Alan Hayling

After a long and continuing career in TV (see below), in the past year I have co-founded an AI start-up, YourAvatar.ai. Our aim is to enable relatives of residents of care homes, especially those with dementia, to quickly - and at almost no cost - create an absolutely lifelike conversational digital twin of themselves as a companion for their relative. The hope is that short conversations with the avatar will retain for longer the ability to recognise family members and friends, and that as a companion it will help mitigate isolation and loneliness. Here's a short animation explaining what we do - https://vimeo.com/1083163363?share=copy. Over the past few months, we have made huge technical progress using substantial investment funds provided by angel investors. It's exciting and demanding - and we can now enable anyone to make a digital twin of themselves in less than five minutes. And working closely with an academic team at Kings College London specialising in care for the elderly and the mitigation of loneliness we are shortly beginning trials in care homes. Right now, we are embarking on raising a further £1 million in a Seed+ round. Prior to this I was a documentary producer/director, a Commissioning Editor (for documentaries and history) at Channel 4 - for over ten years - Head of Documentaries at the BBC and Creative Director at an established TV production company, Mentorn. Subsequently, with my wife Alex Cooke as CEO, we founded our own TV production company, Renegade Pictures, which grew very quickly, became highly successful and was acquired by Warner Brothers. I now divide my time between YourAvatar.ai and our new production company Renegade Stories. Our most recent documentary "Implosion; the Titanic Sub Disaster" was commissioned by the BBC, Discovery Channel in the US, the British Film Institute Global Production Fund, CBC in Canada and ZDF in Germany. It premiered at the end of May and is streaming on player, Max, CBC gem and ZDF.