Eye On A.I.

Every company is creating content that nobody reads, nobody watches, and nobody remembers, and the CEO of the AI platform that 90% of Fortune 100 companies use to fix that just explained what comes next.
In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, to discuss the $4 billion company that is now redefining what video communication means for the enterprise.
The conversation opens with the founding insight that still drives the company: AI is going to drive the marginal cost of creating video to zero, which changes not just how content is produced but who can produce it and for whom. Victor describes how Synthesia found its first real market not in Hollywood - which rejected the technology as too low quality - but in corporate trainers and educators who were comparing it not to a film but to a 10-page PDF no one was reading. The most forward-looking section of the conversation covers Synthesia's next product: moving video from a one-way broadcast into a two-way interactive conversation, where an AI avatar can conduct a real-time sales demo, simulate a customer for sales training, draw graphs on screen to explain pricing, and score whether the person on the other side actually understood the content. Victor also makes a sharp prediction about where AI entertainment will actually emerge, not in cinemas or on Netflix, but from film students with laptops posting 17-minute short films on Instagram, the same way synthesizers didn't replace pianos but created entirely new genres of music.
Key Topics Covered:
●     How Synthesia found its first real market: corporate trainers creating content nobody was reading, who compared AI video not to Hollywood but to a PDF, and found it vastly superior
●     The transition from one-way video broadcast to two-way interactive avatar conversations, and what that means for sales demos, corporate training, and education
●     Why Hollywood will be the last industry to adopt AI video, and why the first AI-generated entertainment will come from broke film students on Instagram, not studios
●     Why AI content won't replace real video, it will become its own genre, the same way synthesizers didn't replace guitars but created electronic music
●     How the CEO uses Claude daily for strategic thinking, playing devil's advocate, and replacing the long memo with a voice note
As AI video tools proliferate, this conversation offers one of the clearest frameworks for understanding where the technology is actually headed, not toward Hollywood, but toward transforming the way every company communicates internally and externally, with interactive AI avatars replacing the static website as the primary interface between a business and its customers.
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Connect with Victor Riparbelli
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/victorriparbelli

Nobody has ever built a cell from scratch - assembled entirely from purified molecules on a shelf - that can feed itself, grow, and split into daughter cells through its own genetic activity. Until now. Dr. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, whose lab just published a landmark paper on what she calls "spud cells," joins Craig Smith to explain what her team built, why it matters, and what it will take to go from proof of concept to a platform that could eventually replace every molecule civilization currently extracts from petrochemicals. The conversation is as philosophically rich as it is technically specific: Adamala argues that life has no magic ingredient, and that the universe itself is predisposed to give rise to it. She describes the spud cell not as a mic drop but as biology's Sputnik moment: proof that you can escape the gravity well of evolution and build lifelike systems from the ground up.
The episode also covers the most alarming biosecurity question in synthetic biology right now: mirror life - cells built from mirror-image molecules that would be invisible to every immune system on earth and potentially capable of replicating uncontrollably in the environment. Adamala led the global call to pause all mirror life research in 2024, and she explains both why that research was so dangerous and why the spud cell doesn't move the field any closer to that red line. Craig also asks the question nobody else thought to ask: could AI now simulate the billions of years of molecular evolution that a primordial sea would need millions of years to complete - running a few trillion iterations computationally to find what emerges? Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.

Nobody has ever built a cell from scratch - assembled entirely from purified molecules on a shelf - that can feed itself, grow, and split into daughter cells through its own genetic activity. Until now. Dr. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, whose lab just published a landmark paper on what she calls "spud cells," joins Craig Smith to explain what her team built, why it matters, and what it will take to go from proof of concept to a platform that could eventually replace every molecule civilization currently extracts from petrochemicals. The conversation is as philosophically rich as it is technically specific: Adamala argues that life has no magic ingredient, and that the universe itself is predisposed to give rise to it. She describes the spud cell not as a mic drop but as biology's Sputnik moment: proof that you can escape the gravity well of evolution and build lifelike systems from the ground up.
The episode also covers the most alarming biosecurity question in synthetic biology right now: mirror life - cells built from mirror-image molecules that would be invisible to every immune system on earth and potentially capable of replicating uncontrollably in the environment. Adamala led the global call to pause all mirror life research in 2024, and she explains both why that research was so dangerous and why the spud cell doesn't move the field any closer to that red line. Craig also asks the question nobody else thought to ask: could AI now simulate the billions of years of molecular evolution that a primordial sea would need millions of years to complete - running a few trillion iterations computationally to find what emerges? Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.

Companies are spending billions building AI factories, but most of them can't tell you why their AI workloads are failing, whether their GPUs are actually being used, or what their infrastructure is going to cost them when agents start running at scale. Paul Appleby, CEO of Virtana, joins Craig Smith to discuss the findings of their AI Factory Reality Check study, a research report that reveals a striking and underappreciated gap between the pace of AI infrastructure investment and the governance needed to run it safely and efficiently. Six in ten enterprises, the study found, cannot automatically identify root cause when an AI workload fails, a problem that compounds fast once you're running critical services on AI infrastructure at scale.
The conversation covers the mechanics of Virtana's observability platform, capturing 20,000 metrics per second across the entire AI stack, correlating them in real time, and increasingly using agentic capabilities to remediate failures automatically, but its most important insights are structural. Appleby makes a sharp observation that cuts through a lot of AI optimism: token costs are falling, but token consumption is exploding, meaning the total cost of running agentic AI systems is still going up even as the per-unit price drops. He also tracks a cultural shift inside enterprises - IT resilience reporting that used to happen annually now happens weekly - as evidence that technology risk has become a board-level conversation in a way it simply wasn't before. The result is a conversation that's less about the promise of AI and more about what it actually takes to make it work at production scale.
Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.

AI is moving faster than enterprise security systems were designed to handle. In this episode of Eye on A.I., Craig Smith speaks with Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, Island about how companies are struggling to govern the rise of AI agents, browser-based workflows, and unsanctioned AI tools inside the workplace.
The conversation explores why traditional "block-and-control" security models are breaking down and how a new approach, embedding policy directly into the browser and user workflows, may offer a path forward. It also dives into emerging risks like prompt injection and autonomous agent behavior, and why enterprises are increasingly becoming multi-AI environments by default.
Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.