AI and the Future of Creative Work — Sylvain Montreuil, Animatix

If AI becomes a creator, where do humans bring value to storytelling?

In this episode of Futureproof, Xano CEO Prakash Chandran talks with Sylvain Monterrey, founder and CEO of Animatix, an AI-powered film production platform used by leading advertising agencies and media studios. Sylvain shares his journey from fashion to AI — and explains how the creative production pipeline is being rebuilt on top of foundational models. Together, they explore what AI means for storytelling, why creativity still begins with humans, and how new workflows are transforming not just content creation — but company building itself.

Topics covered include:

• End-to-end creative pipelines in AI: Why the next era isn’t about standalone models — it’s about stitching them together so teams can go from brief to storyboard to finished film in a single workflow.
• AI as co-creator, not replacement: Technical barriers are collapsing, but the creative spark still comes from people — the message, meaning, and emotional arc.
• The rise of enterprise-grade AI filmmaking: Why big studios care about continuity, licensing, and digital actors — and how legal frameworks will shape adoption.
• AI-native organizational design: How team structure, roles, and product velocity change when everyone can build and iterate at real-time speed.
• Real-time personalization and the cultural question: Why “your own version of the movie” is coming — and why it could reshape culture, marketing, and identity.

Episode ID: 18454919-ai-and-the-future-of-creative-work-sylvain-montreuil-animatix

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Transcript

From Early Ventures to Creative Tech

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you leave it everything to the AI model, there is no sense to it. Even if it looks perfect, the lines are perfect, the images are perfect, but there is no creative sense of it. When you give those tools to a human where someone has something to say that is very creative and actually is able to craft those tools into a direction with a purpose, then you come into something.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

I'm Prakash Chandrin, the CEO of Xano.com. Today I'm joined by Sylvan Montreuil. Sylvan is a serial entrepreneur, designer, and innovator who spent his career turning ideas into reality at the intersection of creativity and technology. He's the founder of CE and CEO of Animatics, an AI-powered video production platform that's helping major advertising agencies and media companies move from concept to finished film in record time. With Animatics, Sylvan has brought generative AI out of the lab into the real world production, transforming how creative teams build storyboards, animatics, and full commercials. His work sits at the forefront of AI and media, proving that machine intelligence can accelerate, not replace human creativity. I love that theme, by the way. And we're going to dive into that a little bit more. But first of all, Sivan, let me say welcome. It's really good to see you. I know I saw you a couple years ago at the No Code Summit. But thank you so much for being here today. Yeah, thank you for having me. Great to see you again. Well, before we get into it, there's a lot that I want to cover, especially because you know you obviously have uh quite a history just in starting multiple businesses. You've worked in industry, and you founded a company that leverages AI that real customers use. So I think there's a lot of meat uh in this conversation. But I wanted to just start maybe at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your background leading up to Animatics?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Well, I mean, very extensive background. Uh, so I'm uh I'm a serial tech entrepreneur. Uh, Animatics is my seventh company. Uh, always been at the forefront of creative tech and deep tech. Uh created um as a first company when I was 20 years old uh as a fashion brand while I was stopping uh playing professional basketball and doing sporting events, uh, and then kind of learned the craft of entrepreneurship there. And then got into innovation, got into the web uh a long time ago, and then uh started to uh fund uh a few other companies. Company that uh was a self-flying camera that was uh flying around uh action sports and athletes to capture uh their movements. Uh the company was sold to an aviation group and it turned out to be a drone company. Uh, and then did a sketch pad uh to draw storyboards on uh a tablet with real pen and paper. This company was sold uh to a big uh the pen and paper group. Uh and then did a couple of other uh into the OTT sharing content, uh streaming. Uh and then uh I founded an innovation studio uh and then small investment fund very into the lean startup where I applied the same methodology how to actually bring a technology, turn it into a product, and scale it into a company. So that's how I got exposed to uh launching so many projects and I got really like the bug of entrepreneurship from a very early age, and uh that's what I've been doing for 25 years now.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Yeah, I see that. And um, you've also not only kind of been the serial entrepreneur, but you've also had some time working at larger organizations. I think when I met you, you were uh the product leader at a larger company too. So you you have that kind of range.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah, so I've I've been uh like early on, just starting my own project and then jumping into uh bigger companies uh as a uh chief of product, usually. Uh so I'm I'm really much a product guy. I like to build things, I like to make it uh work. So very extensive technical background, uh even if I'm not so much an engineer by by training, uh and a very good uh sense of design. I've always been very attracted by creativity and design and putting things on paper. Uh so I have like that that multiple skill set between business, design, and tech uh to be able to uh just bring that into a different organization.

The Moment Animatix Began

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Yeah, so it's actually interesting because as you were talking about your background and you people can look at your background on LinkedIn, it feels like a lot of what you were doing uh kind of has led up to what you're doing now with animatics, just kind of blending this kind of design um orientation, sketch, sketch pad type background, all to this world of AI that we're living in and what you're building with animatics. So for those of uh those people that don't know, I would love for you to not only talk about what animatics is, but tell a little bit of the origin story, like the aha moment that had you say, okay, I I've got to go and build this.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Uh it's it's uh it's a funny story. So actually, when when we met, I was working with this uh this US company out of New York, and uh and so I was just like really dedicated into this. And for some reason, um this the company went off. Um the CEO got in into some some sort of uh of stories, uh raising funds and a bit of complication with this story. And uh so just all of all of a sudden, just in one day, uh I got I got claimed to get paid, and uh I got fired. And I was like so hungry about it. Uh, I was like, okay, let's let's just tell the story to the world of what happened. And then I went on to, I was playing with all these AI tools from the very beginning, integrating a lot of AI and LLMs into all these tech companies. And I was like, okay, uh I saw the state of AI video and and AI image really early on, and I was like, let's tell that story to the world and and shape it as a as a trailer for a movie that will tell this entrepreneur story, and I wanted to like make the trades as a as a like a house of uh like casa of papel meets uh uh some some sort of gangster movie. So I went on all that night and trying to just draft that storyboard uh and with all the AI tools at the time. So like that's like a year and a half ago, two years ago. So at the time was mid-Journey and a bit of uh runway and luma. And uh and so I spent the full night until five in the morning just trying to get my rage out, and uh and I realized that it was just impossible. It was impossible to actually put uh every uh ID on paper without leaving the tool. So I had to use uh an LLM, like probably Chat GPT 2 or 3 at the time, uh to create the script, and then wanted to do the audio, wanted to do image, video, sound effect, voiceover. And then I realized that uh to put all this together, even if the AI was just still maturing, that was just impossible. So that's that next morning. I was like, okay, I have two directions. Either I stay in that uh angry phase of just trying to finish that movie, either I get that insight of like, hey, maybe the industry is gonna shape into a position where the tools are gonna get great and the AI is gonna get perfect, but no one's gonna actually build the pipeline that stitch everything together to bring it into the agency for the creative people to actually do this type of films. Uh and that's how the insight of Animatics came along. And uh and that next day I started started building.

Building the Missing Pipeline

SPEAKER_01 8:07

That's fascinating. So you were kind of fueled by rage, uh, where you wanted to tell your own story. And in discovering the tools at the time, you found that there wasn't something that let you go end to end. Like maybe one piece of it, maybe there's a short clip, maybe there's kind of the whiteboard exploration piece. But when you want to go from idea all the way to delivery, especially in this world where we have these tools with AI, there was nothing there. So you're like, I need to build this.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Yeah, totally. And nothing there. And still today, there is uh there is nothing of very few. Uh everyone is very much focused on the quality of one AI output. Uh, but when it comes to actually bringing an end-to-end film from the exploration of your creativity and what you want to do all the way to putting a storyboard together, all the way to the animatic and to the final film, this full workflow is totally uh unpossible into any tools you have on the market today. So uh that's that's how I've built it. Uh, really thinking we need to bring that pipeline to the enterprise and uh and make it accessible to the creative people.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Yeah, so you've been working on this for a little over uh a year now. What is the product today and who does it serve?

Who Animatix Serves Today

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Um so uh so Animatics is uh an end-to-end AI video pipeline for um advertising agencies and media and entertainment. Uh so we make it a very collaborative platform by nature. Uh, we think even if AI can enable you to create a film from uh from start to finish as a one-man show uh out of your computer, it's still a very collaborative, creative process between multiple teams. Uh, people that actually design the characters, design the closing, design the location, and uh draft the film and just bring it all together with all the approval processes that are required. That requires a collaborative platform to actually do this. Uh, and then we bring all the foundational models uh into one workflow, going from a brief to a storyboard to an animatic to a final film, and we leverage all the best in-class models uh from uh the image model, the video models, the audio models, uh, sound effect, voiceover into one streamlined workflow. So uh you can just be creative and don't have to worry about all the prompt engineering, all the stitching together of all these tools. So basically, we do an orchestration layer on top of the models uh to uh enable this for the enterprise.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Yeah, that's amazing. I think one of the reasons why I was excited to chat with you is because it's funny, like maybe in the beginning it would have been uh a tool to express your anger from end to end, and now it's kind of turned into this like really commercialized product that real customers are using. Um, talk to us a little bit about the types of customers that you serve. Is this kind of just in the getting started phase? Like, who are the types of customers that leverage this to kind of uh you know create that creative output uh and and kind of go to market with uh the creative things that AI is putting together?

Solving Continuity and Consistency

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Also, I mean to today AI is picking up, and and so I saw that coming quite quite early, about two years ago. But when when you look at the market, everything is going for the the like the end user, the like anyone can produce any type of video. Uh, but when you look at it, it's still very expensive to produce, it's very hard to leverage. So you see a lot of things on YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on. But when it gets professional, there is not so many uh platforms you can actually leverage. So from the very beginning, I targeted uh the B2B business, big enterprise to enable this pipeline inside the big company. Um, so today we have large advertising agencies, um, like uh most of the top 10 uh advertising companies are using us, uh, and then we have media and entertainment ranging from Hollywood to uh smaller studios that are actually leveraging Gen AI. We have different types of use case. Um, advertising is a big one, uh, going from uh showcasing a product to showcasing a full range of products, uh 100% AI, or a chunk of AI, a chunk of traditional production. And then when it comes to like real filmmaking, we go from previews to uh animatic to actually final films, uh, and we start to see that there is the capabilities to go full uh full final film, uh 100% AI. Uh so we think that's gonna come in the next year. Uh, we're gonna have like full blockbuster films, 100% AI generated. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Um tell me, what is what is the most interesting thing that you've seen created on the platform so far?

SPEAKER_00 13:02

No, it's it's uh it's it's very interesting. We have a lot of commercial uh short form content. Uh that was like the very beginning where we enter uh the market. So um yeah, very cinematic. We don't do any like social media type of uh of content. We do more like TV, YouTube type of longer commercial, uh 15, 20, 30 seconds. Uh, and then we start to have more and more short uh short form films uh around uh two, five minutes, and then we have um like TV production channels and streamers that are looking uh to do this for their uh green lighting of their films, uh so we start to see uh longer form content. Uh some of our customers are doing a 20 minutes uh on it. Because we leverage all the models, we don't have any uh length limitation. Uh every model's output like a five to ten seconds footage. But if you look, because we have the consistency of it, and that's the core of a technology, to unable to contextually understand the story and stitch uh all this different piece of uh of content with great consistency in style, in character, in location, in uh in the product, we put all that together to create a film. So it's like a uh multi-shots of multiple five to ten second sequence put together into a very consistent way where there's different camera movements, and then you can get a full full film and and there is no limit in duration really.

AI Accelerates the Art, Not the Artist

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Yeah, um I had seen uh a clip, and I think one of the one of the things that you mentioned around that continuity is something that is just very hard to get right. And you had like this animal that was on a surfboard and then in a limousine and then riding like a motorcycle or something, but it looked very seamless. It's like, okay, this is the same animal going from clip to clip. Where when I've tried to experiment thing uh with things like, you know, for example, I will try to create a story for my kids using AI and read it to them at night. Sometimes the shots look very different and they call it out. They're like, well, why does that lion look different than this lion? And if they're noticing, then obviously when you're going to, you know, uh creating a commercial for something that actually is, you know, that a business needs to use, that is the most important thing. So it feels like that's a huge value there.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Well, I mean, that's that's how I mean I got started because I didn't want to do just one one form, like one shot, and and really like you realize really early, like if you put multiple shots together and your character is not the same frame, and the background change on every frame, and the shirt color change on every frame, then you have a problem to tell your story. So that was the first thing we we tried to solve, but now the the models' capabilities have greatly evolved. You probably also uh Nano Banana and Seed Dream V4 and all those models that are very good at consistency. Um, so that's less of a problem now, but still you need to have continuity into your story. How do you actually create an arc that tells a story from beginning without being a cinematographer or a storyteller? So we're trying to simplify this capacity uh for every creative user to just go on the platform and actually tell their story or import their brief, and we we build that for them. We build a consistent character, we build constant backgrounds, constant product, constant scene, and then you can import anything into it to create that end-to-end story. Um but yeah, I mean the the evolutions of the models are going so fast. And I've I've kind of spotted that from the very beginning, but I knew like the the like how do you create that cinematic language that brings everything together would be the key for adoption for those uh larger companies.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

You know, um I want to talk to you just about the nature of storytelling in general. In in some ways, just being an entrepreneur, you've been telling stories throughout your entire career. You're a very pen-to-paper type of person. Um in this age of AI, I'm curious as to your thoughts around how how storytelling just fundamentally changes, if at all.

A Wave of Creative Explosion

The Future of Talent, Rights, and Digital Actors

SPEAKER_00 17:17

As I said, um I I don't I have a very atypical uh path of doing my things. Uh I've always been very attractive with creativity, design, and building things. Uh so that's kind of where I went and I brought technology into the way. But I was really always interested in in movie making and making films and different ways of doing it. So very early, I was like doing cable cams with camera, trying to do travelings and all this type of stuff. Where then I built a drone company to do this and so on. So I always saw the technology as an enabler to actually capture these shots, and I saw video as a very powerful means to actually express what you have to what you have to express. Uh today it's getting even simpler than ever before. I mean, we can literally create uh like a five-minute movie by tomorrow, uh, no problem. Uh like even a year ago, that was not possible. Two years ago, impossible. Um and and like five years ago, you couldn't even think about it. That would be like a 50, 200 to a million dollar budget to do these type of things. So the technology is only building the storytelling in terms of it's abstracting the complexity of doing the film, because before you needed actors, you needed location, cameras, uh lighting, uh, people that know about framing and color grading, editing, like all this pipeline is just falling away. And uh and what's last is your your storytelling capacity. What do you want to say? What's the message you want to come through? Even if the LLMs are helping you putting things together into a good format, you need to come with the inception of creativity. What's the message you want to tell and how you're gonna deliver it? And I think that's uh that's gonna not gonna be taken away from from the creative people. And I even think the contrary, um, where I think the industry is gonna explode to something much more creative, where it's gonna be much less to the creative people to access those types of technology as it was before. Before you could have the greatest film uh in your pocket, just uh riding it into your room, but no financial capacity to be on set and actually shot this. As today, anyone can actually create that film and probably next year everyone can create a full, full-length movie. Uh, there is cost to it, but nothing compared to what it was before. So my take is uh we're gonna have like a ancification of the internet, and which is, I mean, starting today with all the things that we see with the Sora and all the stuff that are coming out there, it's it's easy to create a lot of TikTok like content. But on the other side, it's gonna be uh much more creative content that will be created by more creative people uh that are enabled by the technology. Uh so a bit like when we saw VFX uh 30 years ago, where we thought that was the end of uh the FX in cinema and the industry will collapse and the computer will do it, and and there is no budget for it. We saw an explosion of that industry where now we have regularly hundred million dollar movies, even if it's not just the the regular thing that actually finance all these VFX. I think the pipeline is migrating from uh from a 3D pipeline to an AI pipeline, and and the same thing will happen. The industry will keep growing, we'll have more special effects for more things, and and video will be a major uh medium of of telling those stories accessible to anyone.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

I love that. Um I think it's also um a very hopeful view. You know, I think there's so much that I read around it's so sensational. It's like, oh, this industry is dead. AI is gonna go ahead and replace everything. I saw an interesting interview with um Ben Affleck, I think, on uh Sorkin, and he was kind of likening AI to a craftsman. A craftsman can like sit down next to someone, it can learn exactly all of the tools of the trade, it can know how to like, you know, create frame by frame everything. But he was uh, I think he said like a craftsman knows how to work, but an artist knows when to stop. And I think that it is an important co-collaboration around this LLM that can help express your creative ideas, but you have to still narrate and dictate what makes a creative piece of art. Would you kind of agree and align with that synergy between the AI model and the human creative?

SPEAKER_00 22:09

No, yeah, totally. I think if you leave it everything to the AI model, that's where it gets uh not very vibrant and there is no sense to it. Even if it looks perfect, the lines are perfect, the images are perfect, but there is no creative sense of it. When you give those tools to a human where someone has something to say that is very creative and actually is able to craft those tools into a direction with a purpose, then you come into something. So uh I really don't think um there there is any uh good output of this that will be 100% created with AI, even if it's technologically possible. I think uh we need to relate to it, uh, and it needs to be a tool that equips the the creative to actually build that like the that new tool set. It's it's still a tool, even if it's extremely powerful, it's still a tool for you to to express yourself.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Absolutely. Um, you know, one thing that I'm curious if you have thoughts on is just kind of the nature of how we will consume and interact with maybe the new type of actor that we're gonna see on the screen. Uh, in that as AI creates more and more for us, uh, and it's obviously being co-created with creatives, um I'm curious how talent changes, how rights change, how uh is there a world where actors uh who obviously so many of us relate with on screen that that relationship changes? How do you see that kind of view and framing and how when where things are going in the creative world?

Building an AI-Native Company

SPEAKER_00 23:53

So, I mean, multiple things. Uh, today you can uh you can generate anyone you want, you can uh steal a picture from anyone you want and create a film out of it. Um the legal barrier are starting to uh to form, and especially for us that plays into the enterprise scene, it's it's very much of a big concern. It starts by solving the legal issues about the use of AI and the deployment of AI. Then it's the business issue, like how does it change the business model for it? And then it's the the technical issues, how do we implement? First, I thought that was going to be the contrary, like let's solve the technical, let's find a business, and then we'll address the legal letter. But we realize that uh the use of models and how they've been trained is a big uh is a big hurdle to the adoption. And then the other one is the use of talent and talented IP. Uh, if I prompt someone that uh is very much into your trade and the system has been trained into some some people that or some image that are very close to yours, I can get into your same likeness without even knowing. And that's a big risk for uh for the agencies and for the big media because you don't know that you're exploding someone's likeness without his consent. And I think that's gonna create a big blocker into the use of uh of talent into Gen AI at scale. So what we are um rolling out uh very very soon uh and and next actually next week, we uh we partner with different uh model agencies uh that brings digital likeness of real people uh into um uh into a digital twin where uh the actors give their consent to use themselves with uh some some controls uh into the commercials, into the films. So you're using real people uh as uh a digital casting into the film. So we we solve the the the issue around IP, around using characters in into that direction. Uh and and that's that's where I think I see the evolution of talents. Uh everything's not gonna be generated and abstracted. It's gonna be uh linked to some real people to be able to capture some real knockness. And then for the more high-end, we start to see digital capture where we capture in uh 4D uh motion capture to get the expressions, to get uh the special end check, to get uh something that AI is not capable to do, or not capable to, you're not capable to prompt it. You need to still capture it to still to capture the performance of the actor and restitute it with AI because it's easier to construct uh construct a scene with AI than it is to do in in any other way. So I think that that merge between the AI generation and the talent will be more and more present, but there is guardrails and safegrades uh around uh around the usage of all this.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

That's fascinating. I mean, just like this notion of the digital twin of the actors. It allows them, I suppose, to be a lot more prolific and kind of be in all the all of these different scenes. Um, I do think kind of this the notion of like the perfect take, and kind of when you know that you've got it as a director or something, you get the best out of the actor and the and that relationship. I do wonder how that will change, but it's a very interesting world we're moving into.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah, I mean, and and it's still like very much an exploration, also. Uh, but it's it's interesting to see. I mean, the position I'm taking with animatics, I don't think it's gonna replace the human at all. It's more uh like an enabler of of your creativity and your capacity. But for sure, I mean the technology is extremely disruptive, extremely powerful, uh, and it's gonna it's gonna totally disrupt the full industry. Where I I don't see any way that any companies tomorrow will require to have an AI pipeline uh to actually produce their content from end to end to end. Um and and then that brings some legal complexities into this that uh that needs to be addressed, but uh that's that's gonna mature over time.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Very interesting. Um I want to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about company building. You know, you've been company building uh for a couple decades at this point, and the nature of kind of curating teams, uh how you kind of bring things to market, uh I'm is is really just changing. So maybe starting kind of where you are now and working backwards, you are now creating base an AI native, an AI-first company. And in creating this, obviously, team is very important, but I'm assuming that you have to bring the right mix of characters in this world that is rapidly changing, rapidly evolving. They themselves, I'm sure, have to be AI natives. Can you talk a little bit about your mindset going into starting animatics, the team that it would require, and how you just think about framing uh or grouping people together to get the best out of them?

SPEAKER_00 29:11

No, very, very good question. Uh yeah, there could be a full, full, uh full day on that one. But uh uh so so the the I mean the way I've started Animatics, I knew that uh there was gonna be an AI first company, that's the models of management will have to be radically different from from what it has been before. The level of skills will have to be radically different as well because you uh the skills are merging into multiple things. Like a year or two years ago, things you were not capable to do, now you are able to do because you have access to all these things. And then the the skill set is is kind of fading away. Like you there is no more such of a coder, a designer, a businessman, a strategist, uh, a marketer. There is a bit of mix of all of all of this, and the approach um I've been taking while while drafting uh the organization of Animatics is are you actually able to get immersed into those tools and redefine the way you work? Um and and that was like kind of the first uh the first intent, and that's why we have a very different team, uh, like very experienced for sure, but uh also very versed into multiple disciplines that are able to converge into uh into different roles. So um my background has been always very involved into organizational design. Um I've I've done uh Olacracy, I don't know if you if you recall of that, like um anything that is self-organized uh and where you decolorate the person from the role. Uh so that's that's really like this this systemic design that I'm trying to build within Animatics. And what when it gets very interesting is when you define a company by a set of roles and uh and a set of circles and functions, um, then you can actually bring the people to complement those roles very transversal, very organic. And when you bring AI into this that that starts to understand much of what's happening, you're able to bring a very different team, very different organization, and go much faster than what you used to do before. Like if I take the parallel from the last company to build a very complex product, we were like 25, and to to do the same thing now, we are we are less than 10, and and we go probably 10 times faster than what we did before. Uh so the the the velocity of it has has greatly improved.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

But I also organized I imagine the seniority level of that less than 10 is also higher than the blended 25.

Curiosity, Agility, and the New Builder Mindset

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Yeah, it is. Uh and and I mean two twofolds. Like the team today is structured, so uh we have like very senior people uh on on the top. So Andreas uh um uh that that joined me, uh ex-googler, uh head of uh AI sales in in NEA. Uh so joined the company um like a year, a year and a half ago. Uh then we have Vega that was uh head of uh AI uh in Zurich, uh leading 120 people on the AI side of things, and then we have Patrick uh that was uh in uh head of um uh VFX at Netflix, uh so bring all the creative uh directions of the company, uh, and and then myself, so that's like kind of uh the core. But then uh we have Ivan, Daniel, and some other uh developers that are very uh immersed from the beginning into AI, uh, and this understanding of how the tools have evolved, how the software building has evolved in the last two years was very important. I think if you if you use the same recipe that you used two years ago into how you organize the team, how to structure your sprints, uh you're missing out because uh the speed of software development, of product design has greatly uh evolved. Like uh, I mean we were we were kind of joking the other day. We we don't we don't use Figma anymore in the way we were using it before to do the product spec. We use Figma to feed the AI tools to tell you like, look, that's what I want, not build it. So you you you don't build like prototype as interface that are like kind of dummy prototype like you would do a few years ago. Now you use you you do working prototype almost in real time and see if you like it, and from there you iterate. So all this like capacity changed the the structure of how do you uh deploy the the product uh and and at the speed you deploy it. So the the funny thing is uh so like the the last uh probably 10, 15 years, like maybe like five five, seven years ago, I was advocating, I was doing a lot of software, and I was advocating the lean startup where uh you should uh I was like sell it before you build it. So you should you should design the product in a way people will believe it's real, and then once you have traction, then you build it. So you avoid the risk of building something that people don't want. So that was like really advocating this. Like, how do you show traction before you actually build a product? Because building was very expensive. In the last few years, building got really extremely cheap. Uh, and and so that philosophy cannot hold anymore. Now you would you would build first and make sure it sticks. Uh, and and there is like the the nature of prototype has changed quite a lot. Like you you just you ship products every day. Yeah. And and you see how that that evolves even multiple times a day.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

I totally agree with you. It's it's interesting because that's quite like a philosophical shift as well. Because I think you have people that are still kind of hanging on to lean and go through going through the traditional ways of designing and building software. But to your point, the rate in which you can create, it's just faster to get it out there, get it tested, or put it in front of someone, have it working, and then, you know, kind of go back and iterate uh because you can, right? It takes a certain mentality. And um, to that end, I wanted to ask you, you know, you it sounds like you've put together um this mix of like senior leaders that understand things at the highest level, but also AI native creative technologists that are hands-on as well. What was that hard to recruit for? I imagine that there aren't actually a lot of those people with that mentality out there.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Uh it it's it is and it still is, and uh we we are in the middle of uh quite heavy recruitment. Uh, but the the way we've I've been looking at it, and and and I think I had this this conversation with with Ray Deck uh uh one time that that you you know well as well. Uh I think it's it's around your capacity to mobilize your skills, not so much about what you know how to do, because that's what you know how to do is just almost vanishing uh on a daily basis. Uh everyone is capable to know that things, you just ask ChatGPD and you have it. But it's like, how do you actually leverage those new tools and those new capabilities and create something out of it? And and that agility, I find it uh, I mean, and I'm I'm I'm very driven by this, but it comes from people that do sports or music that are able to pick up this new instrument and do something with it. And uh that that capacity to not knowing and improvise around what you have at at end and what's this new feature that's come today, and there is a new capacity that's coming out tomorrow. You cannot just set on a set of principles that you just apply and it works. You have to be very curious, very agile, and able to create a new process and a new way of doing almost on a weekly basis. Um and so that that I find is it's not something you you find uh on someone that has done a big school or where a big manager at a big corporation. It's more like personal. Like how do you relate to things and how curious you are and how passionate you are at the end with this technology and be able to dive in and say, uh, you know, I don't know. I have no idea about these things, but I'm gonna learn uh to do it.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

And then the age, I mean, Ray was uh, we had a conversation with him a couple weeks ago, and we talked about literacy and how that's changing. And to your point, the ability, if you are a curious person, you can learn anything, right? And so really I think you've said it right. It's like it's if you're curious, you're hungry, you can learn it. How do you then act on it? How do you mobilize that? That's kind of the new currency that we're moving into.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

I mean, there is so much stuff to explore, and and those days is getting crazy. Like we cannot keep up with the pace of what's throwing at us. But we get we get to start somewhere, explore and try to build things. Is it uh making it a movie tomorrow on using AI, making it a piece of software on using some cursor and lovable, making it uh whatever? It's just like putting yourself into a situation where you're gonna make it and then iterate on it and make it better every day. Uh, that's like kind of this this like uh sort of of quest of making yourself better on on uh on touching those things uh that where you you improve like your capacity of relating with this without really knowing where you're gonna go until one point where you have a clear direction and it makes sense in terms of business, in terms of your skill sets, and and so on, and then it aligns. But I think it starts with that that that curiosity and that uh that wanting to go and and do things.

Starting New Things in a Post-Lean World

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Yeah. So, I mean, we touched on some of this, but if you know, there's gonna be technical builders, application development leaders that are looking to start new things uh in today's world. Um, I'm curious like what advice you have for them. Like you just said, you know. Do it, be curious, and learn. But like, do you now have a framework for how you think about starting a new initiative in today's world?

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Actually, I don't. I was I was very much into this. Uh I mean I ran an innovation studio and I was like really advocating how you should start a business. Shortly did a business school where they taught me do a business plan and all this. And then I was like, nah, that doesn't work. You have to just do and iterate. So I got into the lean startup movement quite heavily uh about 15 years ago. But now I didn't have time to like really reflect on what's happening. But I think that the rules of the games are totally changing. Uh I would say it's still a miss, a mix between understanding technicality and understanding business, uh, and making it uh tangible so people can experience it and touch it. So I think my fundamentals of um making it uh business sound, uh technically like if it works, and and then uh big accent on design so people can actually enjoy it and and be excited about it, still still work, but it's just so much faster and so much easier to do now. So I I don't have like a framework or methodology yet, but uh I think if you only stay on the technical aspect to make it work and you forgot the business capability, then it's gonna be harder to uh to to make it emerge. And and we see a lot of AI applications out there, but that don't have like it's just a feature and they don't have like very much of a core uh business sense of how it's gonna evolve. Yeah. And especially into a very dynamic market, it's it's hard.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, regardless of all the technology, you're still trying to solve a problem for someone, you know, and I think that that has to be foundational to leveraging all of these tools to make it done or have it done faster in a more delightful way for the customer that you are serving. And I think what I'm hearing from you is that in this world where maybe there doesn't, there isn't like a lean methodology, you just have to be a student of the space. You've got to be in it, you've got to be curious, you've got to be hungry and testing and um building as quickly as you can because uh the market is moving so fast. Well, the by the time a framework probably gets invented, it's going to be outdated by the next uh paradigm shift.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

No, and I think my take is it comes back to you. It's like you say like everything that I've done in the past naturally puts me in the position of animatics. And for me, it's very natural to do what I do, and I'm very good at what I do because I have all this past, and it's very aligned with who I am. Uh so I think it's what you need to find as an individual. If you just chase a business because of a business ID, especially today, there is, I mean, like I I see myself every day, like, okay, I can create any film I want, but what I'm gonna create, what I'm gonna say. And if you just start to copy the film of the next one, then you lose yourself. So you have to find something that that resonates to you, and especially if you're gonna spend all these times and hours doing it, you better you better love it, huh?

Real-Time Filmmaking and Cultural Implications

SPEAKER_01 43:24

Amen to that. Um, as we start to close, uh we kind of like to have this segment called, you know, what's in your AI toolbox. And um, you know, with all of the tools that you are experimenting with, can you share the tools that you're most excited about that you get value from, either in building your business or you know, even in your personal life?

SPEAKER_00 43:47

Um so nothing too too special too exotic, but uh I can I can talk about the the orchestration we do with with animatics. Uh so we leverage all the foundational models. So I think right now we have 26 uh from uh LLMs to image to video to voiceover, uh, sound effects and music. Uh so we just rolled out Sora 2 Pro um like two, three days ago. We rolled uh VO3.1 yesterday. So as the models get out, we get them on the platform. Um what we do internally, we orchestrate those models. Uh so obviously we use uh some of Xano for the orchestration. Uh it enables us to go very fast in the deployment of those API and orchestrate in with that uh like at first, actually, that was one piece of of my uh my technical decisions was to decorrelate uh the AI from the the back end, because like a year ago, you didn't know how much hallucination the AI will produce onto your old code. And so for all the business sensitive uh activities, we needed a space that was safe to drive all these function stacks and all these business transactions uh without being at risk of the AI doing some hallucination on anything. Now that we're stable, then we start to merge it uh a bit more and get more contextual understanding of everything. So we use uh everything across the board from uh from all the LLMs, the cloud cursor, and and all these uh all these functional models. Uh, but fundamentally is like how do you bring the set of knowledge of your application so so the the system can can understand it and and you're able to uh to give it more context. I think that's that's the that's the key of it. And I wanted to touch that also on the organizational side. If you're able to give it some context of how your company is organized, then you can leverage AI to help you make those those type of decisions. Uh so same thing with code, same thing with what we do with film. We try to give it context so then the AI can do its job into making uh sense of it and enable you to go faster. So it's not so much into the set of tools. I think we all use the same same tools. It's more like how do you structure uh the system for this this contextual understanding of what you're trying to achieve. So it has enough data to to put you in the right direction. Um, and and that's that's that's all of it. So and then the concern is always like how much data do you give to that thing where we don't really know what's what's that thing.

SPEAKER_01 46:44

Yeah. So yeah, it's it's in order for it to do its best, you've got to give it a lot of data. But can you really give it all the data you want to give it? Yeah, exactly. Um yeah, and just to close, you know, as you think about the next five years, especially in the space that you're in, the space of creativity, the space of storytelling, what's a bold prediction that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_00 47:06

No, I mean, I think it's it's real-time uh filmmaking. Uh that's gonna be the the big uh the big crazy thing. Uh as models get faster uh then they're gonna be able to generate in real time. And it's it's already the case. We see uh 3D words generation and next frame prediction and and all this type of thing. So I think real-time movie making is is around the corner. Um and and that's where I get a bit concerned about it because uh we know the the societal impact that uh social media had on society where everyone is in this little uh bubble looking at only the things that interest yourself, uh, and then it creates like a lot of um yeah imbalance in society. What's gonna be a world where everyone watches its own movie and there is no more um like cultural relationship around it? Like everyone has a different ending of the movie based on what's uh on what's what you want to see. So I'm concerned about this, like how that's gonna shift, and and same thing it's gonna happen in in marketing. Like you can create variations at scale that adapts to um to any type of people. So what's gonna be the the effect of all this hyperpersonalization of content uh in real time uh to to the people, to the children, and to everything. So technologically, in terms of business, is really good, but in terms of the social uh societal impact about it, uh I'm I'm really concerned uh on how that's gonna that's gonna turn out.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

Yeah, and I I know we could probably have a no a whole other hour just on that piece alone. Um, but I have really enjoyed this conversation. I've learned so much uh from you. It's clear that you have so much experience, and I love kind of just like the way that you're operating in this world. It's amazing that you've been able to, again, take this culmination of your experience into animatics and also create a team, this AI native team that's doing real things, solving real business problems. Uh, and it's just super awesome uh to witness. So thank you so much uh for being here today and for your time.