In this episode, Loni Stark, VP of Strategy and Product at Adobe, joins Liam to talk about what happens when a 25 year tech career runs alongside a full creative practice in painting, sculpture and writing, and what that split brain teaches her about building for the AI era. Loni explains why she thinks brands may already be invisible, or worse, misrepresented, inside AI answers, why every company needs to start treating AI as a new kind of audience, and how she is running her own home AI lab, complete with a self built server and a personal agent that has now run continuously for over 150 days, to understand what actually gives an AI agent an identity.
Along the way, Loni and Liam get into her Harvard Extension School research into "orphan values," the personal values people can't express in any of their current life roles, and what happens to that alignment as AI reshapes the roles themselves. She also breaks down how she balances Adobe's biggest enterprise bets, including Experience Manager, Commerce, Brand Concierge and LLM Optimizer, against the need to experiment without limits in her own time.
Key Topics Covered
Why Loni keeps a full art practice, painting, sculpture and writing, alongside her tech career
Growing up with parents who didn't understand the arts, and using creativity as a form of rebellion
Whether humans are innately creative, and why AI makes protecting your own voice more important
Why Loni has stayed at Adobe for 25 years, and how she thinks about "growing the aquarium"
Building a personal AI server at home instead of a garden, and what that setup actually involves
Swapping the underlying model and the agent harness to test what gives an AI agent a persistent identity
Her Harvard Extension School research into "orphan values" and how AI is reshaping the roles we express them through
The shift from human mediated to AI mediated experiences, and why that changes what "traffic" even means
Why being invisible to AI isn't the worst case, being misrepresented by it is
How brands should start preparing their content and catalogs to be "agent ready"
The placebo effect of working with agents, and how that belief shapes performance and creativity
How Loni balances limitless experimentation with the governance enterprise AI actually requires
Why she does what she does: an insatiable need to grow, create and become more than she currently is
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction and welcome
00:05 - Balancing a full art practice with a 25 year tech career
05:38 - Why she's stayed at Adobe for 25 years
08:30 - AI as the biggest creativity enabler she's seen
12:50 - Inside her home AI lab: hardware, memory, and swapping the agent harness
18:11 - Studying psychology at Harvard, and what "orphan values" mean
26:28 - The shift to AI mediated business, and why invisible isn't the worst case
31:46 - How brands become "agent ready" for the AI agent economy
36:23 - The placebo effect of working with AI agents
37:35 - Balancing limitless experimentation with enterprise governance
47:05 - Why Loni does what she does
49:14 - Where to find Loni and closing thoughts
Loni's Socials:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonistark/
Loni’s Art Gallery: https://atelierstark.com/work/
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