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I met my AI twin—and now I’m in an existential crisis
The emergence of Sentience, an AI designed to create a digital twin of its users, represents a significant shift in brand strategy for AI companies. By focusing on personalization and the unique characteristics of individual users, brands can differentiate themselves in a crowded market, moving away from generic AI models to more tailored, context-aware solutions that resonate deeply with consumers' identities and needs.
FastCompany: Before I ever met Sam Kececi, I had already interviewed him on his career, his use of AI , and his thoughts on data privacy. In this case, “him” might be a loose word, depending on your definition—I had spoken not with Kececi himself, but with an AI chatbot that he designed to recall his memories, mimic his personality, and share his opinions. Kececi is an ex-Amazon software engineer who, since August 2025, has been building an AI company called Sentience.
The real Kececi, who I spoke to after interviewing his personal AI, describes Sentience as “the digital version of you, but with perfect memory.” It’s a chatbot that uses your emails, Slack messages, Apple Notes, social media, and anywhere else that you might show up online to create a chatbot and assistant that understands the context of your life and mimics your tone, opinions, and writing quirks.
As Kececi’s digital doppelganger explained it to me: “The long-term vision is a digital twin that can recall anything you’ve experienced, communicate in your voice, and eventually operate on your behalf.” Sentience debuts to the public on March 26 after raising $6.5 million in an initial seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. It’s launching for free, but plans to add paid tiers in the coming weeks. Currently, it’s available as a desktop app, mobile app, and an embedded feature in Slack.
In the future, though, Kececi says he wants Sentience to be able to “interact in all of the different applications you use,” from iMessage to WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams. Having tested it for about a week, I can say that it’s the most natural-sounding chatbot I’ve ever talked to. It was able to almost uncannily mimic my writing quirks, predict my opinions on design news, and write its own articles from my perspective.
Sentience feels like an inevitable next step in the evolution of AI assistants, where instead of a mass-market chatbot that caters to a generalized “you,” you get a personalized bot that knows almost everything about you—for better and for worse. [Image: Sentience] An AI designed to mimic you As AI models have become exponentially more powerful in recent years, the concept of building digital twins has gained popularity.
Last April, Stanford University researchers published a paper in which they used AI to build a “digital twin” of the part of the mouse brain that processes visual information, a breakthrough that they said could be applied to future research on the human brain. Right now, the average consumer can use a variety of nascent tools to purportedly clone themselves as a means to be more productive. Sentience aims to marry personalization with the functions of a productivity platform, similar to something like Superhuman or Notion. Kececi first began dreaming of a digital twin while working as the CTO of a software development company called Macro.
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The article discusses a significant shift in AI branding strategy that could reshape how companies engage with consumers, making it highly relevant and impactful for brand professionals.