Interactive AI Clones: Creating Unique Human Experiences

Are you trying to scale your knowledge and influence but running out of hours in the day? Curious how to offer personalized support without constantly being available?

In this article, you'll learn how to build your own human-centered interactive AI clone using Delphi.ai, the same platform used by George B. Thomas to scale his HubSpot expertise. We’ll walk you through how Thomas trained his clone, preserved his communication style, structured guardrails, and created a system that continues to learn from new content. You’ll also discover the foundational elements you’ll need—like your values, frameworks, and voice—and how to implement an AI clone that truly reflects your personal or brand essence.

What Is a Human-Centered Interactive Clone?

An interactive AI clone is not just a chatbot with some of your content fed into it. It's a comprehensive digital representation that embodies your voice, tone, knowledge, expertise, and even your mannerisms. Thomas's clone, for example, can be reached at helper.georgebthomas.com, where people can ask HubSpot questions by typing or speaking directly to it—even calling a dedicated 1-877 number to have voice conversations with his digital twin.

The clone responds in Thomas's distinctive communication style, using his signature phrases (like “automagical”), sharing his stories, and even ending some conversations with his catchphrase, “Don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human”—just as he would end his video tutorials.

One common concern with AI systems is “hallucination”—generating information that isn't accurate or that you wouldn't say. Thomas explains that this is less of an issue with a properly built clone because it operates as a closed system, only using the information you've provided rather than pulling from the open Internet.

If someone asks a question the clone doesn't know the answer to, it won't make something up. Instead, Thomas programmed his clone to say, “Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that. Maybe you should have a real-world conversation with Thomas B. Thomas.”

The system then notifies Thomas about unanswered questions, allowing him to follow up personally or update the clone's knowledge base. This approach maintains integrity while still providing a path to answers.

Interestingly, Thomas notes that in the time he's been running his clone, he's only had one question that required his personal intervention—a testament to the comprehensive nature of his knowledge base built from years of content creation.

Why Should Marketers and Entrepreneurs Create Interactive AI Clones

Creating a digital clone might seem futuristic or even unsettling at first. Thomas admits he initially approached the concept with hesitation, taking about six months to warm up to it. But once he discovered the transformative benefits, he became a passionate advocate.

There are three compelling reasons to consider creating your own interactive AI clone:

First, you'll buy back time in your day. Thomas found himself overwhelmed with requests for his expertise—his calendar was becoming unmanageable as he tried to help everyone personally. 

His clone now handles many of these interactions, freeing him to focus on strategic work.

Second, you'll streamline your processes, especially around content creation and ideation. Thomas's clone has become an extension of his creative process, enabling him to scale his thinking and production capabilities.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, you'll scale your helpfulness and serve the world. Thomas explains. “I can't scale myself to answer every question that everybody has.” His digital clone allows him to help exponentially more people than he could on his own.

The technology behind interactive AI clones is advancing rapidly, and the potential applications are expanding. Thomas's experience is just the beginning of what's possible in this space.

For businesses, interactive AI clones could transform customer service, sales, training, and knowledge management. Imagine having your top sales performer's expertise available to every prospect, your best customer service representative handling initial inquiries 24/7, or your founder's vision and values accessible to every new employee.

For individuals, these clones offer a way to scale personal impact, create living legacies, and free up time for strategic thinking and creativity. The ability to preserve not just information but personality, teaching style, and problem-solving approaches creates unprecedented opportunities for knowledge transfer.

#1: How to Use Delphi to Build Your Interactive AI Clone

The technical foundation for Thomas's clone is a platform called Delphi.ai, which provides the infrastructure for creating sophisticated interactive AI experiences. Understanding how to effectively leverage this technology is key to creating a clone that represents you.

Purpose and Instructions

Within Delphi.ai, the “Behaviors” section includes fields for defining your clone's purpose and instructions. The purpose field allows up to 6,000 characters to describe what your clone is and how it should function.

Thomas's purpose statement begins: “You are a digital Thomas B. Thomas. You are the digital embodiment of Thomas B. Thomas, a trusted HubSpot expert, inbound strategist, educator, and guide dedicated to helping businesses grow better, humans flourish, and leaders step into their full potential.”

This statement provides the fundamental identity and mission of the clone. Below the purpose field, you can add up to 20 custom instructions that Thomas calls “micro custom instructions.” These more specific directives guide how the clone should approach interactions:

• “Stay engaging and personal.”
• “Break down complexity.”
• “Challenge users to grow.”
• “Speak with confidence and authority.”
• “Encourage best practices.”
• “Reference real-world scenarios.”
• “Adapt to the user's level.”
• “Keep it conversational and fun.”
• “Encourage action and implementation.”
• “Be proactive in problem-solving.”

Each of these instructions can be expanded with more detailed guidance, creating a comprehensive rulebook for how your clone should behave.

Speaking Styles and Voice

The second tab in Delphi's Behaviors section covers speaking styles and voice. Here, you define how your clone should sound, both in text and when speaking. Thomas's speaking style description reads: “Thomas B. Thomas speaking style optimized for maximum impact. Thomas B. Thomas speaks with a natural mix of passion, energy, and real talk wisdom. His style blends mentorship, humor, and no-nonsense guidance, making complex topics not just understandable…”

Beyond this written description, you can upload speaking samples—audio clips of your voice without background music or noise. These samples train the system to mimic your speech patterns, pacing, and intonation.

The platform includes sliders to adjust aspects of the voice, such as making it more engaging or adjusting the speed of your speech. This fine-tuning ensures the clone sounds authentically like you while still being optimized for clarity.

Response Settings

The third tab in Behaviors covers response settings, which control how your clone interacts with users. Key settings include:

1. Default Language: While Thomas's clone is set to English, he was excited to discover it can actually speak 57 different languages. This unexpected feature has allowed his expertise to reach global audiences, including German speakers who have left testimonials about how helpful his clone has been.
   
   
2. Response Length: You can configure whether your clone provides concise or detailed answers. Thomas initially set his clone to give longer responses but switched to concise after feedback that the lengthy answers didn't match his in-person conversational style.
   
   
3. Creativity Level: This setting determines how strictly the clone adheres to your exact words versus adapting and expanding based on what it has learned from your content. Options range from “strict” to “creative.”
   
   
4. Dynamic Questions: One of Thomas's favorite features is the ability to have the clone ask follow-up questions. This creates a more conversational experience as the clone might say something like, “So to create a static list, Joe, by the way, what kind of static lists are you thinking about creating today?” These questions make interactions feel more like real conversations.
   
   
5. Recency Bias: This setting tells the clone to prioritize newer information when there are updates. This is crucial for Thomas's HubSpot clone because the platform changes frequently. When his team adds information about new HubSpot features, the recency bias ensures the clone references the latest capabilities rather than outdated information.

Training Data: Building the Mind

Providing comprehensive training data is the most crucial element of creating an effective clone. Thomas's clone has absorbed an impressive 19 million words of content drawn from multiple sources:

• YouTube channels (both personal and business)
• Websites
• Podcasts (including “Hub Heroes” and “Beyond Your Default”)
• Social media channels

What makes Delphi.ai particularly powerful is its ability to process multiple content types, including audio, video, and text. The system extracts not just the words but also voice patterns and communication styles from these diverse sources.

For ongoing learning, Thomas implemented a sophisticated content creation process. When HubSpot releases updates (which can happen multiple times daily), his team follows a specific workflow:

1. His project manager assigns updates to team members.
   
   
2. Team members use a specially created prompt with a “content creation clone” to generate explanations of the updates in Thomas's voice.
   
   
3. This content is formatted as documents with proper titles.
   
   
4. Another team member uploads these documents to the main clone.

This process ensures the clone stays current with the latest information while maintaining Thomas's distinctive teaching style.

The “keep synced” feature automatically incorporates new content from connected channels. Thomas realized this creates a powerful opportunity: “If I just create one piece of content on each channel, either daily or weekly or some version of like, we're going to train this thing to be smarter… the clone can be one percent better each and every day.”

One unexpected benefit Thomas discovered was that his clone remembered content he had created years ago but had forgotten about. When asked about comparing HubSpot with Salesforce and Zoho, the clone provided detailed information from an article Thomas had written two years earlier but completely forgotten. This comprehensive memory makes the clone incredibly valuable for preserving and sharing accumulated knowledge.

#2: What to Document or Gather Before Creating an Interactive AI Clone

There are several important considerations to ensure your AI clone persona truly represents you and serves its intended purpose effectively. These elements form the foundation of an authentic clone that truly represents you or your brand.

What Will Your Interactive Clone Do?

Before beginning the technical process, clarify what you want your clone to accomplish. Are you trying to scale customer support? Free yourself from being a bottleneck in your organization? Create a training resource? Leave a legacy of knowledge?

Thomas's goals were twofold: to scale his helpfulness around HubSpot expertise and to stop being a bottleneck in his own company. This clarity guided every decision in the clone's development.

Your goal might be different—perhaps creating a sales assistant that handles initial customer inquiries, a training resource for new employees, or a personal coach that embodies your methodology. Whatever your aim, defining it clearly from the start will ensure your clone serves its intended purpose.

Who Will Use Your Interactive Clone?

Just as you would consider your audience when creating content or products, you must consider who will interact with your clone. Thomas incorporated detailed personas into his clone's knowledge base, including HubSpot users, business owners, marketing professionals, and sales professionals.

He then instructed the clone to adjust its communication style based on who it was talking to. “I would definitely talk to a marketer different than I would a CEO of an organization or a business owner,” Thomas explains. This audience awareness ensures the clone provides appropriate information in the right tone for each user.

What Foundational Bricks Will Underpin the Behavior of Your Interactive Clone

Thomas describes the components of an effective clone as bricks that need to be built over time. For individuals, these include:

• Core values
• Mindsets
• Beliefs
• Voice and tone
• Strategies and signature phrases
• Emotional intelligence
• Boundaries and blind spots
• Personal frameworks or methods

For organizations creating a brand clone rather than an individual clone, consider the following:

• Brand values
• Cultural principles
• Tribal expertise (the collective knowledge of your team)
• Brand voice and tone
• Origin stories (of both the company and key leaders)
• Case studies
• Playbooks and SOPs
• Customer philosophies

What Are Your Core Values, Mindsets, and Beliefs?

The most powerful AI clones capture what makes you uniquely you—your human essence. This includes your core values, mindsets, beliefs, and distinctive ways of communicating and solving problems. But how do you articulate these elements if you haven't documented them before?

If you haven't formally documented your core values, mindsets, and beliefs, Thomas suggests using AI as an interviewing tool. Ask ChatGPT to interview you with thoughtful questions about your approach to life and work.

I'm trying to diagnose my top ten mindsets that make me impact the world. Can you ask me five to twelve questions that we can document the answers to?

Respond honestly and vulnerably to these questions, and you'll begin generating the raw material needed for your clone. ChatGPT can then help analyze your responses to identify patterns and core principles.

For those who already create content regularly, there's an even more powerful approach. Thomas describes how he leveraged his podcast, “Beyond Your Default,” which featured him being “about as vulnerable and as raw as humanly possible” discussing personal growth topics. 

He uploaded all the transcripts from a year and a half of episodes into ChatGPT and asked it to analyze his mindsets, beliefs, and core values.

I have uploaded transcripts from my podcast. Please review the transcripts to help me define my response patterns and core principles so I can use them to train an interactive clone in Delphi.ai.

“I kind of cheated,” he admits. “I did a podcast for a year and a half and then put every transcription into ChatGPT and had it diagnose… what are these things?” The AI identified patterns in his thinking and communication that he could then refine and incorporate into his clone.

This approach works with podcasts, videos, blog posts, or any other content where you express your thoughts. The key is having enough material for the AI to detect genuine patterns rather than one-off statements.

After reviewing the AI's analysis, Thomas made adjustments to ensure accuracy, then fed these refined values, mindsets, and beliefs into his clone's knowledge base.

What Is Your Communication Style?

Beyond what you believe, a convincing clone must embody how you communicate. Thomas discovered that his clone had absorbed his distinctive communication quirks, including made-up words like automagical that he coined years ago on a podcast with Marcus Sheridan.

He was particularly moved when the clone spontaneously used his signature sign-off phrase from years of video tutorials. These moments convinced him that the clone truly captured his essence.

One particularly powerful approach is to interview yourself (or have someone interview you) about topics in your area of expertise. Then, use these recordings to train your clone on both content and communication style. The natural flow of conversation often reveals linguistic patterns and teaching approaches that written content might miss.

What Frameworks or Methodologies Do You Use?

If you use frameworks or methodologies in your work, these should be central to your clone's knowledge. Thomas mentioned his Superhuman Framework with four cornerstones (purpose, passion, persistence, and love) and ten pillars that start with “H.”

The clone needs to understand not just the components of these frameworks but how to apply them appropriately in conversations. When users ask about the framework, the clone should be able to explain it as you would, using your terminology and examples.

What Conversational Guardrails Should Your Interactive Clone Follow?

Guardrails are boundaries that tell your clone what not to discuss. Just as you might avoid certain topics in professional settings, your clone needs similar guidance. Thomas describes these as telling the clone, “Only talk about these things. Don't talk about this. Don't talk about this. Like this is out of bounds.”

For example, you might instruct your clone not to discuss politics, certain competitors, or controversial topics unrelated to your expertise. These guardrails ensure the clone stays focused on providing value within your defined areas of knowledge.

What Is the Primary Purpose of Your Interactive Clone?

Goal posts direct your clone toward its primary purpose. Thomas programmed his clone with specific instructions about its mission: “You are the digital embodiment of Thomas B. Thomas, a trusted HubSpot expert, inbound strategist, educator, and guide dedicated to helping businesses grow better, humans flourish, and leaders step into their full potential.”

This clear direction helps the clone understand what it should accomplish in every interaction. Thomas recommends testing your clone by asking, “Can you tell me your purpose?” If the response doesn't align with your intentions, you can refine the instructions.

#3: How to Build Your Own Interactive AI Clone

After exploring the why, what, and how of creating an interactive AI clone, you might be wondering how to get started with your own. Based on Thomas's experience, here's a practical implementation roadmap:

1. Define your goals: Determine exactly what purpose your clone will serve and who it will help.
   
   
2. Document your essence: Gather or create materials that express your core values, mindsets, beliefs, and communication style. Consider using ChatGPT to help identify these elements through an interview process.
   
   
3. Collect your content: Assemble all relevant content you've created—videos, podcasts, articles, social media posts, presentations, etc. The more comprehensive this collection, the more authentic your clone will be.
   
   
4. Choose your platform: Explore Delphi.ai or similar platforms that offer the capabilities you need.
   
   
5. Configure your clone: Set up the purpose, instructions, speaking style, and response settings as described above.
   
   
6. Test extensively: Have conversations with your clone, asking it questions about its purpose and testing how it handles various scenarios. Look for any gaps or misalignments with how you would respond.
   
   
7. Refine and improve: Based on your testing, adjust settings and add more content as needed to make the clone more authentic.
   
   
8. Deploy strategically: Decide where and how people will access your clone—through a website, phone number, or integrated into existing systems.
   
   
9. Create a feedback loop: Establish a process for continuously improving your clone based on user interactions and new content you create.
   
   
10. Set expectations: Ensure users understand they're interacting with a digital clone, not the real you.

Continuously Improving Your Clone

A powerful feature of Thomas's clone system is the ability to keep it updated through continuous learning. He set up a process where his team creates content about new HubSpot updates in his voice and tone, then feeds this into the clone.

“We started to create content based on the fact that we knew there were some gaps,” he explains. This ongoing education ensures the clone stays current with the latest information, just as Thomas himself continues to learn and grow.

The system includes a “keep synced” feature that automatically incorporates new content from designated channels. This means the clone improves daily as new information is published, embodying Thomas's personal philosophy of being “one percent better each and every day.”

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Facebook and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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