When Humans Become Hardware: The Next Frontier of AI

Episode Overview

In this episode of Financial Forward, Jim McCarthy sits down with Zav Zavolian, a serial entrepreneur and venture investor, to explore the intersection of human capability and emerging technology. The discussion centers on the evolution of wearable systems, the growing integration of AI into the physical world, and a provocative concept: the human body as “legacy hardware” in an increasingly machine-driven environment.

Key Topics Covered

1. Zav’s Background in Venture and Startups

• 15+ years in the startup and venture capital ecosystem 
• Experience as both an operator and investor 
• Focus on building companies with large-scale, long-term impact 

2. From Investor to Operator: Why Armada

• Transition driven by conviction in the company’s mission 
• Identifying “inevitable” technological shifts 
• Moving from funding innovation to building it 

3. The Core Insight: “The Body is Becoming Hardware”

• Humans increasingly surrounded by AI, robotics, and connected systems 
• The gap between human capability and machine capability is widening 
• Reframing the human role from separate to integrated 

4. Rethinking Human + Machine Interaction

• Moving away from “AI vs. humans” toward collaboration 
• Designing systems that enhance—not replace—human capability 
• Emotional and psychological implications of rapid technological change 

5. Wearables as Infrastructure, Not Gadgets

• Beyond fitness tracking into: 
   
  • Safety applications 
• 
  
  • Operational intelligence 
• 
  
  • Real-time environmental interaction 
• 
  
• Devices that communicate with broader systems and networks 

6. Preparing for a Connected Physical World

• AI moving from digital environments into physical environments 
• Increased need for human-machine interoperability 
• The importance of making individuals “future-ready” 

Key Takeaways

• The next phase of technology is physical, not just digital 
• Humans must adapt to increasingly intelligent environments 
• Wearables will become part of critical infrastructure, not optional tools 
• The biggest risk may not be AI itself—but our failure to integrate with it effectively 

Why This Matters for Financial Services

• Expands the definition of data sources and risk signals 
• Introduces new regulatory and privacy considerations 
• Challenges traditional boundaries between consumer, device, and system 
• Signals a shift toward real-time, human-centered data ecosystems 

Notable Quote

“The human body is becoming legacy hardware as AI and machines continue to evolve around us.”

About the Guest

Zav Zavolian (Zav)
Serial founder, investor, and startup ecosystem leader with over 15 years of experience building and backing high-impact companies. Currently focused on advancing wearable technologies and human-machine integration through his work with Armada.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

When you talk about the body is becoming hardware, I mean that's that's intense for this audience, right? So we we we focus a lot in the area of consumer finance, regulations, law, banking, and we take detours once in a while when I see something I think is really pretty cool. But talk to us a little bit about why is the body becoming hardware. Welcome to Financial Forward, where we explore the forces shaping consumer finance, technology, and the future of markets. I'm your host, Jim McCarthy. Today's episode is a bit of a deliberate detour, but an important one. As financial services becomes increasingly intertwined with technology, data, and artificial intelligence, understanding where humans fit into the equation is critical. Joining me today is Zav Zavilan, known as Dav, a serial founder, investor, and longtime participant in the startup and venture ecosystem. Zav has spent over 15 years building and backing companies focused on large-scale impact. And today, he's working on something that pushes the boundary even further. Rethinking the relationship between humans and machines. We're going to talk about what it means when we say the human body is becoming hardware, how wearable technology is evolving beyond fitness into safety and operational intelligence, and why the future may not be humans versus AI, but humans integrated with it. This is a forward-looking conversation about technology, risks, and how we prepare for a world that's arriving faster than most institutions are ready for. Let's get into it. Hey, Zavosh, how are you doing? How are you doing? Tell the audience who you are and uh a little bit about what you do, maybe how you got there.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Sure, yeah. My full name is Zavos Zavolian. I go by Zav. Uh, a lot of people know me from being active in the startup ecosystem, venture capital scene um for the past probably 15, 16 years. Uh I've been a serial founder, uh, also investor, and I've always been about uh working on projects that could have big impact. So that's what kind of drives me when knowing the outcome could be something that could push humanity forward. So, with whatever startups that I've been involved in, I usually look for those uh in my check boxes. And when I really see something uh that I could be behind and believe in based on my values, then I could really go all in. And that's when I go from you know the venture side to the operation side. And that happened with the current company that I'm uh part of, Armada, uh, where a lot of the numbers and the data and the conversations kind of pushed us in this direction that you know it's just so inevitable, uh, it's a future that we want it we want to be a part of. And so we're like, let us jump in and roll our sleeves and get to work.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

So tell me this. So, what specific moment or gap in the market made you realize traditional personal protection was not keeping up with how people actually live and work today?

SPEAKER_02 3:42

That's a great question. Uh, you know, Jim, for me, it wasn't a single moment. I think it was a pattern I kept seeing. Uh best way to describe it, uh maybe it's even more of a feeling that the human body is becoming a uh legacy hardware as more AI and robots and machines keep surrounding us. Uh, and just a lot of people feel like they're falling behind the technologies that we're inventing and rolling out. So we wanted to help those people feel more connected, more future ready, and not against the machines and AI, because there's also a lot of you know people talking about the fear of AI taking over. I don't see it that way. I see it more as an opportunity for us to connect better with these machines and robots as AI moves into more of a physical world.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

So and so when you talk about your company makes wearables that are that collect data um and and engage with other systems for specific reasons, um safety, operational efficiency, different things like that. So when you uh when you talk about the body is becoming hardware, I mean that's that's intense for this audience, right? So we we we focus a lot in the area of consumer finance, regulations, law, banking, and we take detours once in a while when I see something I think is really pretty cool. But talk to us a little bit about what why is the body becoming hardware?

SPEAKER_02 5:26

You know, there are a few layers to this, so maybe we can unpack uh one by one. One aspect of it is looking at technology. Now, you know, we have phones in our pockets, you know, every desk has a computer now. Was it different? It's completely different than 20, 30 years ago, and that rate of technology adaptation and maybe it's the demand that uh we seek um for being more efficient or accessing more information uh comes with having to also rethink our lifestyle and you know our day-to-day um tools that we use. So when looking at clothing, it's the most intimate thing to us. Uh, and for thousands of years, humans have been just covering themselves with you know different types of material, but given the rate of technology advancing, uh we haven't really seen that happen with the clothing being functional or adding value to you rather than just covering you. And when you look at the history of uh maybe clothing in recent years, back in the 1900s, uh I wear a lot of long sleeve shirts, t-shirts, uh, but this was considered undergarment until around the 1920s when uh US Navy started to uh basically roll it out as like t-shirts became an outerwear. And then when you look back, nothing's really happened since uh, you know, there's denim and other materials being introduced, but we think now Armada is a company that could help us take us into that next uh paradigm, uh, where clothing, the material from nanotechnologies to thermoelectric batteries, to you know, I can go on and on and we can talk all about the the stuff that comes with it, but it should help us enhance us, protect us, and connect us even better.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah, and I think, you know, and and I think too, um I think the the one of the reasons I believe the body is becoming hardware and what got me most interested in what it is that you're doing, the cutting edge work that you're doing, um, is that um like those glasses that you have on could be doing a diagnostic reading of your eyes to ensure that you've got healthy eyes, um, that you're focusing correctly, and that that prescription is still the right prescription. Those earbuds could be taking your temperature and possibly your pulse rate. And and I and so we do become hardware because we can now measure uh what our output is and what our functions are. And so when I think about your company and wearables and the sensors and the ability to be able to digitalize wearables, I think about the signals that it will be able to send off. We we we we can't even consume all of them now. It would be so infinite, it would be so large that that it would take for a long time to capture all of it. But talk to me about what you think Armanda is, Armada is. Um is it apparel, is it technology, or is it infrastructure? What do you think of your company as?

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Absolutely. We think of Armada less as apparel and more as a system uh infrastructure that uh sort of lives within the clothing layer. And this is where it gets interesting because traditionally risk is managed after something happens, like reports and audits. Uh, what Armada does is turn the human into a real-time data source. And so, to your point, a lot of that data is either not captured. So, for me as a consumer, if I have to go and do an MRI to learn about my body, and it's not even real time, and there's a lot of discrepancies also with reports that happen over uh time rather than having real-time access, so I think will help with uh human healthcare, uh human performance, because the more I gain awareness over my body and my own, you know, from what I'm eating to how much I exercise, how much I sleep. Uh, we've seen this now. This is obviously not something new, but taking it a step further and enabling people to gain control over their own data. And obviously, at an enterprise level, this provides uh a lot of other um you know value. For example, there are blind spots in factories or in mining or within police force, where if you don't have those additional senses and you're limited to static uh you know cameras or and then you don't know what happens in between two locations, that's where you know traffic jams occur, that's where a lot of other you know things lead to injury and cost billions of dollars. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Yeah, so you're talking about moving away from a reactive safety or operational perspective to a to a predictive or real almost real time. Absolutely. If you think about that coal mining or that that law enforcement, the signals that the body could send off with your wearables um could be yeah, very safety oriented. But so when you embed sensors into protection, you're not just um preventing harm, you're you're generating broad insight. So what kind of data does Armanda um unlock and how could that change how organizations maybe think about risk or operations?

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Excellent question. Uh there we're looking at uh data also in different um within different sectors or different types of data, and uh that's where things get interesting because um once you collect certain information and that data could be repackaged and again applied in um different areas. So for example, with some of our robotic uh partners, they're looking at training humanoids, and I think the last I checked expected number is something like 10x the the size of car manufacturing globally. So let's say there's about 100 million cars being produced a year. We're expected to see something like a billion to 10 billion just humanoid robots roaming around. Pretty wild. Uh, but we're looking at you know 10 years, 15 year time. Uh, we're sort of aligned with that to be an outer layer or an intermediary layer or a partner to some of these groups because two things happen. When you, for example, buy a phone, it's another infrastructure we've seen, it's more of a saturated market now. But first thing people do is buy a case uh to protect their phone. So we're gonna see that trend uh within the same robotics world where people buy a whole bunch of robots for a factory or for the security force or for a hospital, and all of them need specialized outerware customization, and that's where our motto comes in. So the types of data that we collect, uh it's also very unique to those particular um industries. And then what we do is because we work with humans and in this case humanoids, uh, sometimes collecting information from people that work in very high-risk environments helps then train those robots to then you know not replace them, but human operators will still exist and work within that loop, except they're gonna be uh moved away from harm's risk. And that's where a robot could do something more dangerous. Human operators work with the robots, but they don't have to put their lives on the line. Um so that's just a kind of paint.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

So you're so you're really if if if uh if you think about it, um you're you're really kind of on the front end of the sensory apparel, sensory market, um for um uh for the nation, really. I mean the first serious uh the first serious attempt at trying to uh uh manufacture the hardware that will ultimately operate you know huge systems. We don't know what what direction it will go, but you're interested in the hardware, you're interested in producing the actual good that does the sensing. And then you will adjust those sensors to whatever demand the customer has, whether it's uh pulse reading or temperature reading or bulletproofing or whether it's um uh you know just uh a robotics measuring a robot's motions and functions as it's moving.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Absolutely, absolutely. We think it's important work uh so that we can enable humans while the you know other companies are doing the work of rolling out more robots and more advanced technologies so we don't fall behind.

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SPEAKER_02 17:24

Thank you uh for that question, Jim. It's been really grounding, uh, it's been a grounding experience uh for me. I think when you're building something ambitious, it's really easy to stay in vision mode. And what CVL's done is force clarity and what matters right now, what actually drives traction versus noise. So day to day, it's made us more disciplined, focusing on real users, real use cases, making sure what we're building actually translates in the market. And I think that's really important. So we keep all stakeholders in mind as we build something uh like our motto in this case.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

So yeah, I've enjoyed I've enjoyed what we've learned. Um I think it's uh I think it's a it's a perspective. I don't, you know, we we talk a lot about working um on the business instead of in the business. That's right. And I don't I don't think we force ourselves enough to do that when we're founders because we we know what pays the bills, and it certainly isn't working on the business that pays the bills in the early days, right? It's just getting customers. So um I I found it to be very rewarding, and um, and I don't know if they specifically picked the cohort, you know, to with with the thoughts about how we would interact or what our products would um, you know, how they would interact or be part of each other. Um, but I do think it's a good cohort, you know. I think there's great products and services that are being offered, and I think it's a it's a good mix of people at different parts of their business growth cycle. And um, I feel pretty confident that they have a lot of resources for us to use when we need them. Um, and and I don't know what are your thoughts on that part of it? That's great.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

Yeah, I I feel everyone's very genuine and they're in it with us. Uh, I've done incubation programs in the past, you know, some accelerators I was I was involved in, also mentoring other startups. Uh, not everyone approach uh the startup early stage from you know, especially in these in the early stages, uh, to focus on your why and build that on the business, really care about what the customers want. Uh so in that sense, I feel like we're in good hands. Uh, and what surprised me was the reach, you know, having people from all over uh attend the cohort, you know, everyone, a whole bunch of us traveled from different parts of North America, so that's good to see as well. That uh it's not just like uh a limited program.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Yeah. And for us, it's been great because you know, I um you know, um McCarthy Hatch um built a model that takes consumer sentiment. So whenever a consumer says anything, a survey, a complaint, um and the the company uh it has a hard time listening to that because most of it is nonsensical. Most of it is I want a puppy, right? Well, you're not gonna get a puppy, right? It's just sorry, you know, the the the the drive-thru at my bank branch is not high enough for my RV to get through. Okay, that's precious, right? And so that feedback data has always been like not taken very seriously. But uh when I was at the when I worked in the Obama administration and we were starting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we had to go out and find who was hurting customers in the marketplace. And the way that we did that is we listened to the citizens, to the customers, and we let them tell us where their harm was, where were their problems. And we were able to synthesize that data down to geographic areas, down to product lines, down to specific um um steps within the product life journey, right down to the company, right down to the complaint. And then we could send uh examiners out to a bank and we'd have a suitcase full of proof before we even got in the door that there Really screwing with customers, and we would just go in and validate that, and the attorneys would write up the enforcement action and off we'd go. And there's 20 over 20 billion dollars worth of enforcement actions that we issued to banks and non-banks for for breaking the rules and hurting customers. And so what I got to thinking was can't can we can I rebuild that system? The answer to that is yes, I did it. And then can we position that to where the banks want to see that point of view? Like they want to see their own their own harm that they're causing if they are causing harm. And they'd like to see it at the same time or before the regulator sees it. And so that's a great idea, and it's working well. And we got a customer top five bank in the country, and um, and it and it's going really well, but I'm bootstrapping it, right? Asaf and I are bootstrapping it, and so we're a little worried about bringing in partners because the the the lift for us is get that system built and make that look really shiny and nice, and this thing will be, I'm not gonna say easy, but it's repeatable to a to a relatively large market. And so, what I like about conscious ventures is it allows me, it allows us off and I to think structurally about what it is that we're doing, and it allows us to think structurally about how we can take on partners without jeopardizing what our end goal actually is. And so when I hear you with your experience about going through these, and and you said you're a you're a startup uh serial uh you know, fund a founder, and um you're I get to learn from your experiences, and I hear some people talk about their experiences, it's all very helpful. It's very helpful for where we're at in our business growth cycle.

SPEAKER_02 24:08

Thank you, Jen. I just want to say uh first of all, congratulations to both yourself and us off and the work you're doing at McCarthy Hatch, because it's important work, and you know, we're rooting for you as well. Uh, and again, also uh for creating space and allowing for dialogue like uh this conversation we're having. So yeah, very grateful.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

So, what do you see, or what what has surprised you the most about how people react to Armanda? And where do you see the first real scale happening? Like, where are you gonna get traction?

SPEAKER_02 24:45

You know, people get it faster than we expected, to be honest. Uh, what surprised me was how quickly people got it, because we thought we'd have to explain this deeply. Uh, but once people see it, they immediately connect to uh connect to it uh in their own environment. And where we're seeing the first real pull is in more high-performing environments, security, defense, enterprise settings where risk and performance really matter to them. Uh, but longer term, I think it will expand into a much wider uh market because everyone eventually benefits from better awareness and protection.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

So and so I'll put you on the spot a little bit. So if you were in an elevator and there was a a true buyer that's that was in the elevator with you uh spontaneously, you didn't know it was gonna happen. What do you what do you say to them?

SPEAKER_02 25:46

I think with each conversation, there's learning, and part of uh our job is not to sell like right away, it's more about educating uh consumers and partners, and through that we build trust. And our partners and stakeholders see that we are you know coming from a genuine place of you know safety protection. Uh, we're trying to put technology to work and we involve them in those conversations. So sometimes it's as simple as uh just asking them what they think about our product. Like we got a lot of feedback on our bulletproof line, and through those discussions, we hear about what matters to to consumers and how they would want to interact with the product. So we're trying to practice more of that listening skill that uh I think at CVL they talked about it too.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Uh it's definitely work in progress, but yeah, I don't I don't have a so you would you wouldn't take your shot, you would you would you would you would build value for future use? That's that's intelligent, that's smart, smart move. Hey Zab, it was really good uh roll up with you today. Are you in Toronto?

SPEAKER_02 27:01

I'm in Toronto right now. Uh we're gonna be back in the States soon, traveling all over. Great, great.

SPEAKER_01 27:08

Well, I can't wait to see you. Yeah, I can't wait to see you again at the next get together. So honestly, thank you very much for rolling up with us. And um, this has been a tremendous uh um uh learning opportunity for me to kind of see what you're doing and how you're doing it. It's it's difficult to be the first one in a market, right? So, hello, I have this shiny thing that has never been invented before, but I'm inventing it. Believe in me. You know, it's it's not an easy thing to do. And and uh we're both climbing that hill. And so I appreciate your your partnership and your camaraderie as we kind of go through the this cohort together, and I wish you the best and your company the best.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

Thank you so much. Likewise, right back at you, Jim. Uh really enjoyed this chat and look forward to uh seeing you guys soon.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

That was my conversation with Zav. What stands out to me is the shift in mindset from fearing technology to integrating with it. The idea the human body itself could become part of a connected system challenges how we think about safety, work, and even regulation. For those of us in financial services and regulatory environments, this raises important questions. How do we govern systems that blend human behavior with machine intelligence? How do we protect consumers when the definition of device starts to include the person themselves? These are not future questions. They're arriving now. And as always, Financial Forward is about staying ahead of those shifts, understanding not just what's happening, but what it means. If you found this conversation valuable, share it with a colleague and subscribe so you don't miss upcoming episodes. I'm Jim McCarthy. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.