Why pay a celebrity podcast host millions when you can create your own using AI?
Inception Point AI is attempting to do just that, as the company builds a stable of AI talent to host podcasts, and eventually become broader influencers across social media, literature and more. Amid the high costs for producing narrative podcasts and pricy, short-term contracts for popular hosts, the idea here is being able to own, scale and control the talent (unlike those off-the-cuff humans) and produce shows at a minimal cost.
“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” said CEO Jeanine Wright, who was previously chief operating officer of podcasting company Wondery, which has recently had to reorganize under the changing podcast landscape.
The company is able to produce each episode for $1 or less, depending on length and complexity, and attach programmatic advertising to it. This generally means that if about 20 people listen to that episode, the company made a profit on that episode, without factoring in overhead.
Inception Point AI already has more than 5,000 shows across its Quiet Please Podcast Network and produces more than 3,000 episodes a week. Collectively, the network has seen 10 million downloads since September 2023. It takes about an hour to create an episode, from coming up with the idea to getting it out in the world.
The company produces different levels of podcasts. The lowest level involves weather reports for various geographic areas or simple biographies and higher levels involving subject-area podcasts hosted by one of about 50 AI personalities they’ve created, including food expert Claire Delish, gardener and nature expert Nigel Thistledown and Oly Bennet, who covers off-beat sports.
As for how it stacks up against human podcasts? “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there,” Wright said.
The company has been recently experimenting with short-form videos and creating social media profiles for the AI personalities, in the hopes of eventually turning some into influencers. Wright hopes to create thousands more personalities in the near future to see what personalities stick.
The team is in the midst of navigating the ethics around creating these AI personalities as the technology advances. Each host now identifies themselves as being AI at the top of the episodes and they’ve stayed away from having the hosts invent their own backstories, for now, but that could come. Wright says she could eventually imagine having hosts chat with listeners, or sing “Happy Birthday” to them, but there’s wariness about diving in too deep.
“I am not going to create a personality that somebody has a deep relationship with,” said William Corbin, co-founder and CTO of the company. He added that the company does not do hard news at this point, but Wright says they might in the future.
The idea behind the company came after Corbin accidentally developed a hit podcast during the pandemic in which he read daily CDC reports, and then branched out into weather reports and other shows that took off, including A Moment of Silence (an actual minute of silence). At the time, they were not using AI.
The company now consists of a team of eight, with four working with content. Podcast topics are selected with the help of AI, based on Google and social media trends, and then the team may launch five different versions of the show with different titles to see what performs the best. The podcasts are often titled after simple SEO search terms, such as Whales, so that they’re discoverable. The shows that do stick can then be replicated and scaled.
“We might make a pollen podcast that maybe only 50 people listen to, but I’m already at unit profitability on that, and so then maybe I can make 500 pollen report podcasts,” Wright said.
The content team, led by Katie Brown, a former lifestyle television host and home goods expert, gives each podcast a title, creates an outline of the podcast, with the content filled out by AI, and assigns it one of the personalities as a host. Other team members do a final check and add in music and sound. The shows are also spot-checked periodically.
The episodes themselves are built using AI, powered by 184 custom AI agents, or autonomous software tools, who work with several large language models, including OpenAI, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and more to build out the content. The podcast voices for the AI hosts are being customized and designed by the team.
The startup is currently bootstrapped, and employees are not yet salaried, but the company will soon seek outside funding.
The team does not see these podcasts as replacing human podcasting hosts, they see it existing as another genre in the landscape. They also have a plan to work with existing creators to help them scale their output.
“I think it exists alongside it, and it can delve into areas where human hosts might not want to go that deep,” said Josh Taylor, co-founder and chief production officer.