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 ver

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