Sharing the Stage with Digital Humans

How I created a first-of-its-kind keynote where AI shaped the research, the presentation, the audience engagement – and even became my co-presenter.

Gerard Kunkel, Founder and Managing Partner at Next Media Partners, presenting Media at the Speed of Choice

AI is everywhere, arriving faster than most people ever expected. So, when I was invited to keynote the recent Tech It Out conference produced by the Women in Cable Television (WICT - Rocky Mountain) organization, I saw an opportunity to do more than talk about AI’s impact on media.

I wanted to show it.

For weeks leading up to the event, I wove AI into nearly every part of the preparation. It helped with research, with trend analysis, with imagery, with video creation, and even with structuring the narrative. By the time I stepped onto the stage in Denver, AI had served as editor, assistant, researcher, data analyst, software engineer, and creative partner – a true team effort.

But that wasn’t the bold part.

The bold part was bringing digital humans – live conversational AI characters – onto the stage with me.

And that’s where the story gets interesting.

Inviting the Future Onstage

When the leadership team at WICT Rocky Mountain extended the invitation, they encouraged me to push boundaries. “Go big,” they said. “Bring something no one has seen before.”

So I did.

Our NMP-built Brand Genius platform doesn’t just animate characters – it gives them the ability to converse, reason, and respond. Days before the event, one of these characters interacted with registered attendees, asking about their media habits, preferences, and values. I fed that data directly into the character’s knowledge base, so by the time the keynote began, the avatar “knew” the audience.

Gerard Kunkel presenting Media at the Speed of Choice at the WICT Rocky Mountain, Tech It Out Conference in Denver, October 2025.

The room was packed. The energy was high. And my goal wasn’t just to share ideas – it was to give everyone a glimpse of a media future shaped by choice, agency, and deep personal relevance: Media at the Speed of Choice.

Gerard on stage (center, below character) with 1950’s digital character – Barbara Miller

Why Conversational Avatars Belonged on a Keynote Stage

For decades, I’ve believed that the best way to show people the future is to bring it into the present. I’ve found it faster and easier to explain a product vision or a future concept by drawing, designing, or building it. A sketch, a prototype or a minimally viable product (MVP) goes a long way in helping an audience understand in a world swimming in media and apps.  So instead of explaining conversational AI, I let it speak for itself – literally.

When the Brand Genius avatars appeared onscreen, they didn’t just deliver scripted lines. They asked questions. They shared opinions. They challenged premises. At one point, audience members asked questions directly from the floor. I relayed their questions to the avatars, and the digital humans responded in real time – drawing from their knowledge modules, their personalities, and even the pre-event interactions with those same attendees. The effect was striking: a keynote that felt like part presentation, part dialogue, part live performance.

The future wasn’t being described. It was participating.

AI Everywhere: How the Experience Was Built

While the avatars were the most visible use of AI, they were only the tip of the iceberg.

Behind the scenes, AI helped:

• Research decades of media behavior and consumer trends

• Generate imagery for 1950, 2025, and 2050

• Build side-screen videos and visual assets to create an immersive experience

• Design, code, and deploy an interactive audience survey

• Analyze audience sentiment and classify insights

• Structure the knowledge base and metadata that fed our onstage characters

A survey of registered conference attendees (left) was distributed via e-mail and both phone and desktop users were able to answer simple questions, including a question that utilized conversational AI involving a question asked by NMP’s 3D character, Nexa (right).  Nexa was able to gather open-ended answers to a simple question using this conversational form. This approach provided additional nuances in the answers that led to insights not easily obtained with traditional structured surveys. – with Nexa Prime

And NMP’s Brand Genius platform itself has matured into a web-delivered, frictionless experience. It uses a combination of LLM-based reasoning, retrieval-augmented data, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, contextual awareness, emotion models, and lifelike phoneme generation to create characters that feel expressive and present.

2025 character on screen – Dr. Nexa Prime answering questions about the surveys

What once required studios, pipelines, and post-production now runs in a browser. And why include conversation AI as a digital human?

The boundary between viewer and experience is vanishing.

Showing the Future of Media Consumption – Not Telling It

Throughout the keynote, the avatars helped demonstrate a central insight: Media is evolving from something we simply watch into something we do.

We’ve shifted from “choose what to watch” to “choose what to do.”  From passive viewing to active participation. From broadcast storytelling to personalized pastimes shaped by AI. To bring these shifts to life, the avatars:

• Led a live, unscripted three-way Q&A with the audience – a conversation that felt spontaneous, human, and genuinely fun

• Served as time-traveling guides through the evolution of American pastimes, contrasting the broadcast era of 1950 with the fragmented digital world of 2025 and the hyper-personalized landscape of 2050

• Interpreted real-time audience survey data, surfacing trends and behaviors while reflecting back the room’s own shifting relationship with media

Abstract ideas suddenly had shape, voice, and personality. The room wasn’t just learning about the future – they were interacting with it.

The Audience Reaction: Surprise, Curiosity, and Possibility

What struck me most after stepping offstage was the energy in the room. People approached me with curiosity, eager to understand how the experience had come together. Some asked for the slides, others wanted to see the avatars again, and many simply wanted to talk about the deeper implications – what this means for storytelling, media, consumer behavior, and where AI would be reshaping their business or industry.

2050 character – Nemepa – Conversational AI Robotic Office Assistant talking with Gerard Kunkel, NMP Founder and Managing Partner about the future of media production, workflows and work life.

Several attendees told me that seeing decades of consumer evolution unfold in a single narrative arc helped them connect dots they had never quite seen before. Others latched onto the idea of choice as the new currency – the notion that relevance, timing, and personal context now determine what captures attention. And a number of people expressed genuine realization that agentic AI isn’t a novel interface or a gimmick. It’s a new medium. A new surface area for learning, communicating, and experiencing information.

You could feel that we had crossed into new territory – not just technologically, but emotionally. The presentation wasn’t just informative; it felt personal, immersive, and alive.

Why Digital Humans Are Valuable in the Future of Storytelling

The reason this format resonates is simple: digital humans add a new dimension (or multiple dimensions) to a presentation. A slide can share facts, and a video can convey tone, but a conversational AI character can look at you (or seem to), understand context, respond with nuance, and bring a sense of presence that feels unmistakably human.

These characters don’t replace speakers or presenters. Instead, they expand what a presenter can do. They make the keynote feel collaborative rather than one-directional. They allow an audience to interact with an idea rather than simply absorb it. And they bring emotion and personality into spaces that too often rely on static visuals.

The implications extend far beyond the keynote stage. Imagine an advertiser offering a digital brand ambassador who can explain a service, answer questions, and adapt to each user. Imagine a corporate trainer who can shift teaching styles based on the learner’s pace. Imagine entertainment formats that blend authored stories with improv-style AI-driven characters who learn from the audience and evolve with each performance.

This is not science fiction. It’s starting to happen now.

Behind the Scenes: The Craft Behind the Magic

Of course, none of this happens by accident. Bringing digital humans into a live keynote required a tremendous amount of preparation – more akin to staging a live theatrical performance than building a slide deck.

NMP has been working with conversational AI, 3D avatars, VR and AR for years.  We’ve built our own platform solutions for creating and managing characters.  I spent weeks designing and tuning special avatars, shaping their personalities, authoring their knowledge modules, and testing their emotional range. I adjusted their movements, the timing of their expressions, and the rhythm of their speech. I fine-tuned camera framing, UX overlays, and staging to make sure the audience could see and understand the characters clearly. And I rehearsed – repeatedly – to ensure the interactions felt natural and conversational.

Every detail mattered. The goal wasn’t to show off the technology; the goal was to make the technology disappear, so the audience could simply experience the personalities behind it.

In the end, the process felt like collaborating with performers who were part code, part imagination, and part reflection of the audience itself.

Where This Is All Heading

The Denver keynote was not a one-off event. It was the beginning of a new format – a blueprint for what live presentations can become.

Envisioning the future of storytelling through media

We’re now exploring keynote stages where AI partners present alongside humans, offering their own perspectives and even challenging assumptions. We’re designing sessions that adapt in real time based on audience reactions, questions, and emotional energy. And we’re building the capability to generate personalized takeaways for every attendee, shaped by their interests and the parts of the presentation they interacted with most.

Envisioning the future of media production with converged agentic and conversational AI.

The next stage is a true hybrid environment where human speakers and AI characters co-create the narrative – responding to the audience together. Conferences, classrooms, boardrooms, leadership summits – all of them have the potential to become more immersive, more participatory, and more personal than ever before.

This isn’t a someday concept. This is already underway inside NMP.

The Speed of Choice Isn’t Coming – It’s Already Here

What this keynote reinforced for me is that AI is reshaping how media is consumed, created, and experienced – not in small, incremental ways, but in sweeping shifts. Organizations that embrace these changes won’t simply keep pace; they’ll help define the new landscape. Those who hesitate may find themselves struggling to engage audiences accustomed to interactive, personalized, and adaptive experiences.

Envisioning the future of transportation with personalized media experiences.

At Next Media Partners, we help companies navigate these shifts – from understanding consumer behavior to designing AI-powered products, services, and experiences. Whether it’s exploring new business models, shaping transformation strategies, or designing and building AI-driven workflows, we’re helping organizations rethink how they deliver value in a world defined by the speed of an in-the-moment choice.

And for those curious about experiencing a keynote shared with digital humans – well, we’d love to show you what that feels like live.