Name: GET READY TO MEET YOUR DIGITAL TWIN
Uploaded: 2025-06-09
Duration: 16 min 6 s

Have you ever had a busy day and said to yourself, “I wish there were two of me”? Delphi Cofounder and CEO Dara Ladjevardian has made that fantasy into a reality. Inspired by his desire to converse with his grandfather and benefit from his wisdom after a stroke, Ladjevardian set to work on creating code that captures and scales the mind of any individual. In this must-see session, he’ll explain his process and demo the technology’s practical use cases for corporate executives—ending with an interview with the digital twin of Fortune’s own Diane Brady. 

GET READY TO MEET YOUR DIGITAL TWIN

Conferences

So, so he, who here has actually thought to themselves, I wish I could clone myself. Anyone, come on, we're all busy. You definitely multiple meetings. I wish, I always wish I had one. Well, now we're in a world where that's no longer a fantasy, and to introduce myself, my name is Darla Gevar, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Delphi, and we allow people to create a digital version of themselves to scale their impact and their time. And in this world where every person potentially has a digital mind, you can connect with a top expert in the world in any subject. You can potentially connect with your great grandparents and maybe your great grandkids can connect with you. But before I get into the implications of this world and how people are using this technology, let me tell you a bit about how I got here. In 2014, I was gifted a book called How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil, and you know Kurzweil? Legend. He was very much ahead of his time, but in this book, he says that one day if we had a technology that could serve as a pattern recognizer for language, you could recreate the human mind. I remember that six years later in 2021, I had started my first company. It was called Friday. It was a company that leveraged LOMs to allow you to buy anything with a text, and I was a solo founder at the time. And many of you guys know the first time you start a company it's very lonely and isolating. Everyone's telling you different advice. You don't know who to listen to, but at the time I was reading a book about my grandfather who was one of the most successful businessmen in Iran before the revolution. He had 30,000 employees at his peak, got put on the hit list by the Ayatollah, and he had to escape, and he came to this country with nothing and was able to rebuild his life back for our family. And he was a legend. He was someone that I really wanted to be able to get advice from and ask, what would you do in my situation? This wasn't a question that a book could answer, and he had had a stroke two years prior, so I couldn't ask him directly myself. But I did realize that these LLMs that I was using to build this first startup, they were pattern recognizers, pattern recognizers for language, and I could actually use them in the way Ray Kurzweil suggested to recreate my grandfather's mind. And that's exactly what I did. I created a digital version of him that I could talk to and ask for advice. And that startup got acquired, but that experience just got me really thinking about how we learn from other people and how you can read a book or watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast, but most of the ways we access knowledge today are passive unless you have a lot of money or unless you can afford to be in a room like this, which most people don't have. And the problem is time. The most unique asset each one of us has is our mind, and up until now, the way you express your mind has a cap. You can only be in one place at one time. And since the beginning of time we've constantly innovated on ways to scale our mind whether it was cave paintings, to the printing press, to the radio. Traditional media allows us to reach millions of people, but it lacks the personalization of conversation, and that's why you hire teams. You try to train teams in your ways of thinking so that you can scale your knowledge in this interactive way, but it loses the essence of who you are. So the question that we had is, what if you could have a new source of media that combines the scalability of traditional media and the personalization of bidirectional conversation. And so we started Delphire. Delphi lets you create a digital version of your mind so that you can have that one on one experience across time zones, across geographic barriers, across languages so that your mind is uncapped. And to tell you a little bit how it works, you pretty much connect your data sources from your email, your social media, your notes, and we create this representation of your mind, and this isn't just where you work or who you know, but how you think about things because that's what makes you unique, your decision making process. That's really what you want to scale. And from there, people can chat with you, call you, and even FaceTime you, which we'll see in a little bit. And before I jump into the use cases, let me tell you a little bit of the, of the why now. Obviously, AI is now affordable. When I built the clone of my grandfather, it was 10,000 times more expensive and it just continues to get cheaper. Consumer demands for how they consume content is changing rapidly. TikTok and Reels lowering attention spans. Younger generations are not reading books as much. They're not going through courses. There's a desire for a more immediate gratification form of learning from someone else. And the last thing is we are currently in an abundance era, and what do I mean by that? The beginning of the internet was an abundance era, dot com era. You had so many dot-coms and Wikipedia pages and blogs, and the creator economy was actually a response to that. Whenever there is an era of abundance, the pendulum usually swings towards a desire for trust and curation. So right now information is abundant and when information is abundant, the bottleneck is not access to information, but rather access to curation and trust. And I think we're seeing that pendulum thing right now. People are over the honeymoon phase, they're getting over the honeymoon phase of AI. So let me tell you about how people are actually using this technology in the business world. One is at the top of the funnel. You want to pick my brain. I don't want to give you my email, but you can talk to my Delphi. And it can answer all the questions and it knows the kinds of people that I want to have in-person meetings with, so it's going to let me know if we should hop on a call, and we have people using this as a replacement of their personal website, their LinkedIn profile, their resume. Then we have the middle of the funnel 24/7 access to an executive or the CEO as a form of customer support. And why is that any different than just a generic customer support chatbot? Well, I think there's an interesting email from Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel where he talks about how his reputation with millennials and Gen Z is very important. And fast forward you see him with the perm and the chain and you know looking very cool. That's all very calculated. He knows that people connect with people, not nameless entities. So we see a lot of the CEOs using Delphi as customer support, building parasocial relationships with their customers, leading to higher NPS. The third is internal. As a company scales, the thing that really breaks is company culture and alignment of decision making. So we have many CEOs and executives scaling themselves so that any new hire who on boards into the company has access to a version of the executives so they can know how to make decisions and how to do things the right way. We have CEOs scaling the highest caliber salespeople in their organization to make their knowledge available to other salespeople so that everyone can get that kind of mentorship and management. And then we all know a big problem is tribal knowledge when you have someone who leaves the company and they take their knowledge with them. Well, now you can turn their mind into an asset that stays in the company, so whoever replaces them can catch up to speed a lot faster. And then you can use data from those conversation analytics to see where in the company you need to focus on. And the last use case is we have people making multi-seven figures in revenue selling time with their mind. Sounds crazy, but people make. 8 figures in revenue selling a book or selling a course. This is just an interactive piece of content that people pay for to learn in an interactive way. So those are the four main use cases we see today and obviously there's a lot of fears around AI I'm going to address those fears head on. You might say, what happens to my data. As we know, a lot of these big AI companies are raising at enormous rounds on the promise that they're going to train models on your data to build bigger and bigger models. With Delphi, we believe AI is best when it's in the hands of the individual, so you own your data, not used to train any external models. Number 2 is probably the most common. What if it says something bad? When when we started the company, many of the fears we had, and we worked with a lot of celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Robbins, Jay Shetty. What if someone takes a screenshot and sends it to the Daily Mail and there's a hit piece on me? Well, luckily fixing hallucination and guardrails was the first thing we had to do at the company. And so there's two ways you might want something like this. Either it only answers questions directly that it has the data on, or you want it to give it a little bit more leeway where it can reason on new situations. An example of that would be if I were to ask my grandfather's clone. How would you think about starting an AI company? He's never spoken about AI in his life, but he started an oil business in the mid-twentieth century in Iran, which was relatively uncertain, and he could apply that reasoning of dealing with uncertainty to an entirely new situation. So those are some of the fears I will address, and I think we'll have time for Q&A at the end, but I thought we'd bring up a digital mind of our very own Dianne Brady to ask some questions. I'm gonna ask a question first. I don't know, maybe you are the digital self. We don't have to. Um, so there's my digital self. I see her coming up. I don't see her. Is she up there? One second, I'll check. I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking about someone specific? Let me know, and I'll do my best to help. All right, while we're waiting for her to go on stage. I guess the last fear I wanted to address is what if this makes me seem inauthentic. And I think the goal, there she is. The goal of this technology is that it's not deceptive, and I'll pause and Diane, hey, we're here speaking at the Fortune CO summit about AI. Any words of wisdom on how we could keep up to date with this rapidly changing technology. Well, first off, Dara, I'd say don't worry about seeming inauthentic. The key is transparency, being up front about how you're using AI and why. People respect honesty, and it's when you try to hide things that trust erodes. As for keeping up with AI, I'd suggest focusing on the practical applications that matter most to your business. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer pace of change, but the real value lies in understanding how this technology can solve specific problems or create opportunities. And don't forget to lean on experts whether it's your team, industry peers, or forums like this summit. What's your biggest concern about AI right now? That's for me? You know, um, I think one of my concerns, of course, this is Diane Brady, the real Dianne Brady, and, uh, and I'm curious about how replaceable I am. Diane, what do you see when you look in the mirror? When I look in the mirror, I see someone who's curious, driven, and maybe a little too caffeinated at times. I think it's about seeing the layers, journalist, leader, mom, friend, and knowing they all shape how I show up in the world. What about you? What do you see? Uh, something a little different. You know, I'm curious. I've been asked to ask any Thing, I'm going to ask if you have any memories of your childhood because I'm curious just how wide. Well, if you've been given the green light to ask anything, go big. What's the one question you've always wanted to ask someone but never had the chance? Or if you're feeling philosophical, what's the one thing you'd want to know about the future? Let's hear it. That's a very good question. Um, I think one thing I'd like to know about the future is, where do you think you can add value where the real Dianne Brady cannot? Is that stumping you, Diane? Maybe it's muted. Maybe, oh, I see it is muted. Yeah, it is muted. So you know, one thing I found with this, I think I can absolutely add value for the real Diane. The goal here is to extend her voice, amplify her insights, and help her connect with more people in meaningful ways. It's not about replacing her but complimenting her work like a digital assistant with her personality and perspective. What do you think would be the most valuable way for me to do that? I suppose that email and perhaps having people ask me questions. It's interesting this exercise, when I first engaged with this, I found the digital self to be a little humorless, and it made me realize I need to upgrade my LinkedIn profile because I kept spouting these things back at myself where I was like, really, content connections, conversation, but this is, I find this to be a much deeper version. Diane, um, what are you working on right now that you say, oh, let me just, should I go historically? So, uh, Diane, you've written about, uh, Donald Trump and tariffs. Talk a little bit about what some of the issues. What are some of the issues business leaders I'm not sure I caught that. Are you asking about something specific? Let me know and I'll jump in. Um, tell us, tell us a little bit about what business leaders are thinking about tariffs right now from what you've written. Parents are a huge focus for business leaders because they're often the ones juggling the most work, family, and everything in between, flexibility has. Diane, I think we asked about tariffs. What's your opinion on tariffs right now? Let me look. Tariffs are a tricky subject. They're often sold as a way to protect domestic industries, but the reality is they usually end up being a tax on consumers. For example, I've pointed out before that tariffs imposed on imports are paid by you. As consumers through higher costs, not by foreign governments like China. It's a blunt tool that can backfire, especially in a globalized economy. What's your take? Do you think they're effective? To be continued later, these are these are difficult subjects. So Diane, thank you for your time. And, and thank you Dara for creating a version of myself that I think is interesting. I look forward to more conversations. Please join me in thanking um Darra Lavarianarian and um. And obviously more to be you can call my digital self, ask her all kinds of questions. I found it a fascinating exercise. So thank you for doing this. I got to get to know you before I met you. Well, and, and let's, uh, let's hope I was worth meeting. So thank you very much, um, and so, uh. I found that fascinating and a little disconcerting. I don't know about you, but that was. So do we have any runners in the crowd? Raise your hand if you actually like to run or hike. There you go. There's one couple in the back. Um, I'm really interested in this next session part of our, um, we are speaking to somebody who's been in the COO role now in a COO role, Dan Sheridan of Brooks Running. It is the brand. I think that runners think about Dara also was in the COO role during an incredible time of transition for both the company and the industry. He will be joined in conversation with senior writer and serious runner Phil Waba and Joy. Thanks very much, everybody.