Rachel Taylor began her career as a creative director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. “I had control of the script,” she remembers. “I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes.”
That was before she pivoted to helping AI companies shape the personality of their assistants. Rather than handing a digital helper a script, the best she can do is point it in the right direction: The technology “sometimes feels like a toddler that you give a permanent marker to and see what it writes on the wall,” she says.
After joining DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup Inflection AI in 2023, Taylor was one of dozens of staffers who followed Suleyman to Microsoft, where they worked on the consumer version of Copilot. In October, she returned to startup life, departing Microsoft for Sesame, whose CEO, Brendan Iribe, also cofounded VR pioneer Oculus.
Sesame has built two talking assistants, Maya and Miles, that are powered by its own AI models. It’s also developing a voice-AI-enabled pair of smart glasses. Taylor’s arrival coincided with its announcement of a $250 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia. Though the company isn’t yet saying much about its long-term plans, Taylor’s responsibilities once again involve keeping AI personas friendly and helpful. She’s also steering them away from traits that can be dangerous if users take them too seriously, such as sycophancy. “It’s weird how much the study of culture comes into play with thinking all that through,” she says of her purview. “It’s not simply tech.”
Calling consumer AI’s current incarnation both “magical” and “primitive,” Taylor muses about her grandchildren being impressed someday that she was there at the start. For now, she stresses, “We’re just scratching the surface of this new mode of communication.”
This profile is part of Fast Company’s AI 20 for 2025, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AI’s most innovative technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers.