Danny Tomsett

On March 15th, 2026, my friend Clint passed away. He was not well for some time, but I always held hope that he would improve, and this summer we'd be playing golf together again. His death is hard to accept. Clint was the founder of a startup called Capsl - it was an app that went against the trends of social media and focused on sharing quality content and stories that would pass on for generations. I loved to watch him talk to people in restaurants, bars, golf courses, networking events, and airplanes - he had big dreams and loved to share his mission with anyone! He was an incredibly talented guy - we had a lot of fun together. When I moved to the US, life was really hard; my friendship with Clint made a huge difference. He brought back the joy that I missed in having great mates. I'll be forever grateful for our time together, and I hope he knows that. If he had gotten better, I would have beaten him easily at golf now 🙂 Will miss you, mate.

Really proud of the team on this one. What Tyler captures well is the effort behind moments like this. These things always look exciting from the outside, but they’re built on a lot of persistence over time. @NVIDIAGTC is one of the events that can genuinely expand what becomes possible to build. For digital humans, advances in the underlying stack matter as it creates room for more natural, more useful, more compelling experiences. That’s why it’s exciting to see our team showing up well in that environment. Proud of what they’ve built, and just as excited about where this technology is heading. linkedin.com/posts/tgmerrit…

I’ve been focused on humanizing AI for the last 10+ years, and what's interesting is that it has made me appreciate more deeply what makes us human in the first place. The closer machines get to imitating us, the clearer it becomes that some of the most valuable things in business are still deeply human: judgment, trust, care, presence, context, and the ability to make someone feel genuinely understood. That’s the thinking behind a new piece I published: Being human in an AI world: A matter of depth vs display. One of the ideas I explore in it is that AI is getting very good at display. It can recognize patterns, respond appropriately, maintain tone, and scale those capabilities fast, but the depth is different. Depth comes from lived experience. It comes from judgment shaped by context, from slowing down when someone needs to be heard, and from the kind of care that can’t be reduced to a script. I think that distinction matters more than a lot of the current AI conversation admits. The real opportunity is understanding more clearly where human depth creates trust, loyalty, better decisions, and better outcomes, which is a business advantage. If you read it, I’d be interested in what resonates. The link is in the comments.

SxSW is awesome, and even better that it's in my home city. It's easy to get lost in all the action and events; however, after doing this for a few years now, I've found my rhythm - prioritizing key events, coffee with friends in town, and picking some great speakers to inspire my own personal development. A few highlights from this year: — Top of the list has to be catching up with old friends and business relationships in person! That part never gets old. — Austin just keeps getting better, the energy, restaurants, rooftop bars - it’s a special place, and every year it feels like more people figure that out. — The NZTE/Kiwi event was another highlight. Plenty of Kiwi accents, plenty of Kiwi humor, and a good reminder that New Zealanders really do punch above their weight wherever they go. — For better or worse, I'm a fan of the "All-In" podcast, and it was great to attend a live event and meet a lot of optimistic entrepreneurs aspiring to build great companies. Fun times! @sxsw

AI is the perfect example of emotional depth vs emotional display. 🦾 Display is what AI can perform. 💜 Depth is what humans offer. Now #digitalhumans are blurring the lines in the most exciting way possible, offering a semblance of depth at scale. And the story starts 10 years ago when we first saw someone become emotional speaking to a digital human. Our CEO, @TomsettDanny, explains in his new blog post below. 👇 digitalhumans.com/blog/being-hum… #CX #AI #innovation #experience

I’m a massive fan of @aprildunford and the work she’s done around product positioning. Her book "Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It" is one of the clearest frameworks I’ve seen for a problem that a lot of great companies run into: building something genuinely valuable, but struggling to explain it in a way that clicks with customers. The issue usually isn’t the product. It’s that people don’t immediately understand what it replaces, who it’s really for, or why it matters. After reading April’s book, we spent time as a leadership team at UneeQ working through some of the ideas and applying them to how we talk about our own category and product. We ended up doing some really useful work on positioning. What I appreciate about April’s approach is that it forces clarity. You have to get very honest about the alternatives customers already understand, who your best-fit customers are, and what makes your offering meaningfully different. It sounds simple, but in practice it requires a lot of discipline. April, you are awesome! Curious for other founders: have there been books or frameworks that significantly changed how you think about positioning?

I just learned today that the "U.S. is facing a severe, long-term nursing shortage, with an 8% deficit of registered nurses. By 2030, the nation is expected to be short roughly one million nurses..." You do wonder sometimes if AI came at just the right time. We've done a lot of work in the healthcare space with Digital Humans; however, I believe the underlying AI technology to ensure accurate and helpful responses is now ready. At @UneeQAI, we dedicate time each year to projects aimed at problems like this. The goal is not simply to build interesting technology, but to apply it in places where it can extend the reach of people working in already strained systems. We are not experts in healthcare delivery, which is why the meaningful work happens through partnership. If you are working in healthcare and thinking about how AI might help close access gaps while maintaining quality of care, I welcome the conversation. Many of the most important uses of this technology will come from collaborations that have not been formed yet.

In early 2020, one of our biggest competitors raised a significant round of funding. We were due to do the same... then COVID hit. Capital markets tightened overnight for companies like ours, building an emerging AI category (very early and without product market fit), making fundraising extremely difficult. It wasn't long, and we were receiving reports from the field that this competitor’s sales narrative included telling customers and prospects we wouldn’t be around in 12 months. That was a hard season. I had to significantly restructure the business, ask my leadership team to join me in reducing salaries, and move the business into survival mode. Time was what we were buying, but we had little way of knowing how long we needed. Many times in this season I questioned if I was even a good leader, maybe I was the problem. It’s easy and not always helpful to compare yourself to someone else. They’ve raised more, they’re hiring faster, the headlines are stronger. At that moment, it can feel like the score is already decided. What I learned is that it's not always best to evaluate your leadership strength through a single-point-in-time lens. A large funding round does not guarantee a company's success, and likewise, a hard season does not determine a founder's chance of success. In those hard seasons, it matters how you respond when conditions are against you. Do you protect the fundamentals? Do you make the hard calls early? Do you get laser-focused on what matters most and strip away distractions that are typically the curse of abundance? There were real moments of personal growth during that period - on reflection, it's almost crazy to say, but I wouldn't trade it for the easy path my competitor had. I am significantly better as a human and leader because of what we navigated in that season. Fast forward a few years, and the landscape looks very different. The competitor that once looked untouchable is no longer operating. We’re still here, stronger, more disciplined, and with a clearer position in the market than we had before. IMO - Cash is helpful, but culture, team, and leadership are the absolute number one multiplier in improving your chances of success.

A few years ago, talking about digital humans felt a bit like talking about something that only existed in theory. We believed they would become a core interface layer between people and technology, not a novelty or a campaign tool, and that it'd be a permanent shift in how businesses engage customers and how people access services, but that belief was not widely shared. When you’re early to a category, you spend most of your time explaining why it should exist. You explain it to customers, you explain it to investors, you explain it to partners, and you explain it to your own team when progress feels slower than conviction. For so many years, it can feel like you’re a lone voice. This is what happened to me. That’s why it’s interesting to watch leaders like @elonmusk talk about digital human companies becoming trillion-dollar businesses, or to hear Jensen Huang publicly state that digital humans are the future. No, this isn't about name-dropping; instead, it's about market signals. At some point, a category crosses an invisible line, and the conversation shifts from “Is this real?” to “How big does this become?” That shift matters more than any single funding round or product launch. It signals that it's all starting to align. Founders love to talk about having a good idea. In reality, good ideas are common. What’s rare is surviving long enough for the market to catch up to them. There were plenty of moments over the years where digital humans felt too early. The adoption cycles were long, the infrastructure wasn’t ready, the ecosystem wasn’t mature, and there were real doubts about how fast the world would move. But if you believe a shift is inevitable, you build for inevitability and focus on staying power. You invest in the category even when it isn’t trending. Now we’re seeing real inflection: Major technology players are building into the ecosystem, enterprises are moving from experimentation to deployment, and the conversation is now about where digital humans show up first in business. Being early can feel like being wrong for a long time, but then, suddenly, you’re not. We’re still at the beginning, but the timing is starting to look very different from what it did five years ago, and that’s when categories move. #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #DigitalTransformation #DigitalHumans

AI is the most disruptive technology evolution we will experience in history; however, it lacks an appreciation for how humans evolve around change. There’s a reason why viral posts by @mattshumer_ (“Something Big Is Happening”) and @cboyack (“AI isn’t coming for your future. Fear is.”) - viewed a combined 86M+ times - has resonated so widely: it speaks to a shift many of us feel but haven’t yet fully internalized, which is that AI is crossing thresholds we once thought were years away. (If you haven't seen Matt or Connor's posts, I shared the links to them in this thread.) At the same time, the conversation around it often misses how humans adapt. Brilliant minds like engineers will need to apply their strengths in new areas - at the same time, the value for emotional intelligence, relationships, and creativity just skyrocketed above an MIT grad with a wicked memory. The truth is, employment in its current form will change, but just as the gig economy emerged through technological disruption, so will a new way of creating value in an AI world. The best strategy to do well is to understand it, invest in it, and move quickly! #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureofWork #Leadership

I shared a moment in this podcast episode that still sticks with me - hitting milestones on paper, but feeling completely dissatisfied. Learning to enjoy the journey (especially in the wilderness years) has been one of the harder lessons of building #UneeQ. I appreciate you having me on, @adamfodonnell. Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%24… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0OlJO2…

Excited to be heading to Web Summit Qatar! 📷 Looking forward to catching up with @QatarAirways and connecting with partners shaping the future of AI and innovation.If you're in Doha and want to meet up, let’s chat! 📷️#websummitqatar #AI #innovation #futureoftech

Congrats to the team at @pearsonlanguage on launching Dana, their new digital language tutor on Mondly! 📷📷Proud to support their mission to make language learning more accessible and impactful. Check it out: #languagelearning" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">pearson.com/languages/hr-p… #futureoflearning #digitalhumans #aiforgood

UneeQ 2.0 is here! The new standard for autonomous digital humans. 📷 Low latency 📷 Pre-trained digital workers 📷 4K resolution 📷 Synthetic animation for personality #AI #digitalhumans  #uneeq2point0 digitalhumans.com/blog/launch-of…[…]innovation-in-the-autonomous-digital-human-avatar-industry