Founders and executives across Asia are beginning to experiment with a provocative new tool: AI-powered digital twins that replicate not just their voice and image but also their unique way of thinking.
AI-powered digital twins allow founders and executives to scale their presence, creating new revenue streams without additional time commitments.,Personal AI personas can serve as collaborative partners in productivity and decision-making, but raise ethical questions around authenticity and trust.,The true advantage lies in balancing scale with distinctly human traits such as empathy, discernment and judgement.
The rise of personal AI personas
The notion of a digital twin once referred to industrial machinery, a virtual replica used to optimise performance. Now, the term has taken a strikingly personal turn. Across boardrooms and startups, leaders are commissioning AI versions of themselves that evolve with their knowledge base, tone of voice and decision making style.
These AI personas are not mere parrots. They aim to capture individual thought processes, memories and communication quirks. Imagine a CEO simultaneously addressing investors in Singapore, mentoring staff in Jakarta and appearing in a podcast interview — without ever leaving their desk. For time-starved leaders, the idea of being in multiple places at once is no longer a fantasy.
Tools enabling self-replication
A growing constellation of platforms is lowering the barrier to building one’s digital counterpart:
Personal.ai creates language models trained on an individual’s content, designed as a private, evolving memory bank.,Lindy offers a no-code agent builder that integrates into calendars, email and CRMs, effectively acting as a personal or business assistant.,OpenAI Custom GPTs allow users to create bespoke models trained on specific knowledge sets, and even publish them in a marketplace.,ElevenLabs and Synthesia provide ultra-realistic voice and video cloning, enabling avatars that can speak and look indistinguishable from their human originals.
Prominent figures have already tested these waters. Tony Robbins’ AI twin, built with ElevenLabs, delivers coaching advice at scale. Deepak Chopra has introduced DigitalDeepak.ai, offering always-on guidance rooted in his teachings. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman went further, creating a video avatar of himself to explore the ethical boundaries of this technology.
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Why leaders are drawn to AI twins
The attraction is easy to see. These digital doubles promise infinite reach: the ability to be everywhere at once, offering mentorship, interviews, or customer engagement without fatigue. They introduce new monetisation models, where personal knowledge becomes a scalable product. Robbins’ team has acknowledged that his AI twin generates revenue around the clock with no additional time invested.
For businesses, digital twins act as cognitive memory tools, ensuring brand consistency and surfacing forgotten insights. Productivity gains are another lure. Routine meetings, FAQs and customer queries can be delegated to the twin, freeing up leaders for higher-order work. Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan has even speculated that if deployed wisely, AI twins might compress the workweek to three days.
The ethical frontier
Yet for every tantalising prospect, there are thorny risks:
Authenticity: Can audiences be sure whether they are engaging with a human or a machine? Trust becomes fragile if blurred.,Misinformation: Poorly governed AI personas could make damaging statements, leading to reputational fallout.,Privacy: The question of who owns one’s digital likeness is an evolving legal minefield.,Skill erosion: Leaders who outsource too much may lose the very interpersonal acuity and cognitive rigour that define them.
For Asian markets, where respect for authority and cultural nuance underpin business relationships, the deployment of AI twins requires particular care. A misstep in authenticity could cause more harm than help.
The post-human edge
Founders are no longer only building companies; they are becoming platforms themselves. The competitive edge will not come from how convincingly one can clone their presence, but from discerning which aspects of leadership must remain resolutely human.
An AI twin may replicate your voice and scale your influence, but it cannot replicate your empathy in a client negotiation or your intuition in a crisis. In a world of infinite clones, judgement and presence remain the rarest assets. For further reading on the ethical implications of AI, a comprehensive report by the World Economic Forum explores these challenges in depth World Economic Forum: Responsible AI in Asia.
The future belongs to leaders who know what to outsource, and what to guard as distinctly human.
Latest Comments (4)
Fascinating read, truly. The idea of AI cloning voices and faces to scale a founder’s presence across Asia is certainly…innovative. While the revenue streams and efficiency gains are clear, I can't help but wonder about the authenticity of those "insights" when they're delivered by a digital twin. It's one thing to replicate a founder's knowledge base, quite another to bottle their intuition or the spontaneous spark that comes from human interaction. What happens when a nuanced, evolving situation needs a *real* human gut feeling, not just a programmed response? It feels a bit like having a brilliant sous chef, but still needing the head chef’s final taste. Just my two cents from Singapore.
This AI “digital twin” concept, especially for Asian execs, is fascinating. It reminds me of the whole influencer culture, just on a more corporate level. I wonder if this will lead to a broader erosion of genuine human connection, making interactions feel more curated than organic. The ethics are indeed a big curveball here.
Fascinating read. While the revenue streams and scaling opportunities are clearly there, I'm still weighing up how much "human judgement" an AI clone can truly capture. It's more than just data points, isn't it? Our distinct Singaporean Kiasu-ness, for example, is tough to replicate fully.
This is quite something. We're seeing similar discussions in Japan, especially from startup founders keen to expand globally without constant travel. The ethical side is a real concern, though.
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