Michelle Gilmore (CEO & Co-founder, Juno) built a digital twin of herself to scale her business. Juno conducts high-quality, qualitative interviews—turning Michelle's 20+ years, and 10,000+ research projects into an AI “listening engine.” We dive into how Juno runs real conversations at scale, why expertise-in-the-loop beats checkbox surveys, and how a digital twin lets a CEO focus on strategy while the AI handles the heavy lifting.
Guest & company:
Michelle Gilmore, CEO & Co-founder, Juno
Juno is an AI research platform that runs real interviews on your behalf
You’ll learn:
What Juno actually does (and how it differs from “conversational surveys”)
Why Michelle raised $2.8M from Blackbird Ventures to build a global “listening engine”
How she captured her tacit expertise to train agents (principles, role-plays, competencies)
Fear vs. reality: AI won’t replace her, it amplifies and scales her impact
When AI is a feature vs. a product and why the answer is “it depends”
Why this matters:
Most teams still send surveys and get thin, leading data. Juno probes, follows up, and helps people articulate what they actually think and feel, so product and research teams can act with confidence.
Key moments (chapters):
00:00 Cold open & why “clone the CEO”
06:00 From researcher to founder: Michelle’s path to Juno
12:00 What Juno actually does (beyond surveys)
18:00 Building the Digital Twin CEO: capturing tacit expertise
24:00 Co-CEO in practice: decisions, prioritisation, removing the founder bottleneck
33:00 Fear vs reality: risks, adoption, and what leaders get wrong about AI
38:00 Scaling quality without burnout: ops, team, and metrics
42:00 Founder playbook: what to delegate first + what’s next for Juno
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Other Links
🎙️our podcast links here: https://digitalnexuspodcast.com/
👤Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcsinclair/
👤Mark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/
👤 Mark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/captdefi
SHOWNOTE LINKS
🔗 SIKE - https://sike.ai/
🌐Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
🌐NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalNexusPodcast
X (twitter): @DigitalNexus
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