'The Diary of a CEO' star Steven Bartlett is going all in on AI — except on LinkedIn

• Star "The Diary of a CEO" podcaster Steven Bartlett gave his company an AI challenge.
• His team ended up incorporating the tech in many ways, including making an AI-animated kids' show.
• FlightStory execs discussed what's working with their AI use — and its limits.

Steven Bartlett isn't just discussing AI on "The Diary of a CEO" — he's using it to make entire podcasts, automate sales pitches, and more.

The podcast star recently raised an eight-figure investment round to build out his company, FlightStory, which has about 100 employees and generated around $47 million in revenue last year.

FlightStory's AI experimentation started in a big way last year, when Bartlett challenged his staff to a two-month competition to use AI agents in their work.

The competition was a scrappy "test for us to very much dive into that space and just see what worked, and see what we could do in a short space of time," said Isaac Martin, director of innovation at FlightStory.

The pre-production team won Bartlett's contest — and a $20,000 prize — for building tools or agents that replaced or improved nearly every part of their processes. Bartlett said the contest resulted in savings of $1.18 million for the company.

Since then, FlightStory has used AI throughout its operation, including an AI-content push it calls "Project Gutenberg," a nod to the founder of the printing press.

Execs at FlightStory spoke with Business Insider about the various ways their operation — a unit of his holding company, Steven.com — is using AI.

They also spoke about why, in the case of LinkedIn, the team is dialing back the use of AI.

The many ways FlightStory is using AI

Shows: In its most ambitious creative application, FlightStory is producing a fully AI-animated video series for kids aged five to eight called "Steven's World." The show revolves around a young Bartlett going on adventures with his friends and uses information from podcast guests like Neil deGrasse Tyson. FlightStory said it's in talks with major streamers for distribution. The series grew out of an earlier AI-made podcast test, "100 CEOs," that was hosted by an AI clone of Bartlett's voice.

AI is also being used to translate "DOAC" into 14 languages. The Spanish translation has been the biggest success story so far, bringing in an incremental 20.5 million views or listens and generating $200,000 in indirect gross ad revenues on Spotify, said Christiana Brenton, FlightStory's CRO and cofounder.

Ad revenue: On the commercial side, staffers are using a custom AI tool to develop pitches based on briefs, FlightStory's creators, and past brand campaigns and pitches. In this way, FlightStory said it has shrunk the process from about three days to a few hours. This has helped boost the average revenue contribution per person across the company by 60% over the past two years.

Speakers: FlightStory is redesigning its FlightSpeakers division, using a conversational AI tool to reduce the time it takes to recommend speakers and check their availability.

Talya Levine, who leads the project, said the aim is to preserve the relationship element that's long been a part of the business but also shake it up with tech.

"We hope it ruffles some feathers," she said.

Social: FlightStory launched a new unit, FlightSocials, in late 2025 to help creators like Colin and Samir, and comedian Ali Siddiq, distribute clips on social media. Brenton said AI has sped up the work of producing clips, evaluating them, and making recommendations for the next ones. In this way, the company can post up to 15 clips per day per creator.

"It just completely removes the guesswork of a human having to decide what part of this long episode to cut up," she said.

FlightStory also built an API called Creator Radar, which plugs into YouTube and other social platforms to help identify high-potential creators to sign. The API helped validate FlightStory's decision to bring on "Hot Smart Rich" host Maggie Sellers Reum by showing that she had an unusually strong community — women who self-identify as "HSR angels" — relative to the size of her audience.

AI still has limitations

Surveys have found that independent creators are generally more eager to experiment with AI than legacy Hollywood studios and guilds are.

For creators like Bartlett looking to scale beyond themselves, AI offers a way to reach bigger audiences without being limited by their own time and energy.

Brenton said a lot of companies focus on using AI for efficiency, but FlightStory thinks of it as a way to "do things that we couldn't necessarily do before."

Like many companies implementing AI, FlightStory says it's not using it to get rid of people, but to allow them to focus on higher-value work.

FlightStory's leaders also recognize AI isn't right for every use case.

For example, the company cut back on using AI on LinkedIn after noticing a lot of AI-written posts on the platform and deciding that ones written by humans could have more emotional resonance. The conclusion: They take longer to write, but have performed better than AI ones. Bartlett and his team now personally write every piece of social copy, Brenton said.

"Ironically, we believe that's a unique advantage," she said. "You'll even notice now if you do follow Steven, there's spelling mistakes and errors, and he doesn't fix them by design."

It's also early days in understanding the types of AI-made content that audiences will embrace.

The AI episodes of "100 CEOs" got at most 35,000 views on YouTube, while Bartlett's flagship podcast regularly gets hundreds of thousands of views per episode. Some praised it while others criticized the voice as not sounding human enough and said they preferred Bartlett's interview format. FlightStory execs think kids will be more receptive to an AI-animated show, and that "Steven's World" will introduce Bartlett's brand to a new audience.

While the Spanish-language translation of "DOAC" brought in additional audience and revenue, not all of its podcasts will share the same financial opportunity. And podcasts that depend on a strong emotional connection with the audience might feel jarring to some if they're dubbed by AI.

When it comes to FlightStory's most valuable property, the "DOAC" podcast, where Bartlett interviews a range of public figures, the execs are adamant that the final edits are done by real people.

"The risk profile and the stakes are higher when you're producing long-form content that reaches millions and millions of people," Brenton said.