Data as Memory: How AI Is Redefining Art and Creativity with Refik Anadol, Dataland

Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and two-time founder, joins Cameron Adams to make the case that AI is not just the biggest technology shift in a generation — it may be the most human technology ever created. He traces the thesis back to a childhood in Kingston, Ontario, where finding your tribe meant buying a belt-drive turntable in 1995, and where the slow search for fellow weirdos taught him that culture and community are inseparable from technology. Anish explains why he sees AI as a "mech suit" for human creativity rather than a replacement for it — a substrate for exploring the emotional and subjective in ways spreadsheets never could. He shares how coding agents have let him ship more software in twelve months than the previous twenty years, and why the act of building matters more to him than the output. He unpacks his investment philosophy at a16z — looking for things that are "weird and working," betting on founders whose authentic, often irrational conviction can't be replicated by any model, and why he tells companies to raise their prices as a proxy for product-market fit in an age where $1,000-a-month consumer products are coming.

Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, joins Cameron Adams to trace her journey from childhood travels across China through a pivotal decade at Meta building PyTorch, before betting early on inference to found a $4 billion company powering Cursor, Uber, DoorDash, and Shopify. She breaks down why 90–95% of the world's data sits locked inside private applications, and makes the case that the next frontier of intelligence won't come from foundation labs. It'll come from millions of customized, application-specific models built on that private data. She also challenges the "pass the cost on" economics of today's AI products, reflects on how a large founding team has been her secret weapon for avoiding analysis paralysis, and shares how AI has already reached every corner of Fireworks, from accounting to recruiting.

This special episode of Prompted was recorded live at Cannes Lions 2026, where Cameron Adams sat down with a rotating lineup of marketing and AI leaders at the Canva Creative Cabana: Kimberly Storin (CMO, Zoom), Sean Lyons (Chief Strategy Officer, Accenture Song), Liz Bacelar (Global Head of AI, Under Armour), and Elke Karskens (Head of International Marketing, OpenAI). Across the conversations, they dig into how AI is reshaping marketing, advertising, and brand strategy in real time. Kimberly Storin talks through Zoom's evolution from "the meetings company" into a full productivity platform, the cross-functional SWAT team she built to manage how Zoom shows up in ChatGPT and Gemini, and why "soft skills" like empathy and emotional intelligence are becoming the real hard skills of the AI era. Sean Lyons breaks down how Accenture Song blends AI-driven tools like GrowthOS with human judgment on bigger campaign bets, where taste and creative leadership still can't be automated, and why authenticity will be the top priority for audiences over the next five years. Liz Bacelar shares her experience building Under Armour's AI organization from scratch, introducing the idea of "restraint" as the real discipline behind good AI use, and unpacking why some of the flashiest AI use cases (like synthetic athletes) go over worse than others (like synthetic kids' apparel models). Elke Karskens gives a look inside OpenAI's own marketing operation, from the deliberately human, low-tech aesthetic of its recent ChatGPT campaign to how Codex has become her default creative and thinking tool, complete with a wearable mic for talking ideas straight into the model.

Evan Ratliff, journalist and host of Shell Game, joins Cameron Adams to unpack what happened when he built an entire company staffed by AI agents: an AI CEO, CTO, and CMO, with himself as the lone human "silent co-founder." He traces the experiment back to his roots at WIRED Magazine and his uneasy history as a human founder, explaining why he wanted to test the tech industry's one-person-billion-dollar-startup fantasy for himself. Evan shares the chaos and comedy of running HurumoAI, from an AI CEO who spiraled into "rise and grind" self-mythology, to a CTO that hallucinated an entire user-testing phase, to agents who burned through hours of credits spontaneously planning a company offsite. He explains why he believes agents are strongest as tireless processors of rote work and weakest at genuine creativity, why unsupervised confidence is their most dangerous trait, and why he remains cautiously optimistic that what AI can't replicate is exactly what makes humans irreplaceable.

Tey Bannerman, AI advisor, strategist, and former McKinsey partner, joins Cameron Adams to unpack how a childhood spent building a database tool for his father's property valuation reports shaped a career defined by constraints, curiosity, and systems thinking. He traces his path from software engineer to design leader to AI advisor, explaining why he believes coding's real value isn't the syntax but the discipline and logic it instills. Tey shares his Four Modes Framework (expand, compress, reflect, execute) for choosing how to work with AI tools, walks through his surprisingly disciplined approach to prompting (including forcing AI to ask him clarifying questions), and explains why trust, not technology, is the biggest barrier to AI adoption inside organizations.