me.\u201dAdam Dorrell, the C.E.O. of CustomerGauge, which makes software for measuring customer sentiment, had a similar experience: He trained an A.I. double with about two million words of his content, and was impressed with the result. \u201cI thought this is like magic,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is really saving loads of time.\u201dDorrell envisioned using the A.I. version of himself to answer presale queries and to respond when someone asked to pick his brain. But it didn\u2019t take off. \u201cIt seems that human interaction is still a thing in 2026,\u201d he said.Similarly, avatars that replicate someone\u2019s appearance can be amusing and novel, but still fall somewhere in the uncanny valley. \u201cMy wife doesn\u2019t like it,\u201d Shipley noted of the avatar version of himself that appears in the Foundry course.Delphi\u2019s Ladjevardian argues that thinking of these bots as substitutes for person-to-person interaction is misguided. \u201cChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and Perplexity are teaching people to learn and read through back-and-forth conversation,\u201d he said. \u201cI think people will have to adapt.\u201dIn other words, in a world where fewer people have the patience to read your book, listen to your podcast or pay attention during your all-hands meetings, an A.I. double can work as sort of an elaborate, animated index to serve up the information on demand.That\u2019s one way Jeff Bussgang, a general partner at Flybridge Capital, uses his A.I. bot with the students he teaches at Harvard.\u201cI load up all of my best advice, in the form of three books, 100 H.B.S. case studies and a corpus of 20 years of blogging about the types of questions that my students typically ask me,\u201d he said of his A.I. double.Bussgang is pleased with the results. Sometimes, when a student emails him a basic question, he first sends back a link to his bot\u2019s response. With that out of the way, he and the student can talk like humans.IN CASE YOU MISSED ITThe labor market extended a strong streak. The U.S. economy added 172,000 jobs in May, topping economists\u2019 forecasts, according to data released by the Department of Labor on Friday. With revisions, March and April added 93,000 more jobs than previously reported.Pre-owned luxury watch prices are rising againIt has been more than three years since skyrocketing valuations for used luxury watches abruptly plummeted back to earth, ending a period of intense speculation. Now the market is finally showing signs of recovery.Pre-owned watch prices increased 4.9 percent last year, according to a Morgan Stanley report based on an index created by WatchCharts, a data provider that tracks 300 watches from 10 major brands.Charles Tian, the founder and C.E.O. of WatchCharts, has been keeping close tabs on every turn of the secondary market. He talked with DealBook\u2019s Sarah Kessler while wearing a 2003 Patek Philippe watch that displays the month, day of the week, date and current moon phase.What is driving the uptick in prices on the secondary market?The pre-owned market was in this big decline from 2022 to 2025. Meanwhile, on the primary side, with inflation, currency exchange rate issues and the rising cost of gold, we were seeing significant retail price increases. With the retail prices going up and secondary prices going down, it created better value opportunities.Is there consensus on what caused the big crash in 2022?It started off with stuff like the Rolex wait lists, where people were hearing that if you were lucky enough to get one, you could sell it on the secondary market for double or triple the price.So you got a lot of speculators. A lot of people were borrowing money to buy these watches. And prices just went absolutely insane. In the first quarter of 2022, the prices of these hype watches rose by, on average, more than 20 percent.You don\u2019t think this recovery is based on the same sort of speculation?I don\u2019t think you see that sort of broad-based speculation this time around. There\u2019s definitely still hype. But you don\u2019t see this broader messaging of \u201cWatches are a great investment that anyone should invest in, even if you know nothing about them.\u201dHow should people think about the market?Buying and selling watches is not a very efficient market. It\u2019s not something you can do very quickly. And even if you\u2019re making money on each watch, if you accidentally buy just one fake watch, you\u2019d wipe away all your profits.Rolex launched its own pre-owned program right around the time of the crash. Why?Historically, there\u2019s been a stigma against pre-owned watches because retailers would secretly dump inventory that they couldn\u2019t sell into what is called the gray market. If a watch sat in a shop for a long time, and they couldn\u2019t get rid of it, they would just sell it for like, you know, 50 cents on the dollar.Rolex was really the first brand that made a big effort with this broad-based pre-owned program. It was, I think, mainly motivated by authenticity concerns. Because Rolex is the most-faked watch in the world.Do you think that we can infer anything about the broader economy by what\u2019s happening in secondary watch sales?There\u2019s been this term passed around the past few years \u2014 the K-shaped economy \u2014 and I do think growth in the watch market is along the same trend. People with enough disposable income to spend five figures on a watch every single year, it does seem like that base is potentially growing.Quiz: C.E.O. payThis question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you\u2019re right. (The link will be free.)Median pay for the highest-paid chief executives in publicly traded companies jumped 35.8 percent in the past year., according to the research firm Equilar. Elon Musk was the best-paid chief executive, making $132.3 billion. That was 2.5 million times as much as the typical Tesla employee.Elon Musk was paid how many times as much as the second-highest-paid chief executive, Dylan Field, the Figma C.E.O.?
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorry, I\u2019m Not Available. Talk to the A.I. Me. https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/06\/business\/dealbook\/ai-digital-twin.html Publish Date: 2026-06-06 08:00:00 Source…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":227200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/08\/business\/08db-ceo-bot\/08db-ceo-bot-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-227199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227201,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227199\/revisions\/227201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}