We had a thesis about audiobooks: every app on the market treats AI as a feature. A synthetic voice here, a recommendation engine there, and a catalog that stays exactly as fixed as it was in 1995. We thought the more interesting question was what happens when AI is native to the product, when the story itself becomes malleable.
We could have written that up as a strategy document. Instead we built Bibo, a working demo you can open on your phone right now. That choice is the point of this note.
The thesis, in one tap
In Bibo, Moby Dick isn't one file. It's five complete versions on one tap: the classic narration, a shortened cut for a commute, a modern YA rewrite, a sci-fi retelling, and a Spanish literary translation, each fully voiced with AI narration. One asset became five products.
That's the pattern that matters beyond audiobooks. Any organization sitting on a content library (courses, a publishing backlist, research, marketing assets) is sitting on raw material for versions it has never shipped: other lengths, other formats, other languages, other audiences. AI turns a fixed catalog into a multiplier. The whole product changes with it; in Bibo, discovery became a feed, covers became a generated art system, and even the ad model became personalized audio.
Why not just write the deck?
Because a deck asks people to imagine, and imagination is where good theses go to die in committee. Everyone reads the same slide and pictures something different. Nobody can picture how it feels to drag a slider and hear the same story compress, or to type "retell this as a detective story in 1920s Chicago" and get one. A demo replaces twenty opinions about a hypothetical with one shared reaction to a real thing.
A demo is also honest in a way a deck can't be. It has to survive contact with real constraints: what the AI actually produces, what the experience actually feels like, where the idea is weaker than the slide version. Finding that out in weeks, before serious money is committed, is the cheapest risk reduction available.
The part that changed recently
This used to be a quarter-long project with an agency invoice to match. Bibo went from concept to polished, self-contained demo in weeks: AI-assisted build, AI-generated narration, translations, and all fifty covers under human art direction. The cost of making an idea concrete has collapsed, which means the excuse for arguing about abstractions is gone. We wrote about that shift inProduction got cheap. Judgment didn't. This is what it looks like applied.
Have a thesis that keeps stalling in meetings?Tell us what you're working on. A short note is enough.