How an AI Keynote Speaker Runs His Business on AI | James Taylor

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Artificial Reality·New York·51 min interview

How an AI Keynote Speaker Runs His Speaking Business on AI

On the Artificial Reality podcast, James Taylor breaks down how he runs his speaking business on Claude, why today's cheap AI is subsidised by venture capital, and how 1,000 people made a Taylor Swift reggae theme song with AI in about 15 minutes.

By James Taylor MBA · FRSA Series: Artificial Reality 6 min read

Check James's Availability Watch the Interview

James Taylor in conversation with Galina Fendikevich on Artificial Reality — "How to Get Ahead of 99% of Speakers (with AI)".

Episode Timestamps

00:00Highlights

00:49Meet James Taylor: Keynote Speaker on Creativity and AI

03:39From Managing Rock Stars to 100 Keynotes a Year

05:35The AI Chief of Staff That Runs His Morning

06:20How He Gets Recommended by ChatGPT and Claude (GEO and AEO)

07:35Psychometric Profiles Before Every Sales Call

09:00The Claude Story Bank That Drafts His Keynotes

12:051,000 People, One Taylor Swift Reggae Song, Made Live With AI

14:27The Claude Skill That Writes His Case Studies

15:31Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini: Why He Isn't Loyal to One Tool

16:22Why Cheap AI Won't Last: The Venture Capital Subsidy

17:21Could Cheaper Chinese Models Challenge US AI?

18:25Five Computers, Five AIs, and Why He Names Them

19:22Which Roles AI Replaced on His Team

22:58Why Silicon Valley's Job-Loss Message Backfires

25:08Cut Jobs or Retrain People? Two Very Different AI Outcomes

26:59Problem Solving vs Problem Finding

31:51Strategy Swarms: Testing Ideas on Synthetic Citizens

34:11Using AI as a Performance Coach

35:39His Virtual Mastermind With Warren Buffett and Bruce Lee

37:14Why AI Models Carry a Western Bias

39:44Where AI Falls Short: Cold Outreach and AI Avatars

42:30The SoftBank Button That Calms Angry Callers

44:47What He Wants Built: An AI Presentation Coach

46:23How Jensen Huang's Storytelling Moved Nvidia's Stock

49:41Live Translation for Global Audiences

50:46How to Book James Taylor

A keynote looks like the most human job there is: one person, one stage, one message. So where does AI fit? On the Artificial Reality podcast, host Galina Fendikevich asked James Taylor three questions — what's working, what's broken, and what still needs to be built — and his answers show how an AI keynote speaker actually uses the technology across sales, marketing, speech writing and live delivery.

James describes himself as the speaking business — one half creative, one half business — and he uses AI in both. He compares it to a musician and a guitar: the tool becomes part of who you are. He gives 50 to 100 keynotes a year in 25+ countries, and AI now touches almost every stage of that work.

An AI Chief of Staff Before Breakfast

Every morning, James wakes up to a report from an AI chief of staff — an agent his team built on Claude. It lists what's on the cards for the day, the questions he should be thinking about, the decisions he needs to make and the open loops still running.

The same agent prepares him for sales. Twenty-four hours before a discovery call, it sends a brief on the client, the event and the LinkedIn profiles of the people joining — plus a psychometric profile of each of them. If he's speaking with a CTO, he knows to lead with the data. It's still James having the conversation, he stresses; the AI just gives him more context. When clients share the attendee list in advance, he can build the same kind of profile for the whole audience — whether they want more humour, more traditional storytelling or more practical, what-to-do-on-Monday actions.

How James Gets Recommended by ChatGPT and Claude (GEO and AEO)

At the top of the funnel, James and his team build thousands of highly specific landing pages optimised for AI answer engines — what's now called GEO and AEO. Claude handles the initial research into what to rank for, Perplexity creates pages at scale, and Gemini runs qual