Arriving Now….. The Digital Twin.

Just as we get used to intelligent chatbots, video generation, and AI-powered analysis, research, content generation, and simulation along comes another good idea: the “digital twin.”

A “digital twin” is an idea which actually started in the 1960s, when NASA engineers built a digital replica of Apollo 13, the space ship which suffered an oxygen explosion. They essentially developed a digital replica of the entire spacecraft (including electronics and power systems) so they could simulate the events that caused the accident.

Since then digital twins have been used to simulate complex train systems, airplanes, and many complex engineering systems (Boeing, Dassault, GE, Siemens). Around 2010 Nasa coined the definition: “an integrated multi-physics, multi-scale, probabilistic simulation of an as-built vehicle or system that uses the best available physical models, sensor updates, and fleet history.”

Well fast-forward to 2025 and now we can apply this technology to humans.

If you think about the avatars, voice generation, and rapid understanding of text we have at commodity prices, why wouldn’t we apply this technology to replicate our human selves? Well we have now testing this in our company for six months and it’s a groundbreaking way to leverage AI for many important applications.

How The Digital Twin Works.

Today a company called Viven.ai was launched, a team of AI gurus (spun off from Eightfold) that brought this product to life. In our implementation the platform injests every digital part of your working life: your emails, meetings, messages, documents, and virtually all your activity in the Microsoft Graph or Google platform (we use Microsoft).

It brings this information together online and displays key relationships, org chart, topics you’re working on, your schedule, and an enormous context on your projects, relationships, activities, and persona. Viven has created a highly configurable security system so users can prevent personal emails, family, or other non-work information from the system.

This thing is enormously powerful.

Since our entire company now has Digital Twins, I could ask my co-founder Bill Pelster’s twin “what are your big action items for tomorrow” or “Bill, what’s the latest status on our relationship with XYZ company?” or I could ask our CFO Ashley “Ashley can you show me our accounts receivable?” or “What is the status of our big contact with ABC company?”

Amazing Use Cases

In our case, we are what I call a “talent dense” company. Each of our team members wears multiple hats, and virtually everyone talks with clients. So I can scan the 45+ people in our company and ask a question like “Who has been talking with Liberty Mutual and what is the latest conversation?” or “Who has done the most recent Galileo demo and what script did they use?”

On a personal basis, each digital twin behaves like that person. In my case, I keep all my old emails online so my twin knows things about me that go back 15 years. So someone could ask me a question like “Josh, can you give me the history of your meetings with Workday and what have you learned over the years?” or even a research question like “Josh, I’d like your feedback on the latest version of our new L&D research would you read this document and give me your feedback?”

Each twin, in a sense, is a digital representation of this person’s knowledge and persona. So if you’re in customer service, technical support, or training you now have access to your deepest experts without bothering them for a call. The Viven.ai platform lets each person see what others are asking of their twin, so I can see who’s querying me directly. It turns out many of our customer success team are asking me for advice, and since I’m so busy I don’t even need to get on the phone.

Imagine a situation where you’re working on something urgent but you don’t want to bother (or wake up) the legal, engineering, marketing, or contracts expert you need? If you’re using a digital twin you could literally ask them a question immediately, and in most cases you’ll get a good answer.

There are thousands of applications here, but for us there’s one that I’m most excited about. We, as a research and advisory firm, are always having conversations with clients, partners, vendors, and press. At any point in time there are likely 10 to 20 of these interactions happening during each day. Rather than convening a conference call to get coordinated and share our activity we will soon be able to immediately see how each of these relationships are going and what we’ve recently learned.

I call this “Collective Intelligence” – using the intelligence of the entire team as if it’s one person.

In other words, our Digital Twins can function together so we, as a company, are one integrated, highly connected unit.

Imagine if we hook our twins up to Galileo (we haven’t done this yet, but it’s on my mind) and then you, as a client, could ask a question of any of our staff as if they’re right there. And the time savings for “not calling a meeting” or “not interrupting someone” is huge.

Well that leads to the final thing to consider in this technology: security, privacy, and intellectual property protection.

How Do You Secure and Protect All This Information?

There are lots of privacy issues here, and Viven has focused in this area. For example:

• Are there certain people (ie. management team) who I want to share information exclusively?
• How can I mark or tag personal items so they don’t accidentally appear?
• How do we lock down pay, financial, or personal employee information carefully?
• Doesn’t this force everyone to clean up their files and avoid putting personal information online?

All these issues have come up, and we’ve learned to use Viven to handle them. But then there’s a legal one as well:

What if one of our senior people leaves and his or her Digital Twin is left behind? Who owns this information? While I’m certainly not an IP lawyer, I’d suggest that inventions, work, and intellectual property you create at work is owned by your company. So one big use of a Digital Twin is simply maintaining and retaining information from those who leave.

While this technology is very new, one thing’s for sure. It’s going to get better very fast. If you consider the rate at which AI is advancing, within a year we’ll have digital replicas of all our key people (digital interview agents are already common) and we’ll be able to talk with them and even ask them to talk with each other.

Imagine if I asked our VP of Research’s twin to “check with the research team and see who is most interested in this new project” for example. The opportunities are endless.

I want to congratulate the Viven team for their amazing innovation, and for those of you who want to check this out, contact us or Viven.ai – we’re excited to show you how this works.

Additional Information

Digital Twins, Digital Employees, And Agents Everywhere

Machines of Loving Grace, by Dario Amodei founder of Anthropic

Galileo™, Your Personal AI Assistant for HR