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If artificial intelligence could stand in for you, take your meetings, answer your emails, and even comfort your loved ones long after you’re gone, would you let it?
That’s no longer a hypothetical question. Around the world, a new class of startups is building digital twins — AI replicas of real people that act, speak and remember just like their human counterparts. These aren’t just souped-up chatbots or gimmicky holograms; they’re serious attempts to capture human essence in machine form, with real-world use cases and profound cultural implications.
The idea might sound like science fiction. In some cases, it already looks like an episode of Black Mirror. The Re;Memory project in South Korea helped pioneer the concept by allowing bereaved families speak to a hyper-realistic AI version of their deceased loved ones, complete with recorded memories and facial expressions. DeepBrain AI, which is the company behind the service, called it a tool for healing. Critics have called it grotesque.
But the digital twin era is arriving fast, and its most ambitious architects argue that AI replicas can be tools for productivity, legacy and emotional connection. Some are already acting on our behalf.
The case for an AI digital twin: You when you can’t respond
Dan Thomson, founder and CEO of Sensay, didn’t set out to build a startup. He was actually writing a book, a philosophical reckoning with meaning and memory, spurred in part by personal trauma. “I’d hit my head and lost my memory,” he says. “That experience stuck with me, the fear of disappearing.”
His solution became Sensay, which creates AI replicas of individuals. Thomson calls them “virtual humans” or “personas,” that have been trained on documents, videos, interviews, emails and more. These replicas don’t just sound like you — they act on your behalf.
“I’ve had people interact with my replica for hours on Telegram and not realise it wasn’t me,” Thomson says. “It’s 90%–95% indistinguishable.”
From grief tech to matchmaking to enterprise customer service, Sensay sees plenty of potential applications. Their replicas, or “sonas,” can be embedded into apps, websites and devices, and they learn continuously.
Executive coach Ant Blair coaches everyone from CEOs to entrepreneurs and trains his digital twin on all of his online meetings and coaching sessions. “The more I coach, the smarter it gets,” he says. That means a version of him — he calls it a “coach in your pocket” — is available to answer questions from clients around the world 24/7.
“They can ask things like, how do I manage nerves, or what’s the best way to structure a speech, or how do I reframe negative thought patterns. It’s filled with content from all my coaching sessions over the years, tips, frameworks, breathing techniques, mindset hacks.”
It’s currently text based, but he’s working on adding voice to make it more conversational and he hopes Sensay will start to offer video, too.
Twin Protocol personalizes digital twins based on vaults
One interesting aspect is that digital replicas can continue to grow and evolve once the training is over. That’s part of the power and a philosophical dilemma. If a replica evolves after death, is it still you?
That question is also central to Twin Protocol, a platform that calls itself “the next evolution in communication.” Co-founded by Stacey Engle and data scientist Bill Inman, alongside AI luminary Ben Goertzel as chief AI advisor, Twin Protocol is already live, with enterprise deployments and a self-serve product launching soon.
Twin Protocol focuses on “vaults,” which are curated data sets of your books, lectures, videos and voice memos. From this, a highly personalized AI twin is trained using a proprietary persona AI layer that captures your tone, style, diction and intent. The result isn’t just a chatbot with your name on it — it’s an interactive version of you that responds with your knowledge and in your voice.
“An AI twin isn’t about perfect replication,” Engle says. “It’s about purpose. You train your twin for something: customer service, legacy conversations, professional coaching. That curation matters.”
Authors can train their twin to answer questions about their work. Entrepreneurs can outsource first-line responses. In the future, your AI twin might be your calendar assistant, your family archivist, and your lifelong productivity partner.
And, perhaps more poignantly, it could become a tool of self-reflection. “Your twin can actually show you insights…
cointelegraph.com