Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?
Deborah is an AI workflow consultant with AIEZ.ai. She runs a team of technologists and strategists who align AI work with an organization’s goals and its culture. We have delivered AI governance, workflows, agentic builds, training and AI advertisement/commercials to enterprise companies, government agencies, and nonprofit teams. As a former investigative reporter for NBC News affiliates around the country (with 13 Emmys), Deborah knows all about storytelling with video. Today, though, that skill is being managed largely by AI. She has been learning to use AI to produce high-quality, less expensive videos than by hand for herself and clients who want advertising and stories today.
Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?
I love to use new technology to help businesses, nonprofits and governments find tasks they can automate with AI to give them time for their customers and mission.
Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?
The idea started with a problem I kept seeing in AI workshops: people were curious about AI, but they were also nervous about it. Some feared losing their jobs. Others didn’t trust the technology. And a lot of AI training was making the problem worse by talking about the technology instead of the people expected to use it.
So we decided to approach training differently.
We created a series of short, funny videos that put humans at the center of the story. We used AI to help create the videos, which was intentional. We wanted people to experience what AI could make possible while they were learning about it. Humor became an important part of the strategy. It gave people permission to lower their guard, laugh at some of the absurdity surrounding AI, and then have a more honest conversation about what the technology means for their work. There was also a wonderful irony to the project. We used AI to create training designed to make AI feel more human.
The Telly Award was meaningful because it recognized something I believe deeply about AI adoption: the technology can be extraordinary, but people still have to trust it enough to use it. Sometimes the first step toward that trust is simply making someone laugh.
Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?
One of the funniest behind-the-scenes facts is that the technology we used to create parts of our award-winning videos is already obsolete.
We used Sora, which at the time felt groundbreaking. Today, that product is gone. That tells you almost everything you need to know about working in AI. The tools are changing so quickly that sometimes the technology you use to teach a workshop can change before you teach the next one. It also reinforced an important lesson for us. We couldn’t build our training around teaching people which buttons to push. Those buttons might disappear next month. We had to teach people how to think, experiment, ask better questions and understand what AI can do for their work.
And there were plenty of imperfect generations along the way. AI can produce something astonishing one minute and something hilariously wrong the next. We kept some of that spirit in the videos because we wanted people to see AI for what it is: an incredibly powerful tool that still needs a human in the director’s chair.
Ironically, the technology behind our Telly Award has already become a little piece of AI history.
What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?
Our biggest challenge was getting the AI-generated characters to behave like actual humans. Sora could create remarkable scenes, but directing the characters was another story. We’d ask a character to speak directly to the camera, and suddenly they’d be staring thoughtfully into the distance. Dialogue could turn into complete mumbo jumbo. A character might look perfect in one generation and like their distant cousin in the next.
It took hours of prompting, regenerating, adjusting and sometimes starting over to get a few seconds of usable footage. The solution was persistence and human judgment. We learned how to give the AI more precise direction, break scenes into smaller pieces and recognize quickly when a generation simply wasn’t going to work.
It also taught us something important about AI that we now teach others: AI can dramatically expand what one person or a small team can create, but it still needs a human director. The award-winning result came from the combination of AI capability and a lot of very human patience.
What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?
What I’m most proud of is that the videos got people to engage with AI instead of being afraid of it. We weren’t trying to convince people that AI was perfect or that they should blindly embrace it. We wanted to make it feel approachable enough that they would get curious, ask questions and start learning.
The most memorable responses came from people who laughed at the videos and then leaned in. You could almost see the tension disappear. People who had been skeptical or intimidated started saying, “Okay, show me how this works.” That mattered more to me than creating something technically impressive. The videos opened a door. Humor made AI feel a little less threatening, and once that happened, people were willing to walk through that door and learn. For me, that is what successful AI training looks like. People leave more curious than afraid, and confident enough to try.
You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?
The recognition matters because we took a risk. We were trying to teach people about a technology that many of them feared, and we chose humor, storytelling and very human characters to do it. We wanted people to laugh, lower their guard and become curious enough to learn.
Winning a Telly Award gave us outside validation that this approach worked. It told our small team that you can talk about something as complex and consequential as artificial intelligence without making it cold, intimidating or overly technical. That is especially meaningful because AI is changing so quickly. The tools we use today may be gone tomorrow, but the human challenge remains: How do you help people understand change, trust what they’re learning and feel confident enough to participate in it? For our team, the Telly is recognition of the bigger idea behind the videos. Technology may change. Human beings still need a reason to lean in.
Tell us what you’re up to! If there’s a new project, launch, or milestone you’d like us to celebrate with you, let us know, and we might share it with our community.
Our newest project is True Prospects, an AI-powered platform we created to help nonprofits find funding so they can spend more time serving their missions.
Nonprofit teams often spend countless hours researching potential donors, foundations and funding opportunities. True Prospects helps them use AI to make that research faster and more focused, then turn what they learn into stronger fundraising strategies.
It’s another example of what excites us most about AI: using the technology to take some of the heavy lifting off people’s plates so they have more time for the work only humans can do.
You can explore True Prospects at trueprospects.netlify.app.
